What is your favorite house interpretation of Sense Motive vs. Bluff?

[keeper0]

My opinion is that the rules for Sense Motive vs. Bluff are at best incomplete and probably in need of a massive rewrite. (I am not talking about the "hunch" rules for Sense Motive. That is probably best for another thread.")

Situation:
A scruffy fighter in mud-caked armor rushes up to the Captain of the Guard. "I need to see the King! The orc army is over that hill and will be here by nightfall!"

How this situation is handled by the rules and how the rules feel to the players depends a great deal on which one is the PC and whether the fighter is telling the truth.

Fighter is the PC and is bluffing
This is clearly the case for which the rules were written. PC is trying to pull a fast one on a no-name NPC, GM judges the difficulty, makes a roll and the game proceeds.
If the fighter wins the bluff vs. sense motive check, the Captain believes him. Interestingly, the rules are unclear on what happens if the fighter fails. Does the Captain know the fighter is bluffing or does he just not believe the information?

Fighter is the PC and is telling the truth
The rules (as I understand them) are silent on how to persuade an NPC of something the PC believes. It is not unreasonable to do a bluff vs. sense motive check, but what does a failed bluff mean when the PC isn't really bluffing?

Captain is the PC and the fighter is bluffing
The opposed check rules would seem to apply here, but I know a lot of players who would be upset to be told by the GM, "You believe him. You are convinced he is telling the truth." claiming that they get to decide what their character believes. (#NotAllPlayers, but many).

Captain is the PC and the fighter is telling the truth
Again, the rules are unclear on what it means to sense motive on someone who is telling the truth.

I have some ideas for how to modify this, but I would love to hear about house rules that have already been play tested.

[Amanuensis]

In some RPG's there is a special skill for telling the truth in a convincing manner. In Pathfinder, if you are not telling a lie and want to convince someone else to do something, you usually make a Diplomacy check.

If a player asks to make a Sense Motive check against an NPC, the GM tells them something along the lines of "he seems to be telling the truth", "something doesn't feel right about this" etc. The player can take that information and believe what they want.

[strayshift]

Also DM style comes into play here - e.g. a DM asks for a number of d20 rolls in advance to apply to skill rolls without informing the pc, e.g. perception but in this case the difference between sense motive and diplomacy. This removes the 'meta' aspect to some degree.

[wraithstrike]

If the NPC is telling the truth or if the PC fails his sense motive check I saying something like "You do not feel like he is being dishonest" or "You do not detect any deception".

[Trekkie90909]

It's probably worth noting before we get into a massive discussion that Ultimate Intrigue contains a rather long topic on this and similar matters (UI, pgs. 182-189)

[wraithstrike]

Everyone doesn't have access to the book. Is it on D20PFSRD yet?

[Trekkie90909]

Ultimate Intrigue (like any book) has to be listed as part of the OGL before 3rd party sites like the PFSRD can add them (and then it usually takes them a few days to copy over all the info).

But cliffnotes:

Fighter is the PC and bluffing: is covered, the captain would know the fighter does not believe his information. How he handles that information would be at the GM's discretion based on the captain's motivations.

Fighter is the PC and is telling the truth: is covered, basically if you want to call for a check, then you can call for a bluff check since the same skills used to persuade someone of a lie can be used to persuade someone of the truth.

Captain is the PC, and the Fighter is bluffing: The rules are actually pretty straightforward here, the subject believes the lie to be true if they fail their opposed sense motive check against the bluffer's bluff check. How you wish to adjudicate that is up to you as the GM, how you wish to interpret that through your character's motivations is up to you as the player.

Captain is the PC, and the fighter is telling the truth: is covered, it's the same situation as earlier when the fighter is the PC. There's some additional information about sense motive, if you instead wanted him to get a hunch about the particular fighter (or to cover for the previous question, captain is the PC and the fighter is bluffing, giving a plausible reason for the player to roll a check without tipping them off that the fighter IS bluffing).

[keeper0]

Trekkie90909 wrote:

Ultimate Intrigue Summary

Thank you for this. I will at least browse this section at my FavoriteLocalGamingStore if it isn't OGL and am now more likely to purchase the book.

I appreciate the difficulty of making good rules for social interaction. Too few make the game too dependent on the acting abilities of the players or GM. Too many make the personalities feel too constrained by the roll of the dice.

My GM is new and, as a result, likes to stick closely to the RAW. The Sense Motive rules, in the CRB, seem incomplete. Combine that with a group of players who love to shout "I sense motive!", and we fall into rule negotiations too often.

My recent proposal is that a player saying "I sense motive" is asking for a hunch check, not opposing a bluff. Opposing checks are initiated at the GM's discretion, not the player's.

[WithoutHisFoot]

Rich Burlew did a rewrite of the diplomacy skill awhile back that might be helpful ( available here )
It gives pretty clear guidelines on how to adjudicate persuasion attempts. It implicitly assumes you're telling the truth, but I don't think it'd be much work to also make it work with bluffs.

[Wheldrake]

The Influence section of UI suggests it be used instead of the Core rulebook system of Diplomacy used to modify NPC attitudes. It's a robust system that seems to work as well or better than the Burlew tweak on Diplomacy.

I started a thread to answer some of the vague points and got some useful answers from Mark Seifter.

However it does require that the DM put in a little extra work to flesh out a social stat block for each NPC you are trying to influence.