Trickery

Lying through your teeth and using honeyed words to get others to believe you.

Ability Score(s): Rhetoric + Voice

Usage: Trickery is the art of lying, deceiving, and fooling those around you into believing things which may or may not be necessarily true. Most Trickery checks are made against an opponent's Mental Defense as the DC, or they can alternatively make an appropriate skill check as an opposed check. Usually this is a Sight check.

Believable lies take no penalty or bonus, however the more unlikely a lie is the harder it gets. If the lie is unlikely they increase Mental Defense by 5 against it (or gain a +5 on the opposed skill check), if the lie is far-fetched this is 10 instead, and if the lie is 'impossible' this is 20. Circumstances can also influence how believable a lie is; if they want to believe you it imposes a -5 penalty, if they're drunk or otherwise impaired (such as being delirious) this is a -5, and finally if you possess convincing proof it is a -10.

Attempting to force someone to take an action they don't want to through the use of subterfuge and manipulation. This increases their Mental Defense by 50 against such a check.

Feinting
Feint is a special type of attack in combat by using Trickery against the opponent's Mental Defense, and on a successful hit the opponent takes a -5 to Physical Defense for 1 round. This is usually accomplished by pulling an attack and causing the opponent to flinch, or otherwise messing with their head. It's counted as an attack, and thus is counted as part of an attack for the purpose of Stamina cost.

Disguising Thoughts
A more unorthodox and difficult application of trickery is the ability to control one's thoughts at the present in order to evade methods of reading one's mind. In order to do this you must be focusing on guarding your mind from your thoughts being detected, and upon doing so you make a DC 80 Trickery check. On a successful roll you manipulate the results of mind reading used upon you to be what you want. Doing this requires concentration and has no true set limit, however for each minute that passes concentrating on maintaining this effect you take 1 point of Resolve damage, and if your Resolve would drop to 0 you must make another Trickery check to keep this maintained. If you manage to do so, you now begin taking 1 point of Sanity damage per minute you concentrate on this.