These modifiers apply to a character’s Acting roll, not to any INT Rolls or other rolls to detect that he’s acting. GENERAL MODIFIERS
Modifier Length Of Acting
Character maintains impersonation/false emotion/fake Skill for a long time
-1 Up to 1 Hour -2 1.1 to 6 Hours -3 6.1 Hours to 1 Day -4 1.1 Days to 1 Week ...and so on DETECTING ACTING Modifier Circumstances
Character has studied person being imper- sonated...
+1 ...for at least 6 Hours +2 ...for at least 1 Day +3 ...for at least 1 Week +4 ...for at least 1 Month ...and so on
Impersonating a specific person
+2 Person being impersonated is completely
unknown to onlooker
+1 Onlooker has heard of person being imper-
sonated
+0 Person being impersonated is vaguely known by onlooker
-1 Person being impersonated is an acquain-
tance of onlooker
-2 Person being impersonated is known to
onlooker
-3 Person being impersonated is well known to onlooker
FAKING EMOTIONS
Modifier Strength Of Emotion
+0 Mild
-1 Strong: anger; happiness
-2 Intense: rage; sadness to the point of crying -3 Very Intense: berserk fury; profound grief
BASE TIMES
Acting is a fairly time-intensive task — to convincingly impersonate another individual, or a false emotion, the character may have to use Acting for a long period of time. Even something simple, like faking an injury, requires a minimum of a Half Phase Action.
A more important question is now often the character has to make Acting rolls to maintain his portrayal. For a short-term task, such as faking an injury, or faking an emotion long enough to trick someone into leaving the room, one Acting roll suffices. For a long-term task, such as adopting an alternate identity for several hours or days, the GM needs to establish a reasonable time period for rolls. One roll per Hour may be a good guideline in many cases. Additionally, if the character imperson- ates another character, the GM may also require him to make rolls whenever he encounters some- one who knows the person being impersonated.
SUBDIVIDING ACTING
Acting is a fairly restricted Skill and so probably doesn’t need to be split into multiple Skills for most campaigns. In games where acting and impersonation are key elements, GMs may want to divide it into two Interaction Skills: Impersonation (used to imitate other people and emotions, and to act in general) and Combat Acting (for faking injuries and Skills).
ACTING BY GENRE
Generally speaking, Acting works the same in all genres, but special considerations apply in a few.
Fantasy
In Fantasy worlds featuring unusual non- Human races, the rules described below for aliens in Science Fiction settings may apply. It may not be
any easier for a character to impersonate one of the Dragon-Lords of Tarkine than to impersonate an Arcturan bog-being.
Martial Arts
Characters can use Acting to imitate another character’s personal fighting style. This ability doesn’t necessarily have much use in combat, but may crop up in other situations. For example, sup- pose a villain with Acting wants to frame a PC for a crime. He could Disguise himself as the PC, then perform some heinous crime before witnesses who swear it was the hero — they didn’t just recognize his face, they recognized his moves. This requires a Skill Versus Skill Contest pitting the villain’s Acting against the INT Rolls of onlookers familiar with the real person. To do this, the actor must know at least two Martial Maneuvers in the same style as the person he’s mimicking. If the actor is a karateka and wants to imitate a jujutsuka, but he doesn’t have any Jujutsu maneuvers, he’s out of luck. A Knowledge Skill of the imitated character’s style serves as a Complementary Skill Roll to both the Acting roll and the INT Roll to perceive the trickery.
Science Fiction
Characters may have difficulty acting like members of another species, since aliens are, well,
alien. When a character impersonates a member
of a species other than his own to a character who knows what members of that species are like, he suffers a -2 to -5 penalty to his Acting roll. He can eliminate this penalty by buying bonuses to Acting
Only To Impersonate [Species] (-1), or by succeed-
ing with a KS: [Species] roll. Gamemasters may also wish to impose some of the penalties from the Disguise Modifiers Table (page 174) on Acting rolls.
ANALYZE
Type: Intellect Skill (roll: 9 + (INT/5) or less) Cost: 3 Character Points for a base roll, +1 to the
roll per +2 Character Points
This Intellect Skill allows a character to analyze another character’s abilities or skills to determine the other character’s level of power or degree of competence. The character must specify what he can analyze using this Skill when he buys it; the text below discusses several examples.
You should take care not to let Analyze take the place of other Skills. If a Skill already allows a character to compare two or more things or to conduct an analysis of something to reach a con- clusion, there may be no need for a related form of Analyze. For example, the Skill Analyze Crime
Scene Evidence isn’t really needed for anything
(except maybe Complementary Skill rolls) because the Criminology Skill already allows characters to analyze trace evidence that way.
BASIC ANALYZE RULES
Using Analyze typically requires a mini- mum of a Half Phase Action, though it can take longer, and some specialized forms of Analyze indicate a longer Base Time (such as the 1 Turn for Analyze Style). See Base Times, below, for further discussion.
After sufficient observation of the target the character can make his Skill Roll. If the Analyze roll succeeds exactly, the character has a general idea of how skilled or powerful the target is in comparison to him (“He’s better than me,” “I could do better than him easily”). If he makes his Analyze roll by 1 or 2, he knows where, how, and by whom the target was trained or manufactured (if applicable). If he makes his Analyze roll by 3 or more, he can discover distinctive manner- isms about the target which grant him +1 DCV against any attacks (or -1 on Skill Versus Skill
rolls) made by the target. If the character makes his Analyze roll by half or more he gains +2 for all relevant rolls against the target (this bonus is equivalent to two Overall Skill Levels; the char- acter may assign the bonus as he sees fit from Phase to Phase). An appropriate Knowledge Skill may serve as a Complementary Skill roll.
In some cases, characters can use Analyze to identify the ability an opponent is using. For example, as discussed under Analyze Magic below, with a successful roll a spellcaster who watches a spell being cast can identify the spell and knows its effects.
Analyze in its various forms often works as a Complementary Skill (and in fact some characters buy it primarily for that purpose). For example, Analyze Style might be Complementary to Gam- bling when a character bets on boxing, and Analyze Vehicle would help with Mechanics when the char- acter works on a car or airplane.
Characters can buy Lack Of Weakness to pro- tect against Analyze. Every -1 to all Analyze rolls costs 1 Character Point. See below regarding Ana- lyze and Find Weakness.
Duration Of Effects; Successive Rolls
The bonuses and exact knowledge gained by using Analyze last only for the encounter in which Analyze was used. They do not “carry over” to future encounters. The character may retain the general knowledge (like “I’m better than him” or “Master Po trained him”) — but never any bonuses. However, at the GM’s option, a character who’s suc- ceeded with an Analyze roll against a target previ- ously may receive a +1 or greater bonus to Analyze rolls made against that same target in later encoun- ters — his familiarity with the target’s techniques, nature, or abilities makes it easier to analyze him/it.
A character cannot make successive Analyze rolls against the same character in the same encounter. He only gets one try per target per encounter.
Requires A Skill Roll
Characters often use Analyze for Required Skill Rolls. In that case, if the character succeeds with his Analyze roll to activate the ability, he does not also get the standard bonuses and benefits of Analyze. Activating the ability is all he does.
EXPANDING ANALYZE
The GM can expand Analyze to allow a character to analyze and evaluate just about any object — buildings, technology (or specific types of technology, like computers), you name it. This allows the character to determine (a) how well- built the object is, and (b) the object’s capabilities in relation to similar items he knows about. In this case, Analyze becomes a particularly useful Complementary Skill — it grants a +1 bonus to related Skill Rolls (including Find Weakness rolls) for every 1 point by which the character makes his Analyze roll.
See Analyze Large Objects and Analyze Tech-
nology, below, for examples of this type of Analyze.