failing a deception check doesnt get the PC the truth, only that the person failed , despair means they gave something away though, although it might not be much, but given that the Marshal manages to figure out liars it might be better for the opposing character just not to try to lie

It also helps if the individual in question doesn't give binary answers. This is also why its good to hide the actual result of a players roll sometimes, especially when it is a binary question or situation.

To elaborate.

If you ask a binary question, make a roll, and you know the results of your roll, you will always know the answer regardless of the result of the roll.

You are playing as an ISB agent interrogating a suspected smuggler. You think he has some Spice on his ship. So you ask him,

"Do you have any spice on your ship?"

He answers "No". You make a check to see if he is lying. Now here is why its important for the GM to hide the result of the roll.

Situation 1: The Smuggler is telling the truth, he has no spice. If you pass the check, you'll be told he is telling the truth. If you fail, you'll be told you think the smuggler is lying. However, since you know you passed the check, you as the player know the actual truth of the situation, and subconsciously it will effect how you play the game.

Situation 2: The same as above, just reversed.

However, if the GM hides the result of your roll, now you have only what the GM tells you you feel. He'll tell you either that you think the Smuggler is lying, or that you think he is telling the truth. Now since you don't have out of character information you can roleplay properly.

First, I will echo what some others have said. Try to always have the players be the one to roll against the difficulty of the NPC's pool. That way any threat rolled is on them! so even on a success they may get threat, which is a prefect way to sow doubt; and if you really want to muddy the waters with some lies in there, just flip a Destiny point and hope for a despair.

From personal experience:

Early in my campaign I may have made a mistake in that I intentionally left a minion alive at the end of a fight because i wanted him to give the PC's some info to follow up on. Unfortunately, my players latched onto this as the primary way to get info they needed, since a rank or two in Coercion (intimidate) made it so they crushed any minion's will to resist. This resulted in my players going to great lengths to keep NPC's alive in a fight and then interrogating them after EVERY fight. They only was I was able to curb it was to "stop giving my minions crucial information".

13 minutes ago, ThreeAM said:

Early in my campaign I may have made a mistake in that I intentionally left a minion alive at the end of a fight because i wanted him to give the PC's some info to follow up on. Unfortunately, my players latched onto this as the primary way to get info they needed, since a rank or two in Coercion (intimidate) made it so they crushed any minion's will to resist. This resulted in my players going to great lengths to keep NPC's alive in a fight and then interrogating them after EVERY fight. They only was I was able to curb it was to "stop giving my minions crucial information".

I would love this to happen at my table so we could turn it into a running joke of a minion being killed (seemingly at random) in the middle of giving crucial information.

5 hours ago, BadMotivator said:

He answers "No". You make a check to see if he is lying. Now here is why its important for the GM to hide the result of the roll.

Situation 1: The Smuggler is telling the truth, he has no spice. If you pass the check, you'll be told he is telling the truth. If you fail, you'll be told you think the smuggler is lying. However, since you know you passed the check, you as the player know the actual truth of the situation, and subconsciously it will effect how you play the game.

Situation 2: The same as above, just reversed.

However, if the GM hides the result of your roll, now you have only what the GM tells you you feel. He'll tell you either that you think the Smuggler is lying, or that you think he is telling the truth. Now since you don't have out of character information you can roleplay properly.

Of course, that also highlights how problematic it is when failing against a truthful statement gives you the contrary result instead of no or a random result - one would assume that someone who's not particularly trained to ferret out falsehoods would mostly just realize they have no idea whether they're being lied to, with actually mistaking truth for a lie probably best reserved for massive amounts of Failures or a Despair.

Otherwise, the smuggler is better off to bluff that he smuggled half a joint of space weed, but smoked that in the meantime...

14 hours ago, BadMotivator said:

It also helps if the individual in question doesn't give binary answers. This is also why its good to hide the actual result of a players roll sometimes, especially when it is a binary question or situation.

To elaborate.

If you ask a binary question, make a roll, and you know the results of your roll, you will always know the answer regardless of the result of the roll.

You are playing as an ISB agent interrogating a suspected smuggler. You think he has some Spice on his ship. So you ask him,

"Do you have any spice on your ship?"

He answers "No". You make a check to see if he is lying. Now here is why its important for the GM to hide the result of the roll.

Situation 1: The Smuggler is telling the truth, he has no spice. If you pass the check, you'll be told he is telling the truth. If you fail, you'll be told you think the smuggler is lying. However, since you know you passed the check, you as the player know the actual truth of the situation, and subconsciously it will effect how you play the game.

Situation 2: The same as above, just reversed.

However, if the GM hides the result of your roll, now you have only what the GM tells you you feel. He'll tell you either that you think the Smuggler is lying, or that you think he is telling the truth. Now since you don't have out of character information you can roleplay properly.

Solution 3: He doesn't have drugs on his ship at all, he has something else that is just as bad, if not worse.

Solution 4: He might have a collection of Jedi memorabilia and items from the "good old days" of the republic. The exact kind of information that the ISB would confiscate without question. One of those trinkets is a personal gift of someone he once knew.

Solution 5: Or someone. Maybe what he is hiding isn't a product at all, but one of his crew mates that the imperials haven't really looked at too closely yet.

Because the question is, unofficially and the player might not even be aware of this "Do I have anything I can bust you for?", if he doesn't have spice he might get setback dice to his check as that isn't what he deals with. After all, he suspects that the PC might be one of those stiff imperials that are only looking for drugs and feels more confident in hiding that other information. The success/failure only determines whether or not they are hiding something. It's up to advantage/threat solely to determine the quality of the information.

I might be overthinking it though. Depends how important that question actually is.

On 7/9/2018 at 1:51 PM, BadMotivator said:

It also helps if the individual in question doesn't give binary answers. This is also why its good to hide the actual result of a players roll sometimes, especially when it is a binary question or situation.

To elaborate.

If you ask a binary question, make a roll, and you know the results of your roll, you will always know the answer regardless of the result of the roll.

You are playing as an ISB agent interrogating a suspected smuggler. You think he has some Spice on his ship. So you ask him,

"Do you have any spice on your ship?"

He answers "No". You make a check to see if he is lying. Now here is why its important for the GM to hide the result of the roll.

Situation 1: The Smuggler is telling the truth, he has no spice. If you pass the check, you'll be told he is telling the truth. If you fail, you'll be told you think the smuggler is lying. However, since you know you passed the check, you as the player know the actual truth of the situation, and subconsciously it will effect how you play the game.

Situation 2: The same as above, just reversed.

However, if the GM hides the result of your roll, now you have only what the GM tells you you feel. He'll tell you either that you think the Smuggler is lying, or that you think he is telling the truth. Now since you don't have out of character information you can roleplay properly.

I think you are answering it wrong as the GM. Succeed and the agent knows whether the smuggler is lying or telling the truth. Fail and he's told that he doesn't know if they are lying or telling the truth, not that he thinks that they're lying.

Fail the roll and you as the player don't know and can roleplay without bias.

Far better to have the player make the roll. they will have better buy in. Dont have the npc roll to decieve. have the pc roll to detect the deception. Most rolls like this can be flipped to have the PC roll.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

Far better to have the player make the roll. they will have better buy in.

This has not been my experience. Have the acting character roll. In this case, Deception is the active skill and Discipline (or Vigilance if you like the Genesys variant) is the resisting skill. Talents that are set up to impact these tests are made with this in mind.

10 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

This has not been my experience. Have the acting character roll. In this case, Deception is the active skill and Discipline (or Vigilance if you like the Genesys variant) is the resisting skill. Talents that are set up to impact these tests are made with this in mind.

Sounds like you might not be getting as much buy in as you could. How involved are your players in building the dice pools? Do they seek boost and set backs

49 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

Sounds like you might not be getting as much buy in as you could. How involved are your players in building the dice pools? Do they seek boost and set backs

Plenty of buy-in. They are just as interested in adding Setbacks to the NPCs pools as they would be in adding Boost to their own. I don't subscribe to the fallacy that players are only interested when they roll the dice themselves.

13 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Plenty of buy-in. They are just as interested in adding Setbacks to the NPCs pools as they would be in adding Boost to their own. I don't subscribe to the fallacy that players are only interested when they roll the dice themselves.

I didnt say that. I said you often get more buy in. Especially on failed rolls. A player is more likely to go along with a failure they rolled than a success against them.

Just now, Daeglan said:

A player is more likely to go along with a failure they rolled than a success against them.

Proof?

On 7/7/2018 at 7:20 PM, DaverWattra said:

Sure, but we've had a lot of fun with scenes where the PCs talk face to face with the BBEG. I don't want to have to cut down on those.

At that point aren't you end campaign, story arc anyway? If they've gotten access to the head cheese, I'd imagine that villain is two steps from the grave anyway, or............

4 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Proof?

The experience many gms have had. You wi notice i didnt use an absolute.

Or donyour players roll a miss and then argue they hit?

1 minute ago, Daeglan said:

Or donyour players roll a miss and then argue they hit?

Whether the dice roll from my hand or theirs, successes and failures are read the same.

4 minutes ago, Daeglan said:

The experience many gms have had. You wi notice i didnt use an absolute.

Your argumentum ad populum is unconvincing. I reject your premise.

Wow. Dude. 1. I did not say it is an absolute. 2. I said this an experience other gms had. Nothing more.

Stop acting like it is an.attack.

@Daeglan and @HappyDaze if I might moderate for a second here there might be some context difference here that I think is relevant to the topic at large as well. Are GM rolls in the open or are they behind a screen?

From at least my experience, players that come from having the GM roll behind a screen sometimes have a more "Us vs the GM mentality" (largely from DnD). Which is what can lead to the players skepticism of when bad things happen, thinking its just the GM trying to "screw them over"because the GM is making things happen TO THEM (possibly by fudging dice).

However, if the rolls are out in the open its less of an issue on who is doing the rolling. Especially in this dice system since everyone can give input on the threat/despair/advantage/triumph results.

That being said I usually always try to have my players roll for most things, and I roll in the open. But there are always exceptions and generally I don't have a set rule and instead just wing it in the moment.

I think most of the time rolls should be open, but certain kinds of rolls should be hidden. Like the mentioned interrogation rolls, of if you are maybe having a PC take a check where the result isn’t immediately obvious to him.

17 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Far better to have the player make the roll. they will have better buy in. Dont have the npc roll to decieve. have the pc roll to detect the deception. Most rolls like this can be flipped to have the PC roll.

Here's the problem with this idea in the current context. If your response to a powerful talent that triggers when you roll against a PC is to make it useless by always having the PC roll, the response you get from the player is likely to be frustration that they spent 20 XP on a talent that never gets used, as opposed to "more buy-in."

Now, people have made the argument that talents like Unrelenting Skeptic can be reversed to function when the player rolls instead (I don't think that's a good fit for all of the social defense talents, but if it works anywhere, it's likely to work with a talent like Unrelenting Skeptic). If you do that, though, you're back to square one, because now the player is adding a bunch of automatic successes to every check they make to uncover Deception. They're still extremely likely to see through any attempt at a lie, even moreso, since the dice in this game favor the active roller, so you haven't actually addressed the OP's problem.

So whatever the merits of the "always have the player roll" philosophy, it's not something that's useful in this context.

27 minutes ago, Kaigen said:

Here's the problem with this idea in the current context. If your response to a powerful talent that triggers when you roll against a PC is to make it useless by always having the PC roll, the response you get from the player is likely to be frustration that they spent 20 XP on a talent that never gets used, as opposed to "more buy-in."

Now, people have made the argument that talents like Unrelenting Skeptic can be reversed to function when the player rolls instead (I don't think that's a good fit for all of the social defense talents, but if it works anywhere, it's likely to work with a talent like Unrelenting Skeptic). If you do that, though, you're back to square one, because now the player is adding a bunch of automatic successes to every check they make to uncover Deception. They're still extremely likely to see through any attempt at a lie, even moreso, since the dice in this game favor the active roller, so you haven't actually addressed the OP's problem.

So whatever the merits of the "always have the player roll" philosophy, it's not something that's useful in this context.

Sure. Which is why i did not make it an absolute. I said it is better. Not always have player roll. Dont take a rule of thumb and make it an absolute.

1 hour ago, Daeglan said:

I said it is better.

Proof?

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

Proof?

Dude drop it. I get it you disagree. Others agree. Many have experienced that it works better. Get over it.