Sentiment

The Sentiment skill reflects a character’s ability to understand the psychology and emotions of others. It is used to spot emotions like hostility and fear in others, to empathize, and to know how people will behave based on their emotional state. It is also used to see through lies—and understand why those lies are being told.

Sentiment Approaches

The Sentiment skill can be used as follows with the appropriate ring:

• Recall Approach (Earth Ring): Detecting inconsistencies between someone’s current and past behaviour, understanding someone’s fears and responsibilities, determining how best to set someone at ease.
• Survey Approach (Water Ring): Discerning someone’s personal feelings about a person or subject (and whether they are positive, negative, or neutral), detecting whether someone’s intentions are hostile, understanding someone’s desires, determining how best to win someone’s approval or support.
• Theorize Approach (Fire Ring): Determining whether someone has left out important details or told you a lie of omission, catching that someone has left out something important, understanding someone’s convictions and ideals, determining how best to excite or enrage someone.
• Analyze Approach (Air Ring): Knowing whether someone is lying to you directly, knowing how a choice or action will make someone feel, understanding someone’s self-perceptions and vulnerabilities, determining how best to get someone to do something you want.
• Sense Approach (Void Ring): Determining whether someone is under the effects of supernatural persuasion or a supernatural being, studying and understanding one’s own emotions, determining whether someone is acting in opposition to their own desires or is suppressing their emotions, knowing the purpose behind someone’s words.

Seeing through Lies

Sentiment is the skill used to discern whether someone has lied to you, and each approach possesses a different means of doing this. However, remember that this is not the first defence a character has against being lied to—a character’s Passive Insight sets the DC of an opponent’s Deception check to successfully lie to that character in the first place. Therefore, most of the time, a character should not make a check to resist a lie with their Sentiment skill by default.
If the opponent’s check to tell the lie exceeds the character’s passive insight, it means that the character can’t tell that the person is lying offhand, but that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to believe that person, either—especially if they have reason to think there might be contradictory evidence somewhere.
At this point, if the character still harbours suspicions, they can use an action (or even a downtime activity) performing a Sentiment check to find a crack in the lie, based on the approach used:

• Recall Approach (Earth Ring): Lets you know whether the potential liar is behaving differently than in past encounters with you. This might reveal a nervous liar by one of their tells or suggest that they are lying unwillingly. If someone tells an easily verifiable lie, the Earth approach to Recall might also be used to pull forth the correct information needed to disprove them, usually paired with the skill that pertains to the relevant body of knowledge.
• Survey Approach (Water Ring): Lets you know whether someone has your best intentions at heart. This doesn’t reveal whether or not they’re lying, but it might give you a hint not to trust what they say either way.
• Theorize Approach (Fire Ring): Lets you figure out whether someone neglected to mention something important. However, it’s less useful against direct lies.
• Analyze Approach (Air Ring): Lets you know whether someone lied directly, but if they constructed their lie carefully enough, it might not help you get an answer.
• Sense Approach (Void Ring): Lets you uncover what someone wants to accomplish with their words. This may help break through a lie, but it is almost always useful as part of the greater game of intrigue.