SKILLS

Sense Motive

(Wis)

You can tell someone's true intentions by paying attention to body language, inflection, and intuition.

Check: A successful Sense Motive check allows you to avoid the effects of some interaction skills. You can also use the skill to tell when someone is behaving oddly or assess their trustworthiness.

Evaluate: You can use this skill to make an assessment of a social situation. With a successful check (Difficulty 20), you can get a feeling when something is wrong. You can also tell if someone is trustworthy and honorable (or not) with an opposed Sense Motive and Bluff check.

Combat Evaluate: As a full-round action, you study a single opponent to understand her fighting style, current disposition, and combat plans. This target must be within 30 feet of you. Make a Sense Motive check opposed by your target's combat bonus. If you succeed, you gain a +1 to your combat bonus (thus improving your attack bonus, your maneuver bonus and your Defense) against that target.

If you fail your check by 5 points or more, you read your foe incorrectly. For the rest of the encounter, you suffer a -1 penalty to your combat bonus against her.

Notice Influence: You can make a Sense Motive check to notice someone acting under supernatural influence. The Difficulty is 10 + the power's rank.

Notice Innuendo: You can use Sense Motive to detect a hidden message transmitted via the Bluff skill (Difficulty equal to the Bluff check result). If your check result beats the Difficulty, you understand the secret message. If your check fails by 5 or more, you misinterpret the message in some fashion. If you are not the intended recipient of the message, your Difficulty increases by 5.

Resist Interaction: Make a Sense Motive check to resist or ignore the effects of certain interaction skills, such as Bluff or Intimidate. If the result of your check exceeds your opponent's check result, you are unaffected.

Challenges: You can take the following challenges with Sense Motive:

Read Situation: For every +5 you increase the Difficulty of your Sense Motive check, you learn one fact about the situation at hand when evaluating a situation or individual. The Narrator may tell you things like someone's apparent goal(s), the nature of an interaction, and so forth.

Combat Clarity: In return for a -5 penalty to your skill check, you increase the bonuses provided by the combat evaluate use of Sense Motive by +1. You can increase the penalty to -10 to increase the bonuses by +2. The penalties you suffer for a check that fails by 5 points or more do not increase.

Try Again: No, though you can make a Sense Motive check for each interaction attempt against you.

Action: A Sense Motive check may be made as a reaction to notice or resist something. (When that's the case, the Narrator may roll the Sense Motive check in secret, so you don't know if there's something to notice or not.) Using Sense Motive to evaluate a person or situation takes at least 1 minute.