Players characters evading direct questions

[Jason]

I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree here.

IMO figuring out the significance of clues and what to do with them is the core gameplay element of mystery scenarios.

I do not consider this to be a misunderstanding, nor do I consider it to be the GM's job.

The GM's job is to give the players enough information about the game world to make meaningful decisions. And then do his best to fairly adjudicate the results of those choices.

If the players do not understand the significance of something, and the characters who live in the game world would have understood the significance, then it is up to the GM to tell the players what their characters would know, before they make any decisions.

Just as it's up to the GM to tell the players what their characters see, smell, and hear because the players can't see, smell, or hear it, a GM must explain to the players knowledge their characters would have about how their world works that the players don't have because they don't actually live in that world.
You can't rely on them being as familiar with how the game world works as you are - in a sense you are the game world.

That still doesn't explain why they don't give an answer though. You don't have to understand the significance of a question to answer it.

If I ask you what you had for dinner last night, you should be able to answer me even if you don't know why I should care. You might have a reason to lie or be evasive or tell me to mind my own business of course, but simply not understanding why I am asking in no way prevents you from answering.

Which means either they didn't really remember or know the answer, or that the players felt that they had some reason not to answer.

Some possible reasons to not want to answer include: they felt the information would be used against them in some way, they felt the person asking was deliberately wasting their time, or they didn't feel like cooperating with someone they were upset at.

I presume that you have some sort of social dice mechanic in your game of choice, right? Charisma checks? Persuasion, diplomacy, gather information, etc.? Right? There is some mechanical way to convince people to do what you want?

Are you telling me that in your game, language difficulties completely supersede these mechanics?

Like, if it would normally be a difficulty 20 persuasion check for me to convince the bartender to tell me the name of the local crime boss.

But, if I only speak dwarven, and the bartender only speaks elven, so I need to rely on a Tongues spell to communicate with him, suddenly the persuasion check is automatic and my social skills don't factor into it at all?

What sense does that make?

Not much, but that's not the example that was being discussed.

A statue isn't a person. Statues don't normally communicate at all, so what expectation would the player have that after using a valuable spell slot he would still have to use a skill roll to persuade the statue to cooperate?

From the player's perspective he wasn't attempting to persuade anyone to give him information - he was using a spell that should reveal an answer. You didn't correct this false impression before he made the choice to expend the valuable spell slot, he was disappointed that the spell didn't simply give him the answer, and then he disengaged from the game completely after he failed the persuasion roll that he didn't think he was going to need in the first place.

If you had acted to correct the false impression before the player cast the spell - "the spell will let you speak with the statute, but you'll still have to convince it to cooperate," then you may have saved yourself and your players 3 hours of wasted game time.

Or you could have decided, "this is the first room of the dungeon. There is no threat to avoid here. They've already made one attempt and failed. The mage is using a valuable resource, I'll just let the statue cooperate without a further roll and we can get moving to the real adventure."

Part of being a good GM is knowing when not to ask for a die roll.

Talakeal's players don't want to play the kind of game Talakeal wants to play. They don't want to be challenged. They don't want to get into nitty-gritty details on how to make something work. They want to play a power fantasy where they win without breaking a sweat. But Talakeal doesn't enjoy GMing that kind of game, as has been established in multiple previous threads.

We have only heard Talakeal's perspective. I don't think we can determine from just his account what it is his players are feeling or what they want.
In fact it seems to me that the root of the problem is that Talakeal doesn't really understand what his players are feeling or what they want. He was asking the forum for possible explanations of a behavior he doesn't understand.