To the Courts: On the witness stand

A major problem that DMs have with mystery and intrigue situations, is the question of liars.

Players tend to believe information NPCs tell them, even when its bad guys, because all of the information being provided by the NPCs, in a way, comes from the DM. As the DM is the one who provides the world for them, it’s understandable that they have trouble taking into account that a mouthpiece of the guy who basically is their eyes and ears, might be totally BSing them.

In my experience, I’ve noticed that players have a binary approach to the prospect of lying NPCs as a result. Some decide if a guy is trustworthy or not, some think that evil people always lie, and some just assume whatever information they hear is somehow correct. What a lot of players really have trouble with, is inconsistencies.

The Innkeeper’s daughter from our prior scenario, she might genuinely not know where the Accused was while she was being visited by the town guard who claimed to see him. She might lie and say the guard was at his post, not wanting him to get in trouble or reveal their relationship. She thinks she saw the accused sneaking around outside at 7am (it was actually someone else). She’s entirely certain that the accused isn’t guilty though because she saw him in a situation where he could’ve used the supposedly stolen item. She does however think he was under a charm spell.

 She might be entirely ignorant about some details, lie about one topic, be wrong about another, be entirely forthright with a third, and be honest but mislead on a fourth.

This is because information is a webwork. Especially in a court case scenario where you have to figure out the holes in people’s stories and prove them. The daughter’s statement that she saw the accused at 7am for example might be grabbed onto by the party as a lifeline (tying in with the timeline stuff I mentioned before) only to have it organically yanked out from under their feet by the king’s prosecutor. This might wrongly lead the party to believe the character is lying about everything though, and that’s again, where the problem comes up.

The DM really, really needs to try to make it clear that characters know what characters know, and their personalities, worries, and relationships effect how they convey and interpret information they see. It’s important to get a handle on this because this is where the real meat of a mystery, intrigue or court scenario is.

In your notes, it’s helpful to make entries about characters indicating what they do know, don’t know, and what they’ll say or lie about. This is because players may interrogate on topics besides what you planned for, and those topics, unexpectedly, may in fact give the players the edge they’re looking for.

To the Courts: The Timeline

I mentioned in the last courts post that the Timeline was our next step in a judicial intrigue scenario. This is because in most cases (not all), timelines are necessary bits of evidence for any mystery plot at all.  

Every procedural at some point mentions stuff like ‘alibis,’ this basically is saying the person couldn’t have committed this or that act because someone or something can vouch for them being incapable of doing it, and usually that’s by being at a specific place (not where the crime was committed) at a certain time (usually when the crime was being committed).  Frequently, witnesses and suspects will of course, lie in these situations.

It’s important to develop a timeline, so that you the DM knows who was where and when, and why.  This can be usually accomplished by making a table of important plot locations and times, and then filling in with who was in what place when. You can add additional notes for yourself to flesh it out.

When you design a mystery like this, who was where when and why are important questions to ask yourself, because it defines the evidence the players will be desperately hunting for.   It’s also where you can easily hide inconsistencies the party can discover.

How could the town guard be at the castle, as his commander reported, at 9am, and then 20 miles away at the inn at 9:30 as the waitress reported? Is she lying to cover up for him, or is the commander ignorant of where his men are? Your timeline shows that he snuck out at 8am, and decided to visit his special friend at the inn, which means that let’s say him saying he saw our friend the accused at 9:00 from his guardshack was a lie and he’s just covering his ass. If the party can find out about the discrepancy between reality (as on your timeline) and what people are telling them, this is the essence of an investigation and they’ll feel clever for figuring it out.

The timeline also helps out a lot with on-going investigations or plots that are still in motion. Maybe a key witness will be killed at PCs+5 days unless they find him first, giving them an alibi they really don’t want for their friend.

Next time, I’m going to try to discuss a major issue for DMs and PCs. Liars.

SKM Development: Magical Research Revisions

Life, and specifically work, have gotten in the way of me providing for the requested modifications to the magical research system in SKM. I’ve neglected SKM a lot actually, and its particularly sad since my players have been floating in a holding action for over a year while I embarked on this goofball crusade to make house rules, and ended up inventing a sort of weird new system.

Previously, magical research required funding and gave no particular benefit. As magic, unlike the other techs, doesn’t have a list of Research topics (RTs) it also had no place for funding overages to go, and funding it became either a luxury line of a successful kingdom, or a foolish and dangerous exercise. The costs didn’t outweigh the penalty.

You had to spend reams of cash to maybe get nothing, and maybe end up with frogs raining from the heavens. That needed work. My main issues were trying to balance use with risk. Magic should not be a simple and safe procedure, but in that desire I went too far to the extreme. Let’s try this again..

For our new magic research, let’s stick with our three categories: Land, Artifact and Creature. That part is simple enough.

We’re going to modify land magic though. Instead of it being a one time shot of whatever, we’re going to make it like technology, and make it sustainable. Resource, Gold or Food, will power discoveries for ‘Land’. This is representative of sacrifices to enchantments, sacrifices, or rituals that empower it. So you’d have a situation where maybe you need to toss 50 Resource on a flame pile to get the Fertility enchantment you unlocked to work for a few months. Kind of like in King of Dragon Pass.  This also gives us an easier resolution for a majority of land mishaps, you could just toss some resources at them to make them go away.

Artifact still provides items like magic swords, and the like.

Creature provides creatures. Either wonderous, useful, useless, or dangerous (to your foes).  

The required sage for Magic Research rule, we’re going to keep. But he’s not going to go crazy if he fears his tenure anymore and increase a chance for disaster.

The biggest issue is the Mishap. And the solution to the Mishap is obvious. Previously, you fed money into Magic and it had a chance of going to one of the three categories. Now you choose the category, and a mishap, instead of having a base percentage chance occurs when you decide to try to push.

Pushing Magic is something you can do to vastly increase the likelihood of a magical breakthrough, at an increasing chance of a Mishap occurring. In this system, every sage has a stat called ‘Risk Acceptance’ or RA, representing how cautious or risky they are.  When a sage is pushed, twice his Risk Acceptance chance is added to the success percentage of unlocking a discovery, however it also means that the pushing triggers a potential for mishap equivalent to his RA.

Our First Example Sage is Lactose the Buttermage, he has a 1% RA since he’s pretty cautious (boring some might say). His king wants to push magical research on land magic. He throws gold at the problem to the tune of 500gp. Let’s say that’s sufficient for a tier 1 magical land effect RT and would normally grant a 50% chance of unlocking. By pushing Lactose, the chance is now 52% (not much of an increase). The DM rolls the percentage, gets a 38, they unlock a magical land effect. He then rolls a percentage to see if the 1% mishap triggers, it doesn’t. The pushing was successful. Lactose is pretty low risk.

Alternatively our Sage is Antmatt the Fire Ant Speaker, he has a 30% RA because he takes enormous risks for the good of learning. He gets pushed. His chance for success launches to a stratospheric 110% (50%+60%), assuring that something is going to be learned or unlocked. His king rolls for the mishap, gets a 22 on a d100, triggering a mishap. What they learned is that the fertility of spiders has vastly improved as they rain from the sky.     

This way the risk is placed on the player’s choices. He can choose to increase his risk to increase success, and he can also choose to gamble by looking for sages either more or less willing to take risks. Mishaps don’t occur randomly anymore, they occur as a consequence of the player taking a measured risk. This I hope will decrease the ‘magic just screws me’ factor.  

Also, instead of the money disappearing into the ether, 30% of ‘wasted’ monthly magic funding will end up going into random available RTs of non-magical fields, representing that while the mage wasn’t able to make a potion that made a man as strong as steel by mixing some pebbles and chemicals around, it helped out the kingdom in figuring out how to make concrete.