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Anonymous
Top 10 Anime Betrayals 2017-08-03 02:56:19 Post No. 54668089
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Top 10 Anime Betrayals 2017-08-03 02:56:19 Post No. 54668089
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Is it ever fair for a betrayal or some other tragedy to be nigh-unpreventable, or at least preventable only through dumb luck?
In my game, there was an important NPC who served as an informant for my character, and was my character's trusted sibling. Although they seldom met my character in person, they kept in touch remotely, gave intel, and told my character where to find more info.
Last session, this sibling told my character to visit a location for intel. (The GM prompted me to go there, twice, out-of-character.) Nothing happened there. My character then learned that the informant NPC killed another NPC, who was important to the game's overall story and one of my character's two best friends. My character was essentially lured away in a ruse, although this was not crucial to the traitor's plan; it was an extra precaution.
The GM let me know that there was foreshadowing that my character's sibling was turning bad and that, in theory, I could have picked up on such things. The GM pointed out all of these foreshadowings. My character was the only one privy to them. I missed every single one of them. They were all grounded in subtle social cues, and, as the GM knows, I am terribly autistic and unable to glean such nuances. I pointed out that many of them were too obtuse and long stretches, and the GM conceded that they were.
I also pointed out that there was no foreshadowing at all that the victim NPC was ever in danger, which the GM acknowledged. The traitor NPC never even brought up the victim NPC in previous conversations. Therefore, even if I did conclude that my character's sibling had gone bad, I would have had to leap to the idea that the victim NPC had to be placed under heavy security for a protracted period of a week or longer (because nothing was stopping the traitor NPC from waiting until the victim NPC was vulnerable, which was most of the time). The traitor took a pure stealth/disguise approach for the assassination.
Was this handled properly?
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>>54668089
>(The GM prompted me to go there, twice, out-of-character.)
>Was this handled properly?
No. If the GM deliberately influenced you OOC so you'd fall for the ruse, he failed to properly set up the scenario.
Other than that, you should have had at least one roll of whatever-the-fuck your system uses for picking up on social wrongness.
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>>54668837
>you should have had at least one roll of whatever-the-fuck your system uses for picking up on social wrongness.
Both my character and my character's sibling have supremely strong deception abilities, well above anyone else's rolls, ourselves included.
In the past, the GM had sporadically allowed my character to make rolls to piece together deceptions based on raw logical deduction rather than social cues (e.g. "Wait a minute, they claimed that X, but that does not seem logically sound due to Y reason"). However, those were rare, and no such roll was called for in this scenario.
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>>54669020
A player cannot properly use their intuition to pick up on social cues in a TTRPG. This is because a large portion of social cues are non-verbal or depend on the intricacies of speech that your GM will not have the acting talent to mimic.
This is why intuition skills or "detect lie" skills exist.
Any circumstance in which said skills categorically do not work is effectively denying the player any ability to discern the truth and should be held as poor GMing, even if the system permits such. Even if the NPC was made by the PC to be a perfect liar.
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>>54669636
How can social cues be picked up from what is a perfect liar?
Logical deductions based on the consistency of a story, I can understand, but not social cues. Alas, such logical deductions were not offered in this case.
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>>54669020
>>54669740
>2hufag
>"my character is a perfect liar!"
Christ, it's like watching a quadraplegic with cerebral palsy pretend to be kung fu master
Also
>It's a "wah, wah, my GM isn't sucking my dick" 2hufag episode
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>>54669740
>How can social cues be picked up from what is a perfect liar?
Why did your GM proffer (or claim to) social cues at all then?
Anyways, deception skills generally protect against both types of discovery, so unless you were playing a system that deliberately segregated the two into different skills and the NPC was bad at one, the GM shouldn't have been dropping hints to be picked up on by OOC means if he wasn't permitting them to be picked up on by IC means.
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>>54669961
So in such a case, it should have been impossible to pick up on hints of deception.
Does that mean that the GM made the right call by making the "foreshadowings" impossibly obtuse, then?
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>>54670011
The GM was correctly playing the character.
That said, the GM (and you, if you aided in this NPC's creation as a perfect liar with knowledge they might be an antagonist) bears some fault for setting up a no-win scenario and presenting it as anything other than a no-win scenario.
"You could have done [incredibly implausible thing]" is worse than "you had no chance" simply because it entails unavoidable yet blameable failure and maliciously setting up the player(s) for a loss.
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>>54670011
>So in such a case, it should have been impossible to pick up on hints of deception.
Not exactly.
IRL, people don't suddenly decide "I'm going to betray this guy" if they were on good terms. There should have been a period when the NPC was coming up with that idea, gathering motivation, coming to the conclusion that no alternative course of action was acceptable. During this period, there should've been signs that something was wrong. The NPC shouldn't have switched to the perfect deception mode until the decision to betray was made in earnest.
So unless that guy was going to betray your character all along, there should've been signs pickable by in-game skills. And if he was, that's just bad storytelling.
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>>54671815
But there were foreshadowings that something was wrong.
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