Greetings, all!
Not seeing the usual weekly post for some days (it should've appeared around 20th), I'm posting this one.
Animal, 'normal person', Spirit and Plant Empathies seem like one of the more interesting traits there are in the game. There are slight differences between how they work, but the important similarities are:
- They allow you to bypass Indomitable.
- They allow you to bypass mutual non-Influencability barriers unrelated to Indomitable (e.g. between non-sapient dogs and sapient humans).
- They give you an overall 'feel' of what the entity before you is like, emotionally speaking. Suffering? In anger? Friendly?
Then there are the differences. Only regular Empathy and Empath Talent include skill bonuses. Plant Empathy used on non-sapient plants tells more about health of the plant, since 'emotions' is a word that is hard to apply to plants. Animal/Plant/Spirit Empathy is much more often used as an
enabling trait for Influences.
Empathy has an interesting synergy with Luck, since a successful Empathy roll allows one to call the GM to roll Reaction more-or-less in the open (SE26, "After a successful roll for one of these traits, make the reaction roll as
soon as the reaction occurs."). And thus it's easy to figure whether one needs to request a Luck Reroll.
Empathy has two
big modifiers (applicable to all forms, except maybe the Empath Talent): Hypersensory -50%, which makes it suffer significant penalties unless the user can focus three senses on the target (so don't take it if your PC is blind/deaf/lacks a sense of smell), and Remote +50%, which allows one to use Empathy without a personal meeting (as long as you can either hear or see the target, even over phone or video).
There are at least three poor man's substitutes for Empathy: Discriminatory Smell with +50% Emotion Sense, Body Language (the skill) and Detect Lies. There are some differences in how they work, of course. Most notably, Detect Lies and Body Language can be resisted by Acting and other skills, which means that fooling a true Empath is harder; conversely, Empathy
can't tell which part of a statement is a lie - it merely alerts the user that there
is at least one lie in the statement.
I'm currently playing a character with Empath Talent 4, and I consider it totally worth the cost. In a way, knowing what NPCs 'feel like' is probably better than spending the same [20] on Reaction Bonuses,
as long as one uses the knowledge to push their buttons properly (it takes some effort to pull off right). The boosted skillset helps too. SOP:Read People [1] is a must-have, IME.
Conversely, I've seen players have Empathy mostly lying around because they do not put their PCs into positions where they would benefit from the trait. I feel that it's one of those traits where you can't hope it'll just passively help you out all the time like Charisma or Serendipity does.
IME, people are less inclined to take Animal and Spirit Empathy (but not unheard of), and almost never Plant Empathy. I also feel that it's generally a better idea to shell out [20] for Empath Talent 4 than to get Empathy [15]. Sensitive [5] is kinda very,
very meh.
What experiences do others have with the traits?
Thanks in advance!