Sense Motive

• 1 Minor Action or Free Action
• Sensory, Social

By watching someone’s body language, listening to them speak, and appraising how they react to what’s around them, you attempt to understand their mental state and specifically whether they’re being truthful or concealing something.

Make a Perception check against the Will or Deception DC (whichever is higher) of the target. If your target is a noble or a criminal, you can use Society Lore or Underworld Lore instead, respectively.

• Critical Success: The GM informs you of the general emotional state of the target, as well as if they are attempting to conceal something. Your sense for the subject’s emotional state last throughout the conversation, allowing you to detect whether they ever start to conceal anything from you and how they react to any events during the conversation.
• Success: You get a sense for how the target is feeling at that moment, and whether anything they just said was a deception or intentionally misleading.
• Failure: You get a vague impression of the target’s emotional state — or the emotions they are trying to convey, if they’re not being entirely honest. You can’t tell whether or not they’re trying to deceive or mislead you.
• Critical Failure: You have no sense of how the target is feeling or whether they’re lying to you other than your (the player) intuition based on how they are depicted by the GM.

You can perform this action only once on a given target for every five minutes of conversing or dealing with it. The GM may allow you to roll more often than this if the target loses its composure or otherwise stops being able to deceive or mislead you for some reason.