Players characters evading direct questions

[Talakeal]

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.

Sure. But that isn't what happened here.

The PCs know literally nothing about Fey politics or territories. All the knowledge they have comes from children's fairy tales.

Which is why the changelings were asking them what the werewolves were planning; they know the PCs know nothing and are trying to direct them to someone who can help them.

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.

It's hard for me to believe that four players would go through an interrogation scene and then forget the information they learned in it the very next scene, but yeah, they is the best explanation I have.

Of course, all the players insist this isn't the case.


[B]

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.

Yep. We both misunderstood the situation.

He misunderstood how the spell worked, and I misunderstood what he was saying and thought he was falling back on his "can we please resolve social interactions with a charisma check" argument.

If either of us had known what the other was thinking, we could have easily rectified the situation, but we didn't.

Still doesn't explain why the other five players were incapable of coming up with a plan for three hours until Brian snapped out of his funk.