Empathy

Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and guess what other people are thinking and feeling. This can be handy if you are trying to spot a liar or you want to tell someone what that person wants to hear. It’s also useful for keeping up your guard during a social conflict. Characters adept at Empathy are very perceptive about people and their motives and often end up as quiet masters of a social scene. They can include reporters, gamblers, and psychologists.



Reading People
''You can use Empathy to figure out what makes another character tick. After at least ten minutes of intense, personal interaction, you may make an Empathy roll against the target’s Rapport roll (see Closing Down under Rapport, the target might also choose to defend with Deceit). ''

''This is an assessment action and, as such, if you gain one or more shifts on your roll, you discover one of the target’s aspects that you weren’t already aware of. It may not reveal the name of the aspect in precise detail, but it should paint a good general picture. For instance, it might not give the name of someone’s brother, but it will reveal that he has a brother. You can repeat this process, taking longer each time, and ultimately reveal a number of aspects equal to your Empathy skill value (minimum of one)—so, a Fair skill (value 2) would allow you to reveal two aspects through at least two different rolls. ''

  

A Shoulder to Cry On
''<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Characters with Empathy are familiar with the emotional responses of other people and are able to effectively provide comfort and reassurance to those who are emotionally wounded. With the Empathy skill, you can create an environment for another character to justify recovery from mild social or mental consequences. See Recovering from Conflict for a discussion about recovering from consequences. Stunts are required to bring this trapping to the level that professional therapists have. ''<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">

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<span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Social Defense
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;margin-left:24px;">''<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">Use Empathy as a defense in a social conflict (though it isn’t the only skill that can be used this way). In particular, you must use Empathy to defend against Deceit as you try to sort out truth from fiction in what you’re hearing. ''<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">

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<span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Social Initiative
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal;margin-left:24px;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">''Use Empathy to determine initiative (order of action) in any social conflict. To minimize on die-rolling, Empathy is usually taken simply at its listed value and used to determine the order of actions you and other characters take.''