How do your players react to you providing information and then later in the adventure they find it to be false or a half truth?
Well they are usually mad at me when it happens, because they believe almost ANYTHING any important NPC tell them :D... Sometime it's really hard no to laught at them but hey, I'm a nice DM so I don't do it.
Yup that's right my players are quite gullible.
I have the opposite in my players. They never believe anything a NPC tells them. :]
I once gave my group a situation in which the NPC most closely allied to the PCs was actually the criminal mastermind. My Paladin tried several times to detect alignment and the like, but this NPC had the equivalent of Belkar's lead sheet, and the PAL never got a straight answer. The party was dealing with this NPC for five or six sessions before they realized (in the form of a bloody confrontation) they should have believed the PAL when he said something wasn't quite right. That was fun.
I do usually try to make minor NPCs that will sometimes give false information, so there's precedent when the really big lies come up...that way, my players can't get too upset.
How do your players react to you providing information and then later in the adventure they find it to be false or a half truth?
Frustration at being lied to / duped / used by the enemy... whatever fits. But it's all in character and they don't get mad at ME personally. They've quickly learned that to do that will simply get me to point out it's not my fault that they're gullible.
Case in point: for those of you playing SCAP.... (spoilers below... if you're a Player in the SCAP and haven't done "Test of the Smoking Eye" yet, stop reading now or your DM will hurt me... :) )
....., there's an opening hook in Test of the Smoking Eye where the bad guy, Karaphon (doing name from memory... probably slaughtered it) has this elaborate scheme to convice the PCs he's a good guy and they need to follow him to the plane of Occipitus. Mind you, the PCs have just been teleported from the jungle to the middle of a vast desert, and have no idea where they are when this cloaked and hooded guy shows up crossing the sands. I did away with it as written, and simply had him say something along the lines of "There you are! I was worried I was too late to find you. Come, come, we must go to Occiputus!"
The module anticipates lots of questions from the PCs, so I was ready with all my answers for the flood of questions I was sure to follow.
Here's what I got: "OK."... and they start to follow him with NO QUESTIONS asked. These are experienced gamers, mind you.
I couldn't help it, I broke character and was laughing so hard I couldn't do anything else for about five minutes. I had to have him go into oratory speeches to give them the background they needed so anything would make sense. Needless to say, when he turned out to be a baddie at the end, they were so sheepish about how they'd handled the first encounter that I didn't hear a WORD about it.
"Hey, wanna go to Occiputus?" has kind of become the new catch phrase when a PC does something incredibly stupid and naive.
I almost just pulled my first TPK last weekend, in FR. The party was heading south from Iriaebor to the Snakewood on the border of Amn, to find a missing gnome. So, they talk to a wood elf ranger in the town, who boldly wore the pin of the Harpers openly. The town was Village sized, and she wasn't too worried about someone coming to such a small place and tracking her down, since she was such a low-level member of the group to boot.
She tells the party that caravans have been getting ransacked by troglodytes and kobolds recently. She did what she could to stop them, but there were many trogs and kobolds, and she's just one lone Harper. She also told the party that the scalykind were attacking from an ancient site, where elves had battled a force of evil ages ago, but no lore remained.
You'd think that that last bit would be a dead giveaway that something big was coming to my experienced group, right?
Wrong.
They head out and fing the cave, and begin their assault against the kobolds. That went well enough, and so did the troglodyte fight that ensued. Then they found a behir that was leading the humanoids, and took it down no problem. After that, they opened the MYSTERIOUS DOOR behind the behir, and found a medusa, whom they dispatched with no acquisition of new statuary.
Then they open the next MYSTERIOUS DOOR and find themselves staring into a vast underground temple complex, and a group of yuan-ti are facing them. They fight the yuan-ti, and again, no problem. But, the mages are almost out of spells, the druid almost out of wild shapes and spells, and the barbarians almost all out of rages. So they press on! they go and find a barracks, which was easily identified by the beds (which looked like cobra's heads carved from the walls with the mouths hollowed out and lined with furs and such). They killed the three off-duty pureblood guards, then went to sleep.
IN THE ENEMY BASE!!!!!
Two hours later, the bodies have been found, the intruders' locations are known, and the whole temple comes down on them and kills everyone but the mage, who went invisible and polymorphed into a fly and escaped.
The adventure would have been fine, if they had slept after fighting the medusa or if they had left the temple- both were very logical options. However, they didn't, and I wasn't about to not play the yuan-ti as the geniuses they are. It was also the first time they had made a blunder like that, and they learned the hard way the price of that kind of mistake.
Now they hate the Harpers. WHAT? Yep, they hate the Harpers for giving them bad info.
Did the Harper they talked to know anything about anything other than the kobolds and trogs? NO!
Was there any way for her to? Not and live!
Did they hear mention that there was once a great evil there that the elves had battled in the past? YES!
Did they pull a tactical blunder by sleeping in the enemy's beds when they knew, just by counting the bunks around them (not to mention the size of the complex they entered!), that there were a lot more than those they had already killed, and even though they could have safely left and come back later, proceeded to leave their victims' corpses in the open and sleep in the enemy barracks? YES!
So how is this the Harpers' fault again?
Sorry for the long post. That's the biggest bait and switch maneuver I've pulled on them thus far. Nevertheless, there are more coming, and my only comments to my players who read this board are these: Never sleep in an enemy's bed, and don't trust in every last bit of info you are handed. The NPC might not be lying; sometimes, they just don't know, either.
Saern, that's hilarious!
My PCs are so cautious they built fortifications around the opening of the wolves den at the beginning of the Whispering Cairn AND posted watch AFTER they fought the wolves (first encounter for the 1st lvl party :)
BTW did your party not think to place watch/alarm? ROFLMAO
Oh, they placed a watch. Here's an overview of the battle (remember, all of this was meant to be encoutnered spaced out, not clustered together, by a party of 8th level, with Superman complexed ability rolls):
Party composition-
Shield dwarf barbarian/bear warrior (hereafter known as BW)
Human fighter/barbarian/frenzied berserker (hereafter known as FB)
Sun elf wizard/elemental savant (air)
Human bard/barbarian (goign for a skald-style character)
Human druid/master of many forms with a bear animal companion
The druid and FB were on watch, and heard a strange noise in the hall (snake-form yuan-ti chaning back into humanoid form). Before they act, the yuan-ti rush into the room: four purebloods, and two half-blood archers hanging back. The purebloods move up and attack, but are summarily wiped out by the FB and druid (who changed into a troll using his MoMF PrC). The archer's arrows do virtually nothing. The rest of the party wakes up and starts getting themselves out of the beds.
In rush two more creatures- strange, mutated snake-men (Amnian caravan guards captured and afflicted with the Spellwarped template from MM3). They charged, and make a few minor hits. One of them is then destroyed by the FB. As the rest of the party gets themselves together, the yuan-ti fall back. The party pursues. The last Spellwarped is grappled by the trolls, whose bear companion then coup de graces him. The half-bloods clear the barracks.
The FB and BW follow them out into the main temple complex, a long, curving tunnel with several stone bridges and stone lanterns (continual flames cast on them), all decorated like snakes. The bridges span a central cavern, laced with vines and about 40 feet deep.
The halfbloods fall back onto the bridge. Then two abominations, hiding behind the lamps with Chameleon Power, use Aversion on the FB and BW. They fail their saves. Next comes out the troll and skald, and the wizard hangs back in the cave. Now the fun begins.
A pair of umberhulks bursts from the ground next to the druid/troll and skald, cutting them off from easily re-entering the barracks. Many, many yuan-ti slither up the vine-covered chasm as snakes and change back into humanoid form. The FB and BW can't attack any of them thanks to their failed saves on the Aversion. Half-bloods use arrows, the purebloods wait for a charge opportunity, hanging back thanks to the umberhulks' confusion gaze (they didn't want to be affected). The wizard uses Defenestrating Sphere to harry the lesser yuan-ti, but they're hot on their saves tonight.
Then a dark naga starts raining Scorching Rays from a ledge high above on the FB and BW. With nothing else to do, they attack the umberhulks, and manage to bring them down. Now, all the little yuan-ti move to attack and flank, while the abominations start using Baleful Polymorph. The skald is now a confused snake (confused thanks to the umberhulks). He is quickly ripped to ribbons by the abominations. The FB and BW, unable to attack anything even looking like a snake, flee into the barracks and try to rip anything they can down to make a barricade. The wizard is using 1st and 2nd level spells now.
Then up comes the brigade of another group of Spellwarped and advanced Huge vipers and flame snakes (FF), who begint o use ranged attacks and pelt the party for some minor damage- minor, but stacking up bigtime with all the other hurts they've taken.
THe abominations move in to flank the troll after he and the wizard take care of the last purebloods. Then the temple leader, Ressanvak, comes up. This is an Elite spellwarped half-red dragon yuan-ti abomination with a big magic scimitar. He breathes fire and drops the mage to half hp. The mage casts Greater Invisibility and 5-foot steps. The troll takes a swing at the big red guy, but does little.
The next round, the troll/druid dies in a massive storm of blades, while the mage turns into a fly with Polymorph and flies away. The yuan-ti proceed into the barracks and summarily butcher the FB and BW.
The druid's player was a complete newbie, so it's been decided to end that campaign and start again at level 1 (he STARTED his first character at 8th level, no easy feat!) so he could learn the game. The party will never sleep in an enemy's bed again.
I'll have to say as a player in the SCAP who just finished the Smoking eye portion, we totally fell for the guys speech. Yeah he showed up as evil to the Paladin, but I think that because we are so good we were hoping to redeem him. He was very helpful until we got to the final test and he tried to push one of the other party members into the flames. Yeah we felt used, but also felt that it was our fault for believing him. Oddly enough, after we beat him in the fight, we let him go. It wasn't our way to sacrifice him into the flames, so we just let him planeshift away. We then went back to fighting over who would step into the flames. We all wanted to step in and couldn't agree on who to let do it. ;)