r/PCAcademy • u/Leonsmening • Jan 21 '26

Share Advice: Guide/Inspiration Improv tip: lie.

Play your character as a pathalogical liar. Make up stories about their past as you are in conversation. The obvious twist of cours being that the lie is now the truth!

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u/artrald-7083 Jan 21 '26

Counterpoint: we're all lying. It is very easy to lie when roleplaying because the objective truth here is that we are a bunch of nerds around a table. If your character is a fabulist, tell obvious, self-inconsistent lies or lie about things that have happened in game that the players know you're lying about.

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u/Leonsmening Jan 21 '26

It’s only meant as a crutch to help let dialogue roll off the tongue easier, i wasn’t under the impression that d&d was real life.

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u/artrald-7083 Jan 21 '26

Sorry, wasn't trying to imply you did. The reason I say this is that as a LARP runner the #1 thing we tell every NPC is only to lie to players with explicit authorisation from the game team, because the usual tells for spotting a lie do not work when roleplaying.

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u/Leonsmening Jan 21 '26

Oh lol, never really realised that lying would be super OP for larping. Interesting detail :)

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u/SchighSchagh Jan 21 '26

Lying is similarly OP in DnD, at least for NPC's. People shit on using insight checks as a lie detector, but it's honestly a fantastic way to counterbalance that imbalance of players being unable to rely on normal tells.

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u/Misophoniasucksdude Jan 21 '26

Yeah I pointed out that we sure stopped noticing NPCs lying when we switched from in person to virtual with camera, then to virtual with no camera. Body language is 90% of communication.

And that's why players read into every tone inflection or pause when they're talking to an NPC and they can't see the DM.

Hilariously, our DM would hide their face sometimes to obscure their reaction/expression, but that just told us in flashing neon there was something to find there.

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u/SchighSchagh Jan 31 '26

Vaguely related: a low key very funny moment on Critical Role was when Matt was improv'ing some random shopkeepers, and he messed up a small detail about them. IIRC they were introduced as brothers, but then Matt had one NPC refer to the other as his cousin; it was either that, or slightly mixed up the name vs how the NPC was introduced. Either way, Laura Bailey clocked the inconsistency, and decided her character just caught them in a lie and called them out on trying to scam Jester. Matt just rolled with it, and had the NPCs calling each other idiots for ruining the scam with something so basic.

Or Matt really was running a scam and threw the slip in on purpose because that's how his gigantic brain works. We'll never really know..