Serious Skills: Insight

The Rules Compendium has a fairly lengthy discussion of the Insight skill, abbreviated below:

The Insight skill is used to decipher body language and sense a character’s emotional status. Moods, motives and malicious intent are the primary purview of the Insight skill. (Alliteration is not). Insight usually opposes a Bluff check, but can also be utilized on its own to ascertain the success of a social situation or determine if someone is under the influence of external forces. For interpersonal encounters, Insight is the analogue of Perception.

Make an Insight check as a minor action. If opposing Bluff, the DC is equal to the triggering Bluff check. If not opposing Bluff, beating a level-appropriate Moderate DC gives clues to a character’s attitudes or motives where a Hard DC can tell whether a character is acting under the influence of an external stimulus.

Throughout the course of this series, it may have felt like I’ve been nickel-and-diming away at the Insight skill, making it seem less and less important.  Doesn’t it make sense, though that a master of Bluff would know if he’s being lied to? Have you ever tried to push the hard sell on a salesman (Diplomacy)? Who will Intimidate the Intimidator? As Brodie Bruce once said it so eloquently – “we smell our own.” What then is the use of Insight?

Read the description again carefully. Insight is not about the ‘what’, but the ‘why.’ While Insight can also tell you what social tactics your adversary is trying to use, the real power is in the motive for that action. That is to say that you could use a Bluff check to determine if someone is trying to Bluff you, but an Insight check will tell you that the character is Bluffing and it’s because they’re testing your resolve. A Diplomacy check could detect that this new friend of yours is being overly flattering, but Insight will discover that you’re dealing with flattery with intent to curry favor. The same holds true for Intimidate or any other skill used in a social setting. The information Insight gives you is always a step removed from simple actions.  It will not, however, tell you to what extent the character is willing to go to meet those ends.

Furthermore, remember that Insight is not a supernatural skill.. usually. It is the knowledge of behavior and psychology, not an extraordinary ability. The information gained – like Dungeoneering – is mostly feelings and hunches. Now that being said, Diplomacy and Insight are the only two skills in which all Psionic characters can train. Thus if you wanted a separate skill to manipulate psionic energy much like Arcana manipulates magical energy, Insight seems to be the best choice. Some DMs might be willing to let psionic characters use Insight to actually read a character’s mind, but such an ability should be used sparingly and would probably best be modeled with a full skill challenge rather than a simple skill check.

Who are the folks trained in Insight and why?

While I normally use this space to discuss character platforms, I want to take a moment and address DMs about player platforms for a moment.

DMs: A character’s skill list is his (or her) wishlist for the game. If a player chooses to train in Acrobatics, he expects to perform stunts of daring-do. If Diplomacy, she expects to need to talk to NPCs. This doesn’t hold true very well (at least in my experience) with Insight. Inisght is the only primarily social skill NOT based on Charisma. Furthermore, there are only 6 classes out of the total 25 (Rogue, Warlock, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Assassin, and Swordmage) who do NOT use Wisdom as either a primary or kicker stat in at least one build. Charisma, on the other hand, is much more rare – only 12 classes use it. This means that you’re going to see a lot of characters who have bought into Insight for something to do in a social situation without really caring all that much about it. Thus when you write social encounters, make sure you use Insight in at least a couple different ways so that these players can latch on to something and feel their skill slot was well spent. I’ll come back to this when we do the series on Social Conflict mechanics, but that’s a different article for a different time…

Now onto characters. A character trained in Insight is inherently somewhat out of genre for D&D. Just run with me on this for a minute. The archetypal ‘adventure’ setup is ‘get quest from good guy, beat up bad guys, bring back Maguffin.’ It does not assume the sort of character and narrative depth or complexity suggested by the Insight skill. The game strongly mechanically supports combat and gear, not so much story or roleplay. What? Don’t look at me like that – it’s true. There are games about telling stories (Fiasco, Do, Blazing Rose, Hell 4 Leather, Kagematsu, etc) and there are games about simulating a world, whether that world matches ours or not. D&D is cleanly in that second category – but it’s a feature not a bug. That is to say that roleplaying is a deliberately sacred ‘gap’ that the designers don’t touch. You can run D&D as a spy story, classical fantasy, 4-color superheroes, a Western, zany (or serious!) post-apocalyptic survival, or whatever the heck else you want around the combat and skill challenge systems. No one is going to dictate to you the kind of stories you have to tell with the D&D toolkit….

…except your characters, and that’s where Insight comes back in. Whether the player intended it or not (see above), a character trained in Insight says something about that ‘gap’. It says that the world isn’t as straightforward as it seems. The good guys don’t all wear white hats and the bad guys all wear black hats. You might need to have Been Around The Block a couple times to figure out exactly what’s going on. There could be one or more Looks Nice, Plays Dirty factions – churches, governments, professional organizations to name a few – with which your character has had some less than pleasant experiences. Heck if several PCs are trained in Insight, it may behoove you to play in an Evil Is The Norm world or at least Chaos Is The Norm so that there’s plenty of twists, turns and misdirections for those Insight-trained PCs to figure out and thus buy more into the story, particularly if the player chose Insight for ‘something to do.’  Insight is one of those rare skills that really defines a setting, not just a character.

We can still talk about characters that would be ‘naturally’ trained in Insight, though. Without any formal training, your character could be Precocious or Genre-Savvy. Deadpool, I’m looking at you. Characters or setting with high psionics might be Telepathic or at a minimum Empathic. Sensitive is another mundane option, but it would be a challenge to play a very sensitive character going around slaying monsters, or worse other people! If your feel your character should have Insight directly from his or her profession, consider the Clergy, Forensics/Investigations or some kind of Proto-Sociologist. You may also have picked it up indirectly from Competitive Hierarchies or Business/Merchantry. The adventurer who just needs to know which door to kick down and how big a sword to stab in the next enemy’s face has no need of Insight. A character who believes that a sharp word is just a dangerous as a sharp spear, however, will be Insightful.

How can Insight be used as a sense, to gain and process information in a social setting?

This article is already running long so I’m going to put these two together for the sake of time and space.

Insight is already a delineated social sense, making this a pretty easy call.  The interesting bits here are in the processing of information, not simply the gaining.  While discussing the History skill, I mentioned that dedicated students of History are likely to not be in the moment very often.  Examining the large patterns of the past to predict the large patterns of the future tends to leave one with not much time to see what’s going on right now.  The same can hold true for Insight on a smaller scale.  For a character trained in Insight, people can all tend to blur together.  ”That shop owner keeps scratching the back of his neck the way my dad did when he lied to Mom about where he was last night.  I bet he’s hiding something.”  ”Why does the chancellor keep looking up at that window while we talk?  Is someone going to break through it and attack us?”  ”You know, Raine down the street used to look at Ward that way.  She’s completely into you.”  Heavily Insight-dependent characters can easily see new acquaintances  as variations on people already met or on simple archetypal themes.  In fact, despite having such a keen interest in people, the Insight master runs the risk of becoming an anti-social observer instead of an active participant.  One can only study for so long before you have to go out into the field, as it were…

..which leads us to the second important sensory aspect of Insight – seeing what isn’t there.  While all skills knowledge or sensory skills run the risk of obtaining false information, Insight is unique in that verification of information gleaned is never a neutral proposition.  If a character fails an Arcana check and comes up with some half-baked theory that doesn’t work, there’s probably a book somewhere that will tell you the right way to do it.  With Insight, however, you have to go poke the bear to find out whether it’s actually a bear or not.  There are no permanent, neutral sources of information involved.  The act of following up on the hunch usually means someone finds out you’re thinking it.  Insight is an incredibly useful hook by which to get your PCs into trouble and thus, like History, every Insight check should ideally yield some kind of answer.  A wasted Insight check is a wasted opportunity for plot advancement.  Insight sees beyond the obvious to the next layer down, if there is one.  If there’s no deeper meaning, it’s not uncommon for the character to ‘find’ something there anyway. Insight might be the way to see through illusions, but beware not to fall victim to the ones you create inside your own mind.

I probably should have detailed this in the History writeup, but better late than never, I suppose.  In 4th edition  D&D, we generally don’t use hidden rolls.  That is, the DM doesn’t usually roll behind a screen or away from the table on behalf of a character as was common in earlier editions.  This leads to some problems with subtle skills like History, Stealth and Insight where a character may not be able to objectively assess his performance, but the player can read the die roll just fine – and it’s a 2.   If you are not fortunate or blessed to have players who can separate player knowledge from character knowledge (or if you just like to mess with them), how do you go about keeping the mystery in the result?  There are at least three major modes of accomplishing this feat and I’ll just briefly run through them here:

1) Pre-rolls – when the PCs get into a situation where they are going to use a skill or skills that should not obviously be failures or successes immediately, have everyone roll a d20.   No skill mods, just roll.  Then, when its time to make a check, they roll the die but don’t know which number you’re going to use.  You may get cries of ‘foul!’ from your players if you do this often, but from time to time a random ‘wait, why did we roll that’ check can put sufficient concern and confusion in the heads of metagaming players.

2) Partial Failure – this one is my favorite.  In essence, the d20 roll is not so much a measure of actual success but of confidence.  The closer the roll is to the required DC, the more flat-out incorrect the feedback is because in the player’s mind, they’re right on the edge of failure or success.  This aligns the player’s mental status with the character’s in state of “I’m pretty sure I’m right about this, but if not I could be making a huge mistake.”  When the roll comes up low, the character knows he’s missing something but can’t detail what exactly.  In this case, most of the feedback should actually be correct save for one or two minor but important details.  The result makes sense in context, but the roll came up poor which will once again create that nagging doubt in the player’s mind.  If she rolls high, though, let her know she’s right.  Sometimes, you’re just on and you know it.  Nothing wrong with that.

3) Information deluge – if you have the time to spare, this tactic can be fun as well.  Before a roll is made, present the player with three (maybe four) possible results.   The roll is then made to determine which result is correct.  If the roll is sufficiently high, the character can be certain of her accuracy and that’s fine.  If the roll is low, he can only deduce that the result you point out is wrong, but not what the actual result is.   Information is still gained, just not necessarily useful information.

Would I recommend flummoxing players like this all the time?  Of course not.  You want to mix up the metagame a little bit.  Keep them guessing.  The point is to create doubt at crucial moments, not withhold information.  Failing to get information is boring and slows down the game.  Having tension about the information-gathering process pulls players into the game and creates emergent story that the group will recount for a long time to come.

Hope you enjoyed that breakdown of Insight! Next week: Nature.