I know you were expecting me to answer a bunch of reader questions in an Ask Angry column this week, but that ain’t what’s happening. I won’t be answering questions while insulting people’s inability to follow simple directions. But I will be responding to my readers. Sort of. Two weeks ago, you see, I ruffled some of Jimmy’s feathers. And now, Jimmy won’t f$&%ing leave me alone about it.

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about resolving social actions in D&D and other RPGs. And even though all I really said was to handle social actions the same way that you handle literally every other f$&%ing action in every role-playing game ever and even though I clearly spelled out my assumptions and told people who didn’t like my assumptions not to even waste their time reading my article because they wouldn’t like it, I’ve still had to hear for two weeks about how I was wrong about everything and how everyone else does things so much better. Because, apparently, even though their interactions with me suggested they had learned their social skills by arguing with racist teenagers over Fortnight voice chat – and probably losing those arguments – these people were somehow masters of adjudicating fictional social interactions between pretend elves.

Don’t let this introduction fool you though. I’m not actually going to respond to most of that bulls$&%. But I will be addressing a specific thing that some of my reasonable correspondents – yes, I do actually have SOME reasonable correspondents – I’ll be addressing something my reasonable correspondents brought up. I’m going to talk about how to handle the Insight skill. Or the Sense Motive skill if you’re still playing D&D 3E or Pathfinder. Or the Sense Motive action if you’re playing Pathfinder 2: Overdesigned, Bloated Boogaloo. And yes, I have started looking at PF2, thank you very much for asking. And I’ll be looking at Insight and Sense Motive specifically in light of the assumptions I made in the previous article that some people seem to believe breaks Insight in some way.

So, allow me to offer some insight into Insight in D&D.

And now that I’ve grabbed the low-hanging comedic fruit and insulted my readers and took a dig at a popular RPG system and denigrated modern gamer PC culture and you’ve got a row filled in on your Long, Rambling Introduction™ bingo card, I can move on.

You Don’t Need Any Special Insight to See THESE Warning Signs

I’m going to continue telling you how to handle social interactions in RPGs. Today’s topic is the f$&%ing Insight skill. And I call it the f$&%ing Insight skill – which by the way is just the updated name of the f$&%ing Sense Motive skill if you’re playing an older edition or a different game – I call it the f$&%ing Insight skill because no one knows what to do with it or how to handle it. And even after I tell them what to do with it and how to handle it, they still have to start a f$&%ing fight with me over it. F$&%ing Insight skill.

But before I proceed, I have to establish – and re-establish – the ground rules.

First, all the assumptions I made in the previous article on this topic are still assumed. And any attempts to argue them will still result in insults and comment moderation. As a reminder, those assumptions are as follows

1. You can’t ignore player skill
2. You can’t ignore avatar strength
3. Talking in-character is just for funsies
4. Player agency is sacrosanct

If you don’t remember what those assumptions are about or you missed the last article, go back and read what I wrote about them. Because those are Angry canon at this point. You can’t argue with them and be an Angreon. And if you aren’t an Angreon, you won’t like anything I write. And I still won’t care. And if I have to moderate this comment section as much as I had to moderate the last one, I’m just going to close it. And probably close the comment section on all future social interaction articles.

Apart from those assumptions, I’m going to add one more point that’s beyond argument. In my last article, I said I was going to hew as close to the rules of D&D 5E as possible. And I’m going to keep doing that. But because the rules here are pretty damned vague, there’s a lot of room for interpretation. And I know – I just KNOW – someone is going to point out that something I suggest here isn’t RAW. Besides, I know WotCs designers have tried to cover for their uneven editing and rushed design by claiming that they left openings for GM interpretation. But when that s$%& makes it impossible to reasonably use the rules without a twisted interpretation, someone has to fix it. And based on my interactions with the gamer community at large, I’m the only one qualified to fix it.

So, in addition to removing all discussions about player skill, avatar strength, the non-importance of talking as your character, and whether it’s okay for dice or GMs to tell players what their characters think, do, or believe, I’ll also be removing comments that point out that, technically, the rules say to do something different. Because, no, they don’t. And because I don’t really give a f$&% if they do.

Warnings done. Time for useful discussion.

Did Someone Else Pack Your Emotional Baggage for You?

So, we’ve got this skill called Insight in D&D 5E. And D&D 4E. And it replaced this skill called Sense Motive in D&D 3E. Which is also in Pathfinder because PF is just a smudged, annotated photocopy of D&D 3E. And in Pathfinder 2, Sense Motive became an action, not a skill. Which means anyone can do it without needing or benefiting from any kind of practice or training. Sort of. Don’t worry about the finer points. No one cares about PF2. No one except one person and he seems to have calmed down about it now. Everyone wave ‘hi’ to Shock.

Insight’s a deceptively simple mechanic. If someone’s telling a lie, the person they’re lying to gets to roll an Insight check to determine whether they spot the lie or not. It makes perfect sense to have a skill like that in the game. After all, there’s a Deception skill so there has to be a way to counter it. And spotting lies and the lying liars who tell them is something you can get better at with practice and training. I know. I took a course myself. I mean, it was only an ONLINE course, but it was designed by the foremost deception expert in the world. And that’s not hyperbole. But I’ll get to that in a little while.

Anyway Insight. The lie-detector skill. Should be easy, right? But it ain’t. It’s a mess. GMs constantly misuse it. Mainly because they only read half the rules and base the other half of their understanding on what they think they remember from older editions and other games. And using Insight creates some big metagaming issues that are actually REAL metagaming issues. And misusing Insight – or using it with strict adherence to the rules as written in older editions – breaks things. And when I say it breaks things, I mean it breaks some of those four assumptions that are so central to role-playing games that they aren’t open for discussion anymore.

It’s a shame, though, because Insight could be a useful mechanic if it were explained clearly and if it were polished a bit and if it were tweaked to avoid breaking the fundamentals of role-playing games and if GMs actually knew something about psychology before they tried to use it.

I’m not going to analyze the rules of the various incarnations of Insight across D&D’s editions and in other games. I’m not even really going to go delve too deeply into what D&D 5E has to say about it. But I am going to point out that, if you’re like most GMs, you’re using Insight wrong in D&D 5E and the rules clearly say so. Check out the write-up on Insight on PHB 128. There’s nothing there that suggests it can be used, for example, as a saving throw against lies and deception. In fact, the rules specifically note it’s used to detect truth when “searching out a lie.” And ‘search,’ kids, is what we call an ACTIVE verb. Not a passive one. And I’m going to come back to that fact. But let me be clear: there’s NOTHING in D&D 5Es core rules in the PHB to suggest that the GM should automatically call for Insight rolls whenever an NPC is lying. Nor anything to suggest that players can ask for Insight rolls every time they suspect a lie is being told. Nor anything to suggest that NPCs automatically get Insight rolls to oppose any Deceptions the players fling at them.

And using Insight in that way breaks TWO of those inarguable core assumptions that you can only disagree with if you wish role-playing games weren’t role-playing games.

First, there’s the issue that player agency is sacrosanct. Neither the GM nor the dice can tell the players what their PCs must think, do, or believe outside the very narrow context of supernatural mind control. Second, there’s the issue that the game’s mechanics must facilitate players figuring things out for themselves or else they actually aren’t playing a game. They’re just picking up dice to see how a random story plays out.

If you look carefully at how the Bluff and Sense Motive skills are described in D&D 3E and PF and PF2, you’ll note that they either say outright or strongly imply that the outcome of a failed Sense Motive roll is that the subject BELIEVES the liar. And D&D 3E’s Bluff rules specifically note that a successful Bluff check vs. the target’s Sense Motive check actually changes the subject’s behavior. If you use those rules against a PC, you’re violating player agency. Because the dice are telling the players what their PCs must believe or how they must behave.

On the other hand, if a player rolls a successful Sense Motive check against a lying NPC – or PC – they are told in no uncertain terms that the liar is, in fact, lying. And depending on the specific system you’re using, the player may get some pretty heavy insights into what the liar’s true motives are. Now, that’s fair enough as game mechanics go, but it does reduce what could be a complex interaction down to a single die roll. And it leaves out any chance the players have to apply their own reasoning or problem-solving abilities to the situation. It’s essentially an “I Win” button.

If you use Insight the way Sense Motive used to work – or the way it still works in PF – you’re breaking the game in two vital ways. And you’re also breaking the rules. Stop it!

Meanwhile, what’s often overlooked is all the other things that Sense Motive used to do and that Insight could still do. Apart from setting the DC for a Bluff check, Sense Motive also used to let people feel out social interactions, get hunches, recognize when a creature is under the thrall of an outside agent or supernatural influence, and other crap like that. And it could be used – actively – as a way to feel out characters and learn more about them through extended interactions. And it seems like a lot of GMs have forgotten all those neat possibilities. And players don’t know about anything the GM doesn’t do at the table. They don’t read the rules.

Let me call your attention to the D&D 5E DMG. Specifically, there’s a two-page spread starting on DMG 244 about social interaction. First, note that it discusses using Insight actively to determine an NPC’s personality traits as part of an extended conversation. Second, the entire spread tells you to handle social actions pretty much the same way I did in my last f$&%ing article. And while it does take the pussy approach of not calling out certain things as wrong, it even makes specific mention of the balance between player skill and avatar strength.

Huh. Imagine that. I was f$&%ing right. Again. I bet a lot of you feel pretty stupid now, huh?

And speaking of the rules, let’s talk about passive scores. And passive actions. Because that’s going to be super important below.

Passive Scores: A Great Mechanic Dumb GMs Don’t Use

To use Insight properly, it’s important to recognize the difference between passive skill use and active skill use. But you can’t talk about passive skill use without also talking about what 5E calls passive skills. Because people assume they’re the same thing. They’re not. But if you actually READ the rules instead of SKIMMING them because you already know how to f$&%ing play D&D and you don’t need rules to tell you how, you’ll find out there’s a lot of overlap between the two ideas and the idea of passive skills in D&D 5E is actually really elegant if you use it right.

Now, I know some GMs have issues with passive checks as described on PHB 175. And I’m using the word ‘issues’ the same way a therapist might use it to describe a child that desperately needs to be institutionalized to the child’s overly sensitive and oblivious parents. Because, man oh man, do people have some f$&%ing stupid issues about passive scores.

Basically, D&D 5E includes this elegant mechanic that is most explicitly used for Perception but can be used for any skill. It’s a way of resolving something without a die roll. It used to be called Taking 10. You just assume that the player rolled a ten on the die, add their modifier, and use that to resolve an action. And there’s a couple of reasons to use it.

First, you can use it to determine the outcome of something that characters are doing passively and continuously. Which is where Passive Perception comes in. If you’re walking around with your eyes open and your ears hearing and your nose smelling, you’re perceiving the world around you. And so, there’s a chance that you’ll perceive even stuff that’s concealed or camouflaged or otherwise difficult to notice. Like the shifting shadow of a sneaking goblin, an air current in an otherwise still room that belies the presence of a secret door, or the slightly upraised floor tile that conceals a pressure plate. In those cases, you just compare each PC’s Passive Perception to the DC required to notice the thing to see who spots what. That way, you don’t have to ask your players to constantly roll Perception checks whenever they are conscious. And you don’t have to give away the fact that there’s something extraordinary hidden nearby – either something dangerous or something valuable – by asking for Perception checks only when there’s something to perceive.

That, by the way, is one of the rare instances of a metagame problem that actually IS a problem. No matter how mature the players, their knowledge that there might something in a scene that they failed to notice DOES change their behaviors. Even if the players don’t capitalize on the information. It changes the way they think.

Imagine the heroes enter a room and you describe it and, to this one clever player who has seen too many Indiana Jones movies, the room just screams “TRAP!” Absent any information beyond that hunch, the alert player would stop his fellows and voice his concerns. Then, the party could discuss the situation and respond accordingly. They could cautiously search for traps, for example. And when they find one, the alert player feels smart. Or they could dismiss the alert players’ concerns, barge forward, end up perforated by a barrage of spring-loaded spears, and then have to listen to the alert player say, “I told you.” Or they could discover there is no trap at all and then, later, when the alert player cries ‘trap’ again, they can dismiss him out of hand. And possibly end up splattered by the trap that really was there this time. That’s all good s$&%. You want that s$&% at your table. You want the players to think about the environment and make guesses and gather clues and refine their understanding of it. That’s how player skill works. And you want them to argue a little and sometimes blunder into traps. Because that s$&%’s just funny.

But if you start the scene off by asking the players to make a Perception roll – or even if you just roll some hidden dice behind the screen – the alert player with the hunch now has this weird bit of metainformation f$&%ing up their head. They might not voice their concerns because, well, it’d be cheating to even have a hunch after a failed Perception roll. And even if the alert player did speak up, the other players – or the GM – might accuse the alert player of metagaming. Of basing their fear of a potential trap on the fact that a die roll happened instead of based on real-world knowledge. You can’t unroll the die and you can’t pretend you don’t know a die was rolled.

Hence Passive Perception. And any passive check. There’s always situations where the game’s mechanics taint the players’ abilities to make decisions based on their understanding of the world. However they respond – and however hard they try to “do the right thing,” whatever the f$&% THAT means – it still changes the way they assess the situation.

And yet, some GMs resist Passive Perception. They say they want to be surprised by the outcome so dice have to be rolled. Or they say that their ability to design an adventure is tainted by their knowledge of the PCs’ scores so all they’re doing is deciding which PCs automatically succeed on what checks by setting Perception DCs. Or – and this one is f$%&ing baffling – or they claim that keeping track of passive scores is too much bookkeeping. I mean, holy f$&%, if THAT’S too much bookkeeping, how do they keep track of an entire combat?!

The objections are stupid. Passive checks are too damned valuable a mechanic and have too much of a positive impact on the game to take those crap objections seriously. Do you disagree? Do you think you have an actual, valid reason for ignoring the passive score mechanic? Great. No one cares. Don’t comment.

In addition to using passive scores to resolve actions when die rolls might taint the role-playing – the in-game decision-making – passive scores also let you distinguish between passive skill use and active skill use. Passive skill use happens when people’s abilities, training, and senses work automatically. When there’s no action to declare. Like when someone who’s been trained in herbalism sees a rare and valuable night-blooming death lily and instantly recognizes it as such. Or when someone enters a room and sees the shadow of a skulking goblin or notices a slightly upraised floor-tile. Active skill use involves actually interacting with the world in some way. Searching for traps and secret doors involves up-close-and-personal interaction. Getting on hands and knees and peering at things from this angle and that, gentle poking and prodding things, feeling around behind or under things, and so on. Diagnosing an illness involves an active examination of a patient. Looking in orifices, listening to lungs and hearts, feeling for a fever, touching sites of inflammation to see how they discolor, sniffing at wounds. And finding out information about rare plants that you don’t know off the top of your head involves doing research.

While D&D 5E doesn’t discuss the difference between active and passive skill use, it does seem like the designers meant to. Maybe if they’d had more time or a better editor, they would have. Notice that, except for recalling lore about specific topics, most of the examples given for using different skills involve some kind of interaction with the world. In the Insight description, the text mentions “searching out lies,” not “noticing lies” or “resisting lies.” And notice that the DMG allows for using Insight to determine personality traits as part of an extended conversation, not as some sort of passive awareness.

Using Insight properly requires acknowledging the difference between passive and active skill use and it requires you to just f$&%ing accept that passive checks are part of the game. And for good f$&%ing reasons.

Giving Up the Goods On the First Date

Let’s look at the problem with NPCs using social skills against the PCs again. The non-problem. Because it’s NOT a problem that you CAN’T use social skills to determine how PCs think or act or what they believe. Only the player can decide what their PC thinks and believes and how they choose to act. But what about when an NPC tries to trick the PCs? NPCs can lie. They can bluff. They can con. And, if you can’t ignore avatar strength, you have to give the PCs a chance to resist that s$&% using their mental capabilities and skill training, right? It’s a paradox, isn’t it?

Well, it’s only a paradox because most GMs just give the players too much f$&%ing information!

Let’s say the players walk into a room. There’s a secret door hidden in the right-hand wall. If you’re running the game correctly, you – the GM – compare each PCs’ Passive Perception score to the DC required to notice the secret door. And then, if a PC passes muster, you tell them… what? Well, most GMs tell them they see a f$&%ing secret door in the wall. I mean, they might say, “a current of fresh air alerts you to the hidden seam of a secret door hidden by the masonry in the right-hand wall.” But that’s fair enough, right? The GM is the players’ eyes, ears, and brain. They’re supposed to tell them everything they see, hear, and know about the world.

But is that REALLY what you’re doing? Because what the character saw – sensed really – was an air current wafting from the right. Sure, you can assume the character would look over, deduce that the air current must be coming from a secret door, and then spot by torchlight the invisible seam of a door in a masonry wall that’s literally constructed to be impossible to see. You’re kind of going a few steps beyond the character’s perception, there. And unfortunately, those few steps are the steps where the players’ brains are supposed to kick in so they can figure s$&% out and feel good about solving something.

The characters don’t see traps and secret doors. They see odd shapes or tiles that don’t fit right or strange gouges scratched on the floor or slightly upraised tiles. Or they notice strange air currents or odd smells. And then the players should think about what all that s$&% might mean and make a guess. Or investigate further. By, you know, actively searching. Poking. Prodding. Knocking. Whatever.

I’ve always said that GMs should be clear and unambiguous when they describe s$&%, but I’ve never said GMs shouldn’t be stingy. Be clear and concise, but also be miserly. Give the smallest information possible. Make the players work for the answers. Draw them into the scene and let them decide what they think is going on and how to use their characters’ skills to confirm it. Or to deal with it.

And that works well for Insight, believe it or not. Which you’d understand if you were a trained lie detector like I am.

I Am Not Technically a Trained Lie Detector

I am not actually a trained lie detector. But I did take an online training course designed by the foremost expert on human deception. See, in the early- to mid-2000s, there was this psychologist and anthropologist named Paul Ekman who was suddenly getting a lot of recognition for the revolutionary work he’d done involving human emotions, body language, and deception. And I got a little obsessed with him. Because his work was fascinating.

I found out about him because of a TV show. And that led me to his book. And that led me to his website and his training materials. And that led me to get a little obsessed with the topic.

Anyway, let me try to summarize the revolutionary things he published that earned him numerous awards and citations and got him recognized by the APA as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. And let me try to do it without gushing.

Ekman went to New Guinea and lived with a pre-industrial tribe of indigenous peoples who’d had no contact with anyone else ever. Actually, he studied several different such groups around the world. And what he found was that, wherever you go, regardless of cultural contact, humans experience the same basic core emotions and they express those emotions with the same scientifically measurable facial expressions. He also invented a method for encoding facial expressions. Basically, there’s seven basic emotions hardwired into every human brain – anger, contempt, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness, and surprise – and the facial expressions and body language that match up with each of those emotions are the same across all humans. It isn’t cultural, it’s biological.

There are more emotions beyond those CORE emotions – and research since then has revealed there are more CORE emotions – but this is just a quick summary so cut me some slack.

What he further found was that, because feelings are faster than thoughts, people leak the body language for different emotions before they even think about what they’re doing. The difference is measured in fractions of a second and so he calls those tiny emotional tells micro-expressions. When you perceive something that triggers an emotional response, you usually can’t stop your body from showing that emotion for a fraction of a second before you act or speak consciously. And human beings are so finely tuned to spot emotions in others that most humans have some natural ability to pick up on those micro-expressions even if they don’t consciously register it. And that ability can be practiced and improved.

Ekman made a big name for himself developing tests and training programs for intelligence and law-enforcement agents around the world so they could learn to spot and interpret micro-expressions. And that helps investigators notice when the things people are SAYING don’t match up with what they’re FEELING. Like, say, when a suspect insists he didn’t assault a dude and he’s totally over the fact that the dude slept with his wife when the suspect’s face is leaking anger expressions all over the place.

Ekman’s work is fascinating. You can check out his website, or you can read his book, Telling Lies. Or, you can watch the Fox psychological police procedural, Lie to Me, that ran for three seasons from 2009 to 2011 in which Tim Roth basically played Paul Schmekman. It was pretty good. Both as a procedural mystery show and as a character drama. Ekman consulted on it and gave it his blessing since it was basically about a fictional version of himself as a crime-solving super-detective. And Ekman’s done a lot of media consulting. He was the scientific advisor on Pixar’s Inside Out and even created a companion guide to the film to help parents talk to their children about emotions.

The point of all this fanboying over a psychologist who discovered that New Guinean tribesmen make the same anger face that I do is to point out that reading facial expressions and body cue isn’t really about spotting lies. They’re about spotting emotional states that don’t synch up with the words people are saying. They tell us something doesn’t line up. They don’t tell us what doesn’t line up, though. That’s the part we have to deduce. With our brains.

Hell, polygraphs and stress analyzers don’t spot lies either. They spot general signs of stress. The polygraph reader has to actually deduce what those stress signs mean. And there is a reason that courts of law in the US don’t recognize polygraphs as decisive evidence and why most police departments don’t use polygraphs to determine guilt. Rather, they use them because suspects think they work and then make stupid confessions out of fear. The history of lie detection is a really fascinating subject. Did you the whacko psychologist who believed in bondage-as-couples-therapy and invented Wonder Woman also invented the polygraph? And that he later denounced its use by law enforcement agencies?

Sorry. As I said, I went through a really weird obsession with this topic a decade ago. Getting back to Insight. And reading emotions.

Let’s say you’re interrogating someone who’s accused of murder. And they have no alibi. They say they were at home, in bed, alone. You can see that they’re feeling some deep guilt, but that doesn’t tell you they committed the crime. What if the guilt is coming from the fact that their real alibi – which they’re trying not to admit – is that they were in bed with the victim’s wife at the time of the murder.

I normally don’t advocate for letting reality design games. In general, realism is a crappy goal and reality designs crappy games. But in this case, reality makes for better gameplay than the fictional idea that Insight is a magical mind-reading superpower. It allows the GM to use Insight to deliver strong clues that don’t give away the whole story. Clues that drive MORE investigation instead of stopping the investigation cold.

How to Use Insight Right

Now, let me tell you how I use Insight and Sense Motive without breaking any of the game’s core assumptions that’s also totally in keeping with the spirit of the D&D 5E rules and that drives more player interaction with the world, not less.

First, whenever an NPC speaks or acts in a way that doesn’t align with what they’re feeling – whether they are actively trying to deceive someone or not – I compare each PC’s Passive Insight score to the DC required to detect the incongruity. I do that automatically. The players never have to ask me for an Insight check. Whenever an NPC is trying to lie or pull a con or acting under false pretenses or has an ulterior motive or is trying to hide their true feelings or is trying to pass on or conceal a hidden message or is in the thrall of a vampire lord, I check the PCs Passive Insight scores against the DC required to detect that s$&%.

And yes, I do keep a list of the players’ Passive Insight scores. I know that that might seem daunting to some of you newer GMs, but years of practice have honed my skills to the point where I can keep a list of FIVE, TWO-DIGIT numbers nearby and glance at it when I have to.

When a PC detects something is off, I tell them what they perceive, but not why. I tell them, for example, that the NPC seems surprised to see the PCs, but he’s trying to hide it. Or that the NPC is trying to conceal their anger about something. Or that the NPC seems really nervous about such a routine business exchange. Whatever.

If a player wants to probe an NPC – to learn more about their personality, motives, emotions, or whatever – they can actively converse with the person to draw out more information. And they can make an Insight check at the end of the conversation so I can figure out what they learn. And just like any other social action, the player doesn’t have to play out every last moment of the conversation. They just have to tell me what they want to accomplish and how. I pretty much follow the DMG here, allowing players to tease out emotions or even non-secret motives or personality traits. Stuff a person could learn from attentively interacting with someone and purposely trying to learn what makes them tick.

You might notice that this all looks a lot like how I handle traps and secret doors and anything else involving Perception. And you’re right. It does because it is. Social actions aren’t any different from any other action. And when a player wants to ‘search’ a social situation using Insight, they have to interact with the situation and they have to tell me what they’re looking for. Or at least they have to tell me where they’re looking. They can’t just generally, you know, search. They have to search a specific section of wall or a specific piece of furniture. The more precise they are, the better.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t give the players other information that’s near the information they’re looking for. Or at least that’s in the same place. When a PC searches a chest for traps and rolls well, I’ll tell the player specifically that they found no signs of a trap, but I’ll also mention the set of initials burned into the wood in the lower back corner of the chest.

So, when a PC thinks the suspect is lying about their alibi – either because of a passive Insight clue or because the player deduced it from other information in the adventure or because the player just has a hunch – they can probe the suspect about the alibi without just outright accusing the NPC of lying. They can say, “I think he’s lying about his alibi; can I see if I can catch him in the lie?” Then I say, “okay. Is there anything specific you’d like to bring up or do you just want to poke around.” Then they can say, “well, you said it seemed like he was feeling guilty about something; can I lean on his guilt?” And then we’ll roll some dice and then I’ll describe the long, probing conversation they have that ultimately suggests that the guy’s guilt doesn’t seem connected to the crime. It seems connected to his alibi. And he’s most definitely lying about his alibi. He can’t keep his story straight.

At that point, if the PC wants to see if they can get the suspect to admit they’re lying, they’ll have to use some other social skill to do it. Because Insight only reveals information, it doesn’t change behavior.

Finally, I do occasionally ask players to make Insight checks as a sort of ‘save vs. faux pas.’ That is, if a player declares an action that involves saying something that might have unintended and disastrous consequences, I’ll ask them to roll an Insight check and, if they succeed, I’ll warn them and give the PC a chance to catch himself midsentence and say something else instead. Note that this isn’t the same as warning players about actions that any reasonable character in the world would recognize as stupid or suicidal or disastrous. I don’t hide those warnings behind checks and die rolls. I tell players flat out that threatening to punch the king in front of his entire retinue and his honor guard is suicidally stupid. These rolls are reserved for situations where a particularly insightful character might notice a clue that others would miss. Like, when say, pointing out the Packer’s jersey the NPC is wearing and suggesting they might not want to praise the Chicago Bears in his presence.

And that’s it. That’s how I use Insight. That’s the correct way to use it. Because, as I noted in the previous article, I’m right, you’re wrong, shut up. And that’s probably the single best piece of advice you can take from all of this. I’m right. You’re wrong.

Shut up.