Awareness
Trait Description: Awareness measures how well the character keeps track of her surroundings and how well she knows how to use all five of her senses. Awareness allows a character to actively look and listen for danger, track her enemies through the jungles of the South or notice the subtle signs of an ambush by the Wyld Hunt.
Specialties: Seeing in Poor Light, Tracking, Listening, Sensing Ambushes
Trait Effects: Someone with Awareness 1 can usually overhear a conversation in an otherwise quiet tavern. A sailor with Awareness 3 is usually the first one to notice a pirate ship on the horizon. Someone with Awareness 5 can tell the number and location of a band of assassins waiting in a pitch black room by listening to the sound of their breathing.
Dramatic Rules for Awareness
Noticing Details (Awareness)
One of the most useful functions of the Awareness Ability is to counter the Stealth of others (see Sneaking/Hiding and Unexpected Attacks). However, Awareness also enables characters to perceive their environment. By its nature, Exalted ordains the Storyteller as the eyes and ears of the players, making her responsible for narrating every detail of the world. Without basic narration, players have nothing for their characters to react to. From a rules perspective, all such details qualify as reflexive diceless (Perception + Awareness) checks at difficulty 0, meaning that characters automatically succeed unless they lack a particular sense with which to receive that information. If the Storyteller has additional details in the scene that she wishes to restrict to those who are more observant, she should call for everyone to make actual reflexive (Perception + Awareness) rolls at standard difficulty, establishing the successes necessary for each detail. Characters can also deliberately attempt to take in their surroundings if they believe they might have missed something. Using Awareness thus reflects situations where a sharp-eyed character notices the distant speck of a rider on the horizon and points it out to those less observant.
Vision (Awareness)
In broad daylight under optimal weather conditions, sufficiently observant characters can spot objects when they are merely specks on the horizon. However, many conditions can interfere with visibility. Exalted handles such conditions by labeling poor visibility as a -1 external penalty and no visibility as a -2 penalty. For every condition, characters face two associated values measured in yards of radius. The smaller value is the distance at which clear vision ends. Any attack or other physical action intended to affect a target beyond this radius suffers the poor visibility penalty. The second, larger radius is the distance at which murky vision ends. Targets outside this range are effectively invisible, imposing the penalty for no visibility. Without the assistance of Charms or stunts, characters cannot make any ranged attacks to a distance greater than twice the “murky vision ends” radius, unless their targets are individually illuminated (such as by carrying a torch).
Torches and other light sources supplant the regular illumination within their radius, granting sufficient illumination to read inside the clear vision area. Unfortunately, torches and other open flames are visible for several miles, alerting anyone hiding in the darkness to the location of the torchbearer and permitting ranged attacks against these highlighted targets as if they were in poor lighting.
While truly invisible characters also impose a -2 external penalty to hit them, vision penalties do not apply to blind characters. Instead, characters who cannot see clearly suffer a -2 internal penalty, while true blindness increases the penalty to -4. Functionally, blindness affords the same approximate hindrance as true darkness, but the nature of the penalty is different because darkness is an external obstacle whereas blindness impairs a character's ability to function.
Sample Visibility Conditions
| Condition | Clear Vision Ends |
Murky Vision Ends |
|---|---|---|
| Bonfire* | 10 | 20 |
| Fog, Day | 10 | 30 |
| Fog, Night | 0 | 3 |
| Full Moon, City or Forest | 0 | 3 |
| Full Moon, Grass or Leafless Forest | 25 | 50 |
| Full Moon, Snowy Ground or Desert | 50 | 100 |
| Heavy Snow, Day | 0 | 20 |
| Heavy Snow, Night | 0 | 0 |
| No Moon, City or Forest | 0 | 0 |
| No Moon, Grass or Leafless Forest | 0 | 3 |
| No Moon, Snowy Ground or Desert | 5 | 25 |
| Torchlight* | 3 | 5 |
* Indicates a light source that supplants visibility within its radius.