Bureaucracy
Trait Description: Bureaucracy covers dealing with commerce, laws and official regulations. It includes everything from a thorough knowledge of paperwork to an expertise with bargaining and making sales pitches. This Ability is essential for anyone who wishes to make his living as a merchant or a government official. However, other Abilities are necessary if the merchant or bureaucrat wishes to evaluate goods or negotiate the social complexities of court life.
Specialties: Bribery, Commerce, Bending Rules, Illegal Business, A Particular Nation
Trait Effects: Someone with Bureaucracy 1 can probably bribe a slightly corrupt official or sell aging horses at the same price as a young ones. Someone with Bureaucracy 3 can turn a small sum into a large fortune in a season of careful trading or swiftly negotiate her way through a complex and ill-managed bureaucracy. Someone with Bureaucracy 5 could out-compete the Guild in a local market or reform the Realm's bureaucracy.
Dramatic Rules for Bureaucracy
Evaluating Goods (Bureaucracy)
Although the Bureaucracy Ability largely concerns itself with managing governments bureaus, businesses, criminal syndicates and other organizations, it also measures a character's overall familiarity with the values of assorted merchandise. The Resources system in Exalted deliberately abstracts prices, with each greater dot encompassing a progressively wider span than those below. Therefore, the actual cost of one Resources 4 item might be as much as Resources 3 more than another Resources 4 item. Because of this increasing abstraction, characters can determine the overall Resources rating of an item with a successful (Intelligence + Bureaucracy) roll at standard difficulty. Yet knowing the exact fair market value of an item in its current condition raises the difficulty to the object's Resources value. Besides any narrative benefits, knowing the exact value of something makes haggling easier, providing one extra success if the other party is honest, and three extra successes if the other party attempts to rip the character off. For more details, see 174 (???not relevant). Pricing goods may be achieved instantly for most smaller products, though large quantities that waver with (or change) the local economy might require hours or even days of research.