Five Kinds of Deception

In most tabletop roleplaying games, lying is either reduced to a single undifferentiated check ("roll Deception") or left purely as something for everyone to roleplay without further guidance. What we hope to do with this document is give GMs and players a richer starting point than that; enough that they can decide how their characters seek to mislead others, anticipate how those attempts might succeed or fail, and play out the longer-term consequences.

In this eight-page, three-and-a-half-thousand-word supplement, we - the Packbats and Brendan "whod99" Wesolowski - describe five different ways one character can fool another:

• Storytelling: Giving a plausible explanation
• Elision: Encouraging people to make assumptions you didn't say
• Chutzpah: Selling a role being played
• Wallflowering: Becoming unremarkable and unnoticed
• Jargoning: Intimidating with (apparent) expertise

...and talk through how they work, how they fail, and how to use these concepts in whatever system you are using to tell your stories - be that D&D or Fate Accelerated Edition or Thirsty Sword Lesbians or Dream Askew. The supplement ends with a quick reference page that has mechanical notes to inspire rules judgments and prompts to inspire player actions.

We feel that deception isn't a Jedi mind-trick where you say anything and roll to be believed. It's a construction that is often tailored to the specific constraints being faced, like a bridge is to the gap being spanned. It needs to be supported by what is already there, and it needs to be able to support the purpose it's built for. We hope this supplement helps you with your engineering.

Cover image based on "Keeping an eye on things" from the Oregon Department of Transportation, used under a CC BY 2.0 license.