Declarations

Declarations
Declarations are a special kind of assessment. What sets a declaration apart from other assessments is that, while an assessment allows you to discover aspects on a target that are already there, declarations allow you to create new aspects that a target didn’t have before and then take advantage of them. Declarations allow players some serious narrative power, because you can effectively introduce new facts into play and then act on them, defining things about the setting and the characters that the GM didn’t already have planned out.

  At first blush, this may seem a bit strange; however, when making assessments, it’s pretty common for players to suggest something that the GM either didn’t plan for or doesn’t have detailed. If you’re casing someone’s house using Burglary, maybe she doesn’t have scene aspects for that house. So when you ask, “Hey, is there some kind of vent access to the outside I could easily pry open to help me get in undetected?” she might not have an immediate answer. Declarations are a way for the GM to have that answer, by having you come up with it.

  To make a declaration, state the aspect you wish to create or take advantage of. The GM assigns an appropriate difficulty, and you roll the appropriate skill. If you succeed, the fact is true and the aspect is immediately assigned to the target so that you can use it just as if you’d succeeded on an assessment roll. Like other assessments, an aspect created by a declaration can be tagged  in the same scene.

  If your roll fails, the fact is not true. This might mean the vent isn’t there, but it can also mean that your character is mistaken and believes the declaration to be true when it isn’t. It can be fun to play around with the results of failed declarations, especially when doing so will create a humorous or ironic situation. Maybe that thing that looks like a vent is actually the grille for a wall-mounted air conditioning unit… which noisily falls to the ground after you unscrew the wall mounting!

<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"">  <span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;">Or imagine that you use Lore to declare that the magical cult your group is seeking assistance from appreciates direct displays of strength as part of their customs. You fail the declaration roll and then say, “Yeah, they seriously won’t respect us unless we walk up and punch the leader right in the face. Cults, man, you know how they are.” Of course, when your group encounters that coven later, that scene has the potential to be very entertaining, indeed.

<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"">  <span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;">The GM has the final call on the effect of a failed declaration, but you’re encouraged to propose failures you think are interesting.