Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

This is one of those ideas that if implemented would be a really nice addition, but would also add a degree of complexity that could be considered excessive.

Both suggestions come together because one without the order would not make sense.

When a player deliberately says a lie to another player he types lie and what he wants to say.

Detect lie is a buff that for some time produces an echo to the player when another character lies.

For example: Bob the Cyrist meets Paul the Tyran and he types;
lie paul I'm an ilmaterite who has come to heal the sick.

The echo would be the same than if he had typed say;
Bob says "I'm an ilmaterite who has come to heal the sick."
but Paul who is affected by detect lies would get an echo like:
Something of what has said $lier is a lie.

Lie could also make someone's alignment slip in some directions according to the visible alignment of the character.

I really like this idea..

The problem is I don't believe most people would expend the effort to use it. It would also take a very strong faith in players with the spell/spell-like ability to be honest when they lie. (LOL, that sounds humorous! Be honest about lying!)

Most worthwhile deceptions carry on for rather some time, and involve some admixture of truth and deception; so while it'd be great to have a spell-like ability to detect lies, I'm not sure this would really work. Hence, a counter-proposal, though it involves a little meta-DM-ing:

When you say something in the presence of someone who has cast detect lie, the game asks you, OOC, "There is a force at work detecting the truth of what you say. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being a complete untruth and 10 a completely honest representation of the whole truth, please rate what you just said."

I don't know if that would work any better, it's another idea.

Personally, I prefer figuring out if someone is lying from the dialog, but that offers no magical option for enhancing one's ability to discern truth from fiction, which ostensibly exists in D&D.

While I love the idea, I don't see it being practical or worth the effort. One of the glaringly obvious problems with this is it's potential for abuse. Granted, it doesn't really get the character any coded benefit, but as far as RPing goes, that could be abused to no end, especially considering how easy it would be to explain it away. Again, I would love to have something like this, but I just don't see how it can be implemented with any measure of confidence that it will work.

On a side note, I've seen a couple players dropping hints that they were lying. Also seen some others that didn't drop the hints, but you could tell they were lying if you were paying close enough attention.