Discipline

Discipline
Discipline represents your ability to stay focused on your goals and actions despite distractions, as well as the ability to protect yourself from the psychological fallout of awful or scary events. It’s what makes you able to conquer fear, resist torture, and recite boring math equations with such dedication that a psychic demon can’t bore into your mind. Characters with strong Discipline rarely let fear get the best of them and can perform a wide variety of stressful tasks without breaking their concentration. They include chess grandmasters, air traffic control operators, and wizards.

Discipline is one of the three cornerstone skills for effective spellcasting, along with Conviction  and Lore.

See Feeding Dependency for how this skill affects a hunger stress track.



Concentration
''Many other skills may be used in circumstances where unusual concentration is necessary— such as using Burglary to pick a lock while you’re getting shot at. In such circumstances, the GM may ask that Discipline be used to restrict the skill being used, representing a small penalty if you are not skilled at keeping your focus. Other circumstances may arise where Discipline would be rolled to represent how well you remain focused on a particular task or idea. ''

  

Emotional Control
''Whenever you are trying to master your own emotions, Discipline is the skill you’ll use to do it. This could be as simple as rolling Discipline as a defense against an Intimidation attack or keeping your terror in check in order to avoid feeding the fear-eating monster next door. Sometimes this trapping may be impaired by a particular aspect on a character—if you have the Prone to Violent Outbursts aspect, for example, and accept a compel on it, then there’s no need to roll Discipline to control the outburst; assume you already failed any such roll. ''<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;">Mental 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"">Discipline is the default skill for defense whenever something tries to deal mental stress to you or tries to mentally or psychologically assault you. At minimum, roll Discipline as the defense against certain Intimidation attacks, as well as against invasive mind magic. ''<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">

<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"">This means that Discipline and Conviction partner together to represent your overall “fortress of the mind.” With both rated highly, you are rarely affected by emotional and psychic attacks (thanks to strong defense rolls from Discipline) and, when affected, you can take more psychological distress before you start to break down (thanks to the extra mental stress boxes from Conviction). When your Discipline and Conviction skills are not in line with each another, you may be easily affected by distress but have the kind of faith and confidence necessary to persevere despite that (low Discipline, high Conviction), or you may be very good at “compartmentalizing” your response to things but actually pretty fragile inside (high Discipline, low Conviction). ''