Dragon Age Inquistion: Coles Empathy

[oneofmanynameless]

Dragon Age Inquisition minor spoilers warning, naturally.

Coles Empathy abilities in DAI seem like they go well beyond the empathy advantage, considering he can not only sense a persons general motivations and current emotions, but also see clear emotional threads in their mind and withdraw thoughts and memories associated with those things. How would you model that?

[David Johnston2]

Cole can use mind-reading and mind probe to dig up thoughts associated with painful emotions.

[scc]

OK, this doesn't really seems like it's GURPS topic, but whatever.

Empathy, the GURPS Advantage, is nothing like what your describing, it gives you a 'gut feeling' about people you meet, for knowing someone's emotions you'd need Mind Probe.

[oneofmanynameless]

Originally Posted by scc

Empathy, the GURPS Advantage, is nothing like what your describing, it gives you a 'gut feeling' about people you meet, for knowing someone's emotions you'd need Mind Probe.

This is a thing that has always confused me. While the description of the empathy advantage says what you just described, in other places there are implications that it can be used to detect peoples ongoing emotional state the same way as body language.

Does the empathy advantage actually provide empathy?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

This is a thing that has always confused me. While the description of the empathy advantage says what you just described, in other places there are implications that it can be used to detect peoples ongoing emotional state the same way as body language.

Does the empathy advantage actually provide empathy?

Empathy provides a bonus to skills like psychology, lie detection and body language.

[Anders]

According to Psionic Powers, the Empathy build there (built using Empathy as the base advantage) gives you a "brief flash of the emotions a subject is experiencing." This gives you the normal bonuses. It cannot be maintained - maybe something like Persistent or Extended Duration to make it last longer? Or build something with Mind Reading?

[oneofmanynameless]

Powers pg. 15 about animal empathy, empathy, plant empathy, and spirit empathy: "These traits make it possible to determine the emotional state and predisposition of another being..."

Powers pg. 48 under Empathy Advantages it starts off with the statement "Awareness of the emotions and general motivations of other beings is central..."

Powers pg. 61 under alternatives to Mind Probe and Mind Reading starts off by saying, "Use Empathy... to "read" emotions instead of thoughts." Which seems pretty conclusive that empathy does grant the ongoing ability to read entities emotional states.

That indicates two different things going on here: the ability to determine predisposition/motivations and the ability to read emotional state.

Basic set describes empathy as giving a picture of peoples general motivations and identity, but everywhere they talk about it it's talked about as though it also gives an awareness of their emotional state and emotional state is a very different thing then motivations and predisposition. Emotional state fluctuates constantly, often within given interactions (particularly when social engineering is at play.) Reading the fluctuations is as or more important than any given emotion.

The body language skill appears to do both of these things as it's description includes being able to use it to gauge feelings (in first sentence) and able to use it like the Empathy advantage (in the second sentence).

Does 2 cp in the body language skill do everything the 15 cp empathy advantage does and more? After seeing empathy discussed in these various locations I've been assuming that, even though basic set does not state that it grants the ability to read emotional states, that it is still the advantage for doing that and I usually allow PCs with the empathy advantage to gauge peoples feelings and emotions (rolling an uncontested IQ check to do so in cases where I would like to make them roll), and generally I've been allowing Empathy to bypass acting skills skills where the body language skill is contested.

Have I been doing this wrong? Does the empathy advantage not actually give the ability to read peoples emotions in an ongoing way throughout the conversation?

[DouglasCole]

This thread confused me a lot until I had the right amount of coffee.

[oneofmanynameless]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

This thread confused me a lot until I had the right amount of coffee.

That's probably my fault. I think my most recent post was after my fifth cup of copy yesterday. It's also not on topic except that I've been a bit confused about the empathy advantage in general in the past about whether or not the empathy advantage actually grants the ability to read emotions as powers seems to say it does. Whether that's just a special effect justifying it's "thin-slice their motivation" effect, or if it's actually the, "you can sense that comment ****** them off, despite their successful acting to cover it up" advantage as well.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless

That's probably my fault. I think my most recent post was after my fifth cup of copy yesterday.

I was just making a name joke that, well, went about as well as one could expect. :-)

Please carry on.