u/siriusly-sirius

For the GMs out there - how do you guys handle deception, or NPCs lying to PCs? In many TTRPGs players might ask for an insight check to see how truthful the NPC is being.

Do you guys even allow players to roll to see if someone's lying? What skill & difficulty do you use? I feel like assigning a difficulty to a skill check has a way of revealing meta information about the NPC that shouldn't be revealed - if i assign a high difficulty, the player can assume not only that the NPC was lying, but that they're a pretty good liar.

On the other hand, if we don't allow players to roll to see if someone's lying, we loose a bit of difference between the characters, where some characters might be better at picking up lies than others, and the only way to flesh out that difference seems to me to be by rolling.

One option could be arbitrary opposed checks - even if the NPC isn't lying, they still roll to determine the difficulty of seeing if they're being sincere or not - but then that shifts the burden of where the meta information is revealed. Instead of the meta information being the difficulty assigned, its the modifiers to the difficulty and how many APs the NPC burns to roll more d20s.

Another option might be Difficulty 0 checks, where the player burns their AP to obtain more information about what the NPC is saying.

How do you guys run it?

Recently used DeACSM plugin with DeDRM. I dragged in an ACSM file, and it remained as an ACSM file, not converting into an ePub.

When I look into the ACSM file's code, I can see the format is `application/epub+zip`, does this affect it?

Also found the following in my debug log:

piped data from file dialog helper:
[b"{{XX}}", b'C:\\Users\\{{XX}}\\Downloads\\URLLink.acsm']
Running file type plugin DeACSM failed with traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "calibre\customize\ui.py", line 236, in _run_filetype_plugins
  File "calibre_plugins.deacsm.__init__", line 422, in run
  File "calibre_plugins.deacsm.__init__", line 324, in download
  File "C:\Users\{{XX}}\AppData\Roaming\calibre\plugins\DeACSM.zip\libadobe.py", line 267, in sendHTTPRequest_DL2FILE
  File "urllib\request.py", line 187, in urlopen
  File "urllib\request.py", line 493, in open
  File "urllib\request.py", line 602, in http_response
  File "urllib\request.py", line 531, in error
  File "urllib\request.py", line 464, in _call_chain
  File "urllib\request.py", line 611, in http_error_default
urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: 

Anyone have any ideas?