It gets pretty annoying. Players tend to think everyone they meet is a secret bad guy. Is there any way to discourage this behavior?
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How do you deal with players distrusting everyone?
They sense the innate pedophilia of a Genshin player, and instinctually distrust you. This extends to the npcs you play.
fippy bippy OP should not be allowed near schools
Holy shit
They aren't wrong.
Just fricking talk to them you fricking moron.
>Show them that they can trust your narration to be factual.
>Show them that normal people don't lie without a good reason by allowing your NPCs to be generally trustworthy.
>Give the exception that proves the rule by making a villain, or enemy of the party, a ruthless pathological liar.
*BONUS D&DTARD ADVICE*
>Don't allow players to use Insight to tell if someone is lying. Insight is not a truth detector. This is what Zone of Truth and Detect Thoughts are for.
What's insight for then
Get a read on your internal organs, detect parasites, sense the onset of a disease, determine if your intestinal flora is healthy.
You know, normal stuff, not magic like empathy and motive-guessing.
I didn't think anyone would respond to this.
To answer your question, Insight is a Wisdom based skill. Wisdom in D&D governs visual acuity and situational awareness. Insight is given several uses in the books, such as determining NPC Bonds, Traits, and Flaws, which can all be used to gain additional knowledge or leverage in a social encounter. It's fair to describe ways in which a character might express themselves whilst lying and to point out inconsistencies and vagueness via the Insight skill check, but I don't allow players to automatically detect lies with a skill check. They can find the puzzle pieces, but it's up to them to put it together.
Example: An unscrupulous character might use Insight and notice a wedding ring on the shopkeep's hand and use his knowledge of the NPC'S Bond to gain Advantage on an Intimidation Check to represent that leverage.
Someone took all the correct lessons from Exalted. Bravo. And if you didn't and just intuited a good social system on your own, then double bravo.
No, that use for insight is just right from the 5e book.
But putting more onus on the player than the character for things like lying can be foolish unless you are going to integrate a stunting type system to consistently give rewards for it. If the character is great as persuasion would you punish the player because they stutter? Would you make the barbarian’s character pick up the fridge before their character can try to lift a boulder?
Of course that line of logic can also cause concerns when stretched to all puzzles when a character is smarter than the player. But the idea that you must use magic for something mundane instead of a character’s skills is rather disgusting to me.
I feel like I'm not being clear.
It's fine to allow players to use Insight (or other relevant skills) to detect or intuit SIGNS of deception (speech patterns, contradictions, etc) but putting the pieces together may require an Intelligence check at the very least. I don't confirm or deny deception outright without Magic or at least a Feat representing that specialized skillset. Like an FBI profiler might have, for instance.
>Don't use a mundane skill to do X, use MAGIC instead. Can't have those silly non-casters having any fun.
God I hate DnDogshit.
> Intelligence being a main stat encourage some players to dump it to be better at what they do.
Knowledge would be better. Make intelligence a quirk/perk.
> Charisma being a main stat giving a way out of roleplaying, or barring it completely as the character needed other stats to be effective.
Should be ditched or replaced with something less constraining like Courage.
> Your character is too dumb to come up with that.
DnD and its big 6 are so baaaaaad.
>Show them that they can trust your narration to be factual.
This shit is so obvious and so many dms fail at it is insane. I'm so tired of dms that outright lie and abuse their power as the narrator to trick players who instinctly trust what the dm describes to them as what they're actually seeing/hearing
>every npc gives cryptic as frick answers
>every npc abuses player trust
>attempted persuasion doesnt work because "the npc rejects X"
>npcs respons in short one-liners instead of of long form answers to which we can respond/gather information/lore
>have to practically beg for information
>information is always incomplete or false in some way
>"heh, shouldve rolled insight ;)"
>consequently noone trusts NPCs, noone cares about NPCs since theyre useless, non-interactable one-liner machines
>want to keep the odd cool NPC around
>gets killed as plot device
>everytime
its so fricking tiresome this isnt even a system issue since you cant exorcise the sperg out of a DM save for leaving the table
Your players RN
Players react in ways you taught them to react, if they mistrust everybody is because you taught them to mistrust everybody
How to fix this? well, start making honest NPCs that aren't going to backstab the PCs
I've only been GMing for this group for a couple of months, and haven't had any NPCs backstab them. I couldn't really try if I wanted to because they're immediately suspicious of everyone.
I'm trying to figure out a way to discourage that, since several months of every NPC being trustworthy hasn't worked.
How do they react once its made clear that they have severely misjudged an NPC and that they were being truthful? Are there actual consequences for them being super paranoid and mistrustful? Have people in game brought up how they're being paranoid buttholes for no reason? Generally people who treat everyone as though they have something to hide don't make a lot of friends, has it cost them allies, rewards, or tangible benefits in some way? Have you actually brought this up with them directly?
My best suggestion aside from just talking to them about it like mature adults is to ensure that there are active downsides for being overly suspicious and distrustful to strangers and potential allies. Being super paranoid doesn't just cause them to miss opportunities, they are actively making it harder for themselves by being so. If they treat their employer or allies like potential threats those people are not going to want to work with them or do favors for them, and digging into the private business of someone who has been nothing but fair, truthful, and straightforward with you is a good way to destroy your relationship with them.
Basically imagine how people would react if someone were acting this way in real life, and how they would respond to it, and then follow through on that. Don't be afraid to let the players suffer the consequences of their own actions, if they make a big frick up or faux pas, let it ruin their plans or derail the plot, and don't give them second chances easy.
Play along, use their paranoid instincts.
> Make NPC with suspicious behavior
> He has underhanded tactics and shady skill set
> But he was legit helping
Is it possible that what you are seeing is not mistrust, but genre-saviness? As in, the players are aware of a bunch of fictional tropes and are assuming they might be in play even when they are not. The characters have no reason to mistrust this character, but the players know their tropes and reacting to how they think this would play out if this was a show or a movie and thats trained them to expect a betrayal under these circumstances.
Genre awareness can be a real problem in RPGs, because there are a lot of classic story concepts that really don't work if the players refuse to engage with them simply because they are trying to outsmart the narrative. The best advice I can give you if you think this is what is happening is to talk to your players and to make them an informal deal: if they do something stupid for the sake of the story, you won't frick them up too badly AND if they are a good sport about things they can expect rewards for it later.
As an example, lets imagine an obviously cursed item found in a buried temple. The genre savvy party recognizes that the item is cursed and, rather than go anywhere near it, just fricking leaves the seals up the temple. They feel very clever about having 'avoided your trap' but whats really happened is that they skipped out on the entire adventure you had prepared regarding that item, its curse, and how to break it. They have chosen the least interesting option, the one where nothing cool happens. And because they have no idea how badly this curse will frick them up is, it *makes sense* from a risk management standpoint to just avoid it entirely. As far as they know anyone who touches it will instantly die.
If you have your gentlemen's agreement in play, though, the players will be much more willing to investigate because you have assured them that any inconvenience for doing so is temporary and there will be a payoff for having done this later. Now you all get to have your adventure.
>As an example, lets imagine an obviously cursed item found in a buried temple. The genre savvy party recognizes that the item is cursed and, rather than go anywhere near it, just fricking leaves the seals up the temple. They feel very clever about having 'avoided your trap' but whats really happened is that they skipped out on the entire adventure you had prepared regarding that item, its curse, and how to break it. They have chosen the least interesting option, the one where nothing cool happens. And because they have no idea how badly this curse will frick them up is, it *makes sense* from a risk management standpoint to just avoid it entirely. As far as they know anyone who touches it will instantly die.
>If you have your gentlemen's agreement in play, though, the players will be much more willing to investigate because you have assured them that any inconvenience for doing so is temporary and there will be a payoff for having done this later. Now you all get to have your adventure.
That is a terrible example. You shouldn’t have such a simple plan where you need to railroad your players into following your specific pre-planned designs with no backup and hinge it on something so easily avoided.
For something like your example you should also have things set up like that which aren’t cursed or otherwise give them a reason they would want to or need to engage with it. Like have it be causing evil corruption or the source of some being’s power so they would need to take it somewhere. Fricking look at things now cliche like LoTR, the one ring could be seen as cursed as frick but just hiding or ignoring it wasn’t an option.
Years of OSR and DnD can train players into wildly paranoid buttholes long before they get to your table. Just wanted to mention that.
The group must be OSRtarded. The genre trains them into paranoia. Frick if I know what to do, other than switching the entire system and making the genre rules clear like a nongenshinpedo adult. Hope it works out for you.
It's because you're a bad GM
Shitty thread by a genshinpedo
Have all NPCs spout out rumors but are all unknowingly false
>the poorly maintained house is haunted
It's not, just a guy who is dick deep in books, so he doesn't maintain his lawn
>monsters in the woods making noises
It's just teens sneaking off to fornicate
>local farmer suddenly disapeared
He went to the next town over to buy/sell supplies
>evil wizard in local tower
He just doesn't like company and isn't doing anything evil
If they think this, you only have yourself to blame.
Paimon isn’t a secret bad guy, she’s an openly greedy, murderous thug who continues to be genocidal towards hilichurls even after discovering theyre people
Let them be distrusting. Add some NPCs where that dynamic makes the game interesting. A wealthy guy they can probably outsmart, a useful guy they should take their chances with. A dumb ass traitor with good loot.
>how do I punish these people who clearly suffer from PTSD?
why?