Empathy

Empathy

This Skill represents your character's intuition for reading people's emotions. For some, it's a matter of observing body language and non-verbal cues. Others employ an extraordinary sense that helps them divine a person's true mood. As the name implies, Empathy also involves the capacity to understand other people's views and perspectives, whether your character agrees with those positions or not. This is useful in everything from negotiations and crisis counseling to reading faces in a crowd and looking for potential trouble.

• Possessed by: Counselors, diplomats, entertainers, profilers, psychiatrists, police officers
• Specialties: Emotion, Lies, Motives, Personalities

If a subject actively conceals his emotions or motives, make a contested roll versus the person's Wits + Subterfuge + Equipment.

General Roll Results

• Success: Your character has a good read on a person's true emotional state, regardless of whatever front the subject puts up.
  
• Exceptional Success: Your character notes enough tell tale clues in a subject's behavior to gain a detailed understanding of her emotional state. Not only can he discern, say, that she is being deceptive, but he can tell from her body language that she is afraid of whoever is in the store across the street.
  
• Failure: Your character is unable to gauge a subject's true emotional state.
  
• Dramatic Failure: Your character completely misreads a person's emotional state, possibly with disastrous results. He may, for example, interpret nervous laughter as genuine, missing the anxiety and potential for violence that clumsy jokes attempt to hide.