Perception

Overview

Perception is your ability to notice and observe non-physical threats, situations, and social cues. Most Perception rolls against other people are resisted with Deceit.

Uses

Perception is a skill that detects non-physical threats, as opposed to Awareness, which is for physical ones. It is used as a defensive Skill against Deceit.

Perception is used when:

• Trying to tell if someone is lying (Using Deceit).
• Trying to determine someone's emotional state.
• Trying to pick up on the atmosphere of a crowd. (Ex. Telling if a mob is about to break out. Judging the general public opinion when making a speech.)
• Searching for supernatural phenomena (Ex. Noticing ghosts. Picking up on if a spell has recently been used. NOTE: This does not automatically allow you to identify that spell. Enchantment is still required to figure out specifics.)
• Picking up on environmental cues. (Ex. Determining if a storm is about to start. Sensing if an area is cursed.)
• Getting a loose judgement of someone's trustworthiness. (Ex. Looking over a shop owner and trying to figure out if he's acting sketchy. Spotting suspicious people in crowds.)

Important Note

Perception does not make your character psychic or empathic. With the exception of minor, common supernatural phenomena, such as spotting ghosts or detecting "bad vibes" in a room, anything determined by the Perception skill alone should be something that someone could realistically notice in real life.

You may not detect:

• Exact intentions (Ex. That hobo is trying to get me to drop my wallet so that he can use it to purchase tickets to the monster truck rally tomorrow at 4PM!)
• The truth behind a lie. (Even if you know someone's lying, you can't determine the truth on that alone)
• Complex/buried emotions (Ex. You can tell if someone is angry, but you can't tell that she's also hungry and mostly just angry at you because you're holding a really nice looking hoagie. UNLESS that character is showing body language that implies these extra details. Ex. She's glancing repeatedly to your hoagie and drooling a little.).
• Complex psychological subtext (Brandon is in a loveless marriage with his ex-hairdresser and suffers from a phobia of squirrels.)
• Things that happened in the past (Ex. If your character is now boarding a roller coaster, he can't try to work out if the funnel cake stand lady was trying to get in his pants. If you're stepping into a set of old ruins, you can't detect a ritual that happened there 200 years ago. UNLESS something residual is still around, such as hints of magic energy or a phone number drawn in the funnel cake's sugar powder.)
• Conclusions based on things your character couldn't realistically pick up on in the circumstances. (Ex. Noticing that someone is fiddling with their collar nervously, despite talking on the phone. Detecting that an earthquake is about to start despite not being a dog.)

Penalties

• Obscured/Hard to hear: If your character is not within range to be able to easily notice social cues, they will suffer a penalty to their Perception checks against the person they're trying to understand. -10 if the person is still within hearing distance, but obscured in some sense (such as on the phone or hiding.) or possible to see, but difficult to hear (Behind a pane of glass, or on a video call with poor reception.) -25 if the person is both hard to see and hard to hear (such as if they're on a boat 10 yards away, or within a large crowd of people). If your character normally has poor sight or is hard of hearing, they do not suffer the -10 penalty for their disabled sense, as they'd likely established other methods, but do still get the -25 penalty if the target deprives them of their other senses.
• Inebriation: Characters that have their judgment in some way impaired suffer a -25 penalty to their Perception rolls against other people. For example: being drunk, berserk, etc. This does not affect environmental or supernatural perception.

With MAX Perception

When you have 100 Perception besides modifiers, you get the following ability.

(This is pending someone actually bothering to make an ability)

The Perception Plus

The + in Perception effectively raises your Perception skill by 25.