This page covers the Physical Awareness skill in this system.
This skill has 4 major jobs:
- Investigating crime scenes & similar.
- Spotting hidden people or things.
- Tracking
- Surveillance, including magical scrying.
Most of the powers linked with physical awareness will fall into 1 of these 4 categories.
Investigating Crime Scenes
These rules aren’t exclusively for crimes; perfectly legal scenes can also be investigated. That said, a scene needs to have had substantial action in order to be investigable. Two people having a calm conversation could not be investigated via these rules.
Test: (Mental) + (Physical Awareness)
Action Interval: 1 hour
The GM sets the difficulty for the crime scene. Each net hit generated by the player above the difficulty grants the player 1 of the following questions, to be answered honestly by the GM:
- What happened here?
- Was care taken to conceal something here?
- What is being concealed here? (this is an additional question, requiring an additional net hit)
- What was the purpose of this crime?
- What was the emotional state of the victim?
- Did they know/trust the perp?
- What was the emotional state of the perpetrator?
- Does this scene have a connection to a local organization that the player characters are already aware of?
- Does this scene have a connection to a conspiracy, goal, or objective that the player characters are already aware of?
Spotting Hidden People & Things
The GM should have player characters roll to spot hidden things, regardless of whether or not the players asked to make such a roll. You do not want to encourage your players to constantly pester you to make unnecessary awareness rolls.
In cases where the GM doesn’t want to give away the fact that something is hidden, the GM can roll on behalf of the player characters without telling the players.
The GM sets the difficulty of the roll for hidden objects, evidence, and similar.
Test: (Mental) + (Physical Awareness) vs. GM Difficulty
If a character is hiding themselves, hiding an item, or covering up a crime, this can become an opposed roll.
Test: (Mental) + (Physical Awareness) vs. Opposed Roll
In many cases, this roll will be against someone using the Stealth skill. The GM will need to understand how Stealth works.
Pointing Out The Hidden
If your character spots something, they can point it out to others as an interrupt action. Others must still make a test of their own to see it, but receive a +4 modifier to their dicepool.
Tracking
These rules cover tracking characters, vehicles, or similar.
These rules are separate and distinct from simply investigating or researching a person. You wouldn’t use the tracking rules to discover where someone works or to learn about their family situation.
You do not need to use the tracking rules if the hunter can see or hear the prey; in those cases you should use stealth mechanics or go into combat if there is going to be a chase scene.
You may only track something if it plausibly left a trail to follow. For example, without radar, an airplane is sort of impossible to track once it has taken off. In this system, without special powers, an airplane would be impossible to track. The Impossible Tracker power changes this.
Each tracking roll is a contested extended action between the hunter and their prey. The GM sets the time interval at something they find reasonable for the situation. Each roll of the dice consumes 1 interval of time. Whichever party reaches 15 (non-net)successes first wins. If the hunter wins, they catch up to their prey. If the prey wins, they escape the hunter. Ties go to the prey. The maximum speed of whatever conveyance each party is using is factored into the dicepool as a multiplier.
Test: ((Mental + Physical Awareness) X Speed) vs ((Mental + (Pilot OR Stealth)) X Speed)
Tracking Info
In addition to catching up to the prey, tracking can reveal information about the prey.
Each time a contested tracking roll is made, the hunter can ask 1 of the following questions per net hit they get above the prey:
- What kind of vehicles are they using, if any?
- What direction did they come from?
- What might they have been interested in or what activities might they have been doing in that direction?
- [Meta] is there plot in that direction?
- How many people were there?
- If they are troops, this question will reveal their troop strength.
- Were there 2 or more distinct groups of people together? Examples: Soldiers & refugees, kidnappers & captives.
- Do they know they’re being followed?
- What physical state were they in when they were last here? Wounded? Tired? Fresh?
- Are they hauling cargo? If so, how much?
Surveillance
Many powers linked with Physical Awareness allow you to create & plant surveillance devices.
Most surveillance actions don’t require a dice test on their own. If you want to hide a surveillance device in someone’s home, vehicle, luggage, or clothing, you will roll (Physical) + (Stealth) vs (Mental) + (Physical Awareness)