Five Ways To Lie Through Your Teeth And Get Away With It In D&D
The adventurer’s life often means massaging the facts to make sure they fit your purpose. Here’s how to lie in D&D and get away with it.
Lying is an integral part of Dungeons & Dragons. Whether it’s convincing the duke whose manor you’ve just been caught looting that you’re actually there for candelabra maintenance, or that angry dragon that you don’t, in fact, taste very good, lying can be extremely handy in a game like Dungeons & Dragons.
But what do you do when you get caught red-handed? How do you convince everyone that you’re as innocent as you say you are? Well in D&D, you have a number of tricks ready to be put up one’s sleeve.
Glibness
Glibness is one of those much maligned spells in 5th Edition that doesn’t do what you want it to do. Especially since it’s an 8th level spell and you’d hope that it would have more powerful effects.
However, all it does is make sure that, for the next hour whenever you would make a Charisma check, you replace the number you roll with a 15 (you can of course use a higher number if you roll one). Usually this doesn’t matter. But the other big thing it does is let you fool a magic spell designed to magically discern lies.
Just make sure that your Charisma check score isn’t suffering from any outside penalties, like, not addressing your target’s bond, flaw, or ideal properly. Otherwise they might take the opposite reaction when you tell them that “actually everyone won.”
Modify Memory
This spell lets you alter the fabric of time. Sort of. You can, if you successfully cast the spell, rewrite a subject’s memories of one event that they experienced within the last 24 hours. For the purposes of a spell, the event can last no more than 10 minutes.
Which means you can’t get away with everything. But within those restrictions you can do many things, including erasing all memory of the event, changing a memory of the details of an event, or fabricate a new event entirely.
Be Especially Good Friends Beforehand
One of the best ways to convince someone that what you’re saying is the gospel truth is by buttering them up beforehand. In D&D, this means improving someone’s mood.
There are five levels of reactions that a potential character can have when the character makes a response:
- Oppose them (possibly taking risks)
- Neither harm nor help
- Accept their request as long as it’s risk-free (or cost-free).
- Accept a small amount of risk.
- Accept a significant amount of risk.
A DC 10 persuasion check can improve someone’s response by 1 step. A 20 or more improves the response by 2 steps.
So all you have to do is get someone to the point that they’re willing to help you (by believing your obvious lie) for the amount of personal risk that it entails for them, and you can get away with the boldest of fish stories.
Mind Control
This one is much sketchier. But it’s the sort of brute force way of making someone believe you. At least for a little while. And it all depends on your DM’s ability to put up with utter BS.
But the Dominate Person spell lets you telepathically take control of a person. Not only do you charm them, but you can use your telepathic link to issue commands to the creature while you are conscious.
By the wording of the spell, you can use your action to take total and precise control of the target, which means that it can only take the actions you choose. Now, if your DM will let you cause a creature to voluntarily fail an opposing Insight check, that’s certainly one way to force a foe to believe you.
Try Command
When all else fails, try Command. It’s the text adventure spell hidden in 5E. You’re limited to one word, so you can’t go for things like “throw baby” but you could conceivably try and Command someone to “believe.”
Of course, it’s up to the DM how they interpret that. But when you’re desperate and all you have is a 1st level spell slot, you’ve probably got worse things to worry about.
Happy Adventuring
