I'm a rather new DM and the story i'm looking to do starts off on the surface as your generic "come to town, find out about goblins, go kill the goblins".  But i'm looking to put in a bunch of sub text, that the goblins are actually harmless (more or less) and it's actually the villagers who are evil.  Problem is, i'm not 100% on how much i need to hand hold my players (straight up telling them "This character is lying to your face and is clearly evil") VS. having them try and make the connections them selves (backwater general store NPC "can't remember" where or when he got that silver inlayed leather chair made from a Young Red Dragon..... oddly enough a former adventurer who lived in town just died.... and his house burned down..... but no one is 100% on what did or did not get lost in the fire..... but for such a rich person the ruins of their house sure seem empty...).

So i guess my question is, when dealing with new players, do you risk them missing plot points because they took all your NPC's at face value?  Is it OK to have your players miss plot hooks?  Should missed plot hooks still have in game effects, IE you could have stopped the BBEG from becoming the BBEG at level 3 but you missed the plot hook, so now you won't run into him again till level 10 and he will be much more powerful/ready for you.

Normally I'd say it's okay to miss stuff, but "haha you've been murdering the good guys all along" is a twist that will ruin the game for many players, even if they really should have figured it out. In that situation, I'd play the villager as an absolute mustache-twirling, constantly chuckling, obvious villain. (Note players tend to be especially suspicious of NPCs who are aloof or rude to them, so that helps too.) That way, the players can't miss it, but still get the fun of figuring it out.

Remember, players have a lot to keep track of. Between roleplaying their character, tracking their stats, and planning through the adventure, it gets very hard to read subtext, and stuff that would be simple in a puzzle book or mystery novel becomes far more complicated. So if you think something is too easy or too obvious, in the context of the game, it's probably just about right.

If they were experienced players I'd say leave them to it, however for beginners I'd be more lenient. Perhaps on the way to the village they run into a merchant who is just the less trustworthy individual, nervously glancing about, fidgeting, and stammering his words. When someone says they don't trust him you can say "would you like to roll an insight?" and find out he'd robbed someone and was selling their stuff. Once you've had an example then hours later when the chance comes up again it is up to them to use that or not. One practice when it doesn't matter then they are on their own. 

my current hooks into are:

A) A small child who is actually friends with the goblins.  This child is the daughter of the general store merchant and knows full well that "daddy and most of the village, looted old Mr. (name)'s house.

B) a farm hand of the guy who died, turns out he was selling the goblins some of the guys cattle for some money under the table.  Farmer wasn't suppose to be there the night he died, he wasn't suppose to SEE the goblins and attack them.... he's REAL desperate to make sure he doesn't get caught and is looking for a way out of town (he'll help you either finger the towns folk or find and dispose of the goblins.... GOD he is terrified someone with some real legal power will find out about this soon...

C) The party keeps noticing (assuming they can pass DC 12 checks) that these back water villagers, who have survived on a couple gold (tops) a year, seem to have a lot of "heirlooms" that look pretty freaking expensive.  OR maybe other forms of wealth that are hard to justify given how they live.

D) The goblins themselves.

With a new DM and new players, my answer is no, you don't risk them missing plot hooks.  One of them will have a passive insight of better than 10.  That one, their spidey-sense starts tingling.  Maybe one of them with an above average passive perception can actually still see the furrows made in the dirt path by whoever dragged the adventurer's escritoire back to their house.  Investigation to put together a timetable showing that the night of the new moon, the goblins were frolicking in the woods and couldn't have committed the crime.  Give them enough chances that they're still the ones pursuing the information, but it doesn't need to be Agatha Christie here, the peasants revolted and sacked the manor house.  

So to answer the question in the header - it's always better as DM to withhold info than to lie, but those aren't your only two options!  You can handhold in ways that respect your players' agency.  And remember that new players sometimes don't think of the "I observe my environment" skills.  

Yeah.  I'm going for less "haha i fooled you, you've been killing the good guys all along" and more "yeah, turns out sometimes the world isn't black and white... Sometimes "the good guys" are anything but.... or even more fun, they honestly believe they are doing the right thing (just like "the bad guys" think they are doing the right thing)

A lot of the stories are kind of playing on / against tropes.  One issue i have with my grand plan, is that it does have kind of a "surprise MF'ers you were actually the bad guys" (assuming they follow the traditional tropes).  But it requires a lot of in game time before that becomes clear.  Like you help a merchant group secure their trade routes from minotaurs,  years later it comes to light that the merchant group now has a strangle hold on those routes.  With no competitors to keep prices at reasonable rates, they are bleeding many of the smaller towns dry.  Maybe that Lord who sent you to clear out a large bandit encampment, actually had you purge a town (which happens to sit on a newly discovered, VERY lucrative mining vein) who had grown tired of their taxes.

Quote from Zhule >>

Yeah.  I'm going for less "haha i fooled you, you've been killing the good guys all along" and more "yeah, turns out sometimes the world isn't black and white... Sometimes "the good guys" are anything but.... or even more fun, they honestly believe they are doing the right thing (just like "the bad guys" think they are doing the right thing)

A lot of the stories are kind of playing on / against tropes.  One issue i have with my grand plan, is that it does have kind of a "surprise MF'ers you were actually the bad guys" (assuming they follow the traditional tropes).  But it requires a lot of in game time before that becomes clear.  Like you help a merchant group secure their trade routes from minotaurs,  years later it comes to light that the merchant group now has a strangle hold on those routes.  With no competitors to keep prices at reasonable rates, they are bleeding many of the smaller towns dry.  Maybe that Lord who sent you to clear out a large bandit encampment, actually had you purge a town (which happens to sit on a newly discovered, VERY lucrative mining vein) who had grown tired of their taxes.

That sounds really awesome under the right circumstances, but make sure your players are on board. Unless I knew in advance that this was a "dark and gritty" or "Game of Thrones tone" campaign, I would probably just assume I was here for a lighthearted or classic-heroic adventure. And if that's what I expected, a "you're the bad guys" moment would make me very, very upset. If I'm playing a happy halfling hero, it's just torn apart everything I wanted him to be, and unless I signed on for that experience (which I totally would), I'm really not gonna want to roleplay through that. If I weren't playing with friends, I'd be tempted to quit the game.

very valid point. My biggest issue, is that a lot of the possible grim dark stuff, wouldn't really come to light till WAY WAY later.  You don't topple an evil king and expect his country to be singing your praises the next night.

I do deeply hope i get to play the last story in the arc: 

Party against a lich who plans to kill one of the gods and absorb their power.

Party finds out that... honestly the lich has some decent reasons for their actions.  Like it kind of looks like the lich cares more about the world then the gods.

Party is forced to decide between helping the lich gain godhood (and the risks that come along with having a literal god physically exist on the plane) or trying to stop the lich and fighting a demi god who is "quickly" gaining full-on godhood

I agree with Naivara. Without giving away the plot, you should make sure your players are on board for a shades-of-grey game instead of a good-vs-evil game.

Also, you definitely need to give them a chance to figure out the goblins are not the bad guys, BEFORE they start slaughtering goblins. Most players will assume goblins == evil, and just go to it, unless you give them good, very clear, reasons to doubt. You have outlined some, but again, make sure they find this out first. Finding out after the fact that you killed a bunch of innocent creatures is not going to be fun no matter how much shade of grey gameplay they agreed to at the start.

First knee jerk reaction - the DM should never lie to players. NPCs should absolutely lie to players. With newer players, this should be more obvious - dishonest NPCs should sort of telegraph their unreliability, or the world should very clearly not match what they've said. Similarly, withholding information from your players that their characters would reasonably have access to is generally bad; it makes the world feel unreal and it adds to an unpleasant player vs. DM dynamic. The short answer is that if you do a faithful presentation of the world (humans are exaggerating goblin evil; goblins will try to talk/surrender in the face of overwhelming force, etc.), even new players should become uncomfortable with the "slaughter the goblins" quest and should figure out what's going on. 

The main thing is to make it clear at some point that the goblins are not evil - [(edited to add) it's usually best to start with subtle hints and gradually escalate them so the players have a chance to figure it out, and if they do, they'll never know that it would have been given to them later]. Depending on your players, you might make that clear before they kill any goblins, or after they kill a few if they have ignored hints, avoided talking to the goblins, and just gone full murder-mode. If you want to be blunt, put an adorable, unarmed goblin family doing wholesome family things a little way outside the goblin village and have them be terrified of the PCs, or put a clearly-good character like an elven druid or cleric among the goblins (maybe make them very powerful but focused on non-lethal take down if it comes to combat, if this makes sense for the universe). If you don't want to drop big hints like those, just have the goblins act like civilians whose village is under attack - most of them run away when they're under attack, maybe some children or old folks who clearly can't fight take up crude weapons to cover their families leaving, one goblin screams in misery and spends their entire turn trying in vain revive their relative who took a PC arrow to the throat while weeping, and goblins surrender or plead for mercy in broken common. If the party ultimately decides that they want to chase down and murder unarmed goblin children - maybe they're allowed to do that, but as it should be in "reality", it should be clear that that is evil.

The thing you should not do is play the goblins like conventional D&D evil goblins who are organized and fully fight to the death and don't have any children or old people among them, and then sometime after they've been slaughtered, reveal that they were actually OK folks and the PCs are the bad guys. It's reasonable that an NPC might trick PCs into killing a single guy who's actually an OK guy; it's pretty unreasonable they would trick them into slaughtering a large group of mostly-civilians. You should never hide information from the PCs that should be available just so you can "Gotcha!" them later - that feels terrible from a player perspective and makes your universe not-believable. 

Quote from Zhule >>

very valid point. My biggest issue, is that a lot of the possible grim dark stuff, wouldn't really come to light till WAY WAY later.  You don't topple an evil king and expect his country to be singing your praises the next night.

I do deeply hope i get to play the last story in the arc: 

 

 This, along with what you had said in your first post, is a sort of classic example of expecting too much from your players. You're writing everything that happens when the PC's act in a very certain way, which is almost never the case. It can also be seen as railroading to a lot of players, taking away the agency. Your ideas are fine, but just be sure that if the players begin to lean in a different direction, don't force them to do what you want for the story. Adapt to what they want. That, at least in my opinion, is what makes the game good for everybody.

You don't want them to miss the plot but you do want a bit of suspense.

The best way to do this is to likely give them some reason to be explicitly suspicious and give them options.

1) The adventurer who died in town - perhaps turn it into a bit of a murder mystery where the townsfolk pretty clearly don't think it is worth any further investigation and then leave some clues lying around for the PCs to find. For example, the innkeeper could have a very fancy lamp/candle holder in their common room with a very uniquely shaped base made of dragon claws. If the PCs investigate the house of the deceaed adventurer they can find dust in the corner where the marks in the dust match the exact shape of the unique base of the lamp indicating that at least one item has been taken from the adventurer's house by someone in town.

2) if the party goes to investigate the goblins, have the goblins talk first. Perhaps they run into one or two who then beg the party not to kill them the way the other villagers did when they raided their village/caves and slaughtered their children. (Bad guys killing children of anything is usually almost guaranteed to get PCs involved) - though it could be a triggering issue for some of your players so assess your group accordingly.

In general, you can have the bad town folk say the "innocent" things but give the players several explicit hints that everything may not be what it seems.

I agree with VanZoren. You are counting a lot on players not interrogating their surroundings, which is kind of the opposite of what a DM should be striving for; you hope to make a world so interesting that the players can’t help but start asking questions of everyone they meet. What if they cast zone of truth when they’re talking to the villagers, or otherwise figure out how shady they are. You assume they’ll side with the merchant guild, but maybe they make an insight check and realize the guild’s plans, or try to raid the guild offices to discover their plans, or they decide to talk to the minotaurs before fighting them.

For it to work like you seem to want, you’d really have to work at hiding the details of the worlds from the PCs. Because if you’re truly telling them everything they see and hear, they should really be able to figure out what’s going on, if not easily, more easily than you expect.

Beyond that, presumably the characters grew up in this world. They should be old enough to know things aren’t black and white — if not all goblins are inherently evil in your world, the characters would know that. You might surprise the players with these things, but these are things their characters would probably know.

I was kind of planning on the goblins fighting to the death, but in a more "this is our home, we have no where else to go.  I'd rather die protecting my home, then watch my friends and family die to starvation/exposure/disease/ etc... while we search in vein for another place to live.  *dramatic screaming as they attack the party*".  The party will have a bunch of chances to figure out the goblins are just scared.  But if they go full murder hobo, I'm not wasting half an hour of everyone's time by trying to make the gobiln's sympathetic.

But i get what you mean.  I think what i really want is for the PLAYERS to know that, sometimes things aren't always as they seem at first glance.  But i want the character to have a bit more of a "black and white" vision of the world.  "Everyone knows that the monster races are curses from vengeful gods.  Thousands of years of religious doctrine and written history can't be wrong.  Right?"   Though maybe the best way to pull that off is less to expect the player characters to do what I envision (What do you mean you can't read my mind random person i just met), and just have the NPC's all have that mindset.

i just want to avoid the "fun" that is your players just freaking NOPING out, to dick around in the world, within the first couple minutes of the game.  "You took a quest to deal with some goblins, and the first thing you did upon getting into town was leave the tavern, leave the town, and wonder the country side for 3 in game months."   One would hope the pregame interviews would weed out those kinds of players, but i worry.

i might be over thinking things.  Just heard and seen a lot of players who either don't pay attention when the DM is telling them things, or their answer to everything is jamming a square peg (even though the situation is more of a round hole) at it, as fast as possible.

Quote from Zhule >>

I was kind of planning on the goblins fighting to the death, but in a more "this is our home, we have no where else to go.  I'd rather die protecting my home, then watch my friends and family die to starvation/exposure/disease/ etc... while we search in vein for another place to live.  *dramatic screaming as they attack the party*".  The party will have a bunch of chances to figure out the goblins are just scared.  But if they go full murder hobo, I'm not wasting half an hour of everyone's time by trying to make the gobiln's sympathetic.

Again, I don't think you want to have it so that the PCs kill a bunch of goblins and then find out the poor dears were just defending their homes and minding their own business. Your goal shouldn't be to make the players feel awful, and I think this is what will happen if it plays out the way you are describing.

Plentiful hints BEFORE the first blow is struck, the first initiative is rolled, that the goblins may not be "evil" in this case, should be provided.

And not to take us back to square one; but who's actually paying the PCs to deal with the goblins?  The murderers in the village?  Why?  I mean you're taking a long walk to force your players into a moral error in the first place.

a small group of adventures that where hired on by the mayor of the town, through a Guild a town or two over.   The mayor knows that he needs an excuse as to why he didn't tell the local lord about the goblin attack that left one of his citizens (of mild renown, and moderate riches) dead.  Or more specifically he needs an excuse as to why so much of that citizen's small fortune, that would have been taxed by the lord then distributed to the citizen's next of kin, has "gone missing".  What better way to hide what really happened, then to hire adventurers to deal with the problem.  Best case the party slays the goblins, and the mayor can claim that he doesn't know what the goblins did with their stolen loot (or maybe he blames the party, claiming they must have stashed away the riches).  "Worst" case, the party dies and he can now claim that the did his best to be a good subject but the goblins have proven to much to handle.  Lord sends in some muscle to deal with the problem and it forever remains a mystery as to what actually happened to all those missing goods.

Why i'm kind of big on the shades of gray in this story.  The goblins have in fact been raiding the village, mostly stealing a few things here and there, sometimes they nab livestock.  They have been careful before this not to harm anyone, and to only take a little bit from any one house/farm.  However that doesn't mean that they aren't stealing from the villagers.  And it was the goblins that killed the villager, again it was not their desire to.  Just an unfortunate turn of events, when one of them got startled.  Heck even the villagers aren't like totally evil.  The dead guy was a raging *******, who lorded his wealth and power over them.  No one liked him in town, but you aren't going to pick a fight with the crazy old guy who can murder you "with his mind" (magic) from 100 paces.  "Now he's dead, and gods damn it, why should this old AH's third cousin's nephew or whatever, get all his stuff when I was the one who had to suffer dealing with him for all these years."

Why i'm kind of big on the shades of gray in this story.  

Just make sure you have not fallen so in love with a story that you are going to force the players through it whether they like it or not.