Performance
Trait Description: Performance covers all forms of artistic expression, from storytelling and acting to dancing and singing. It also includes the theatrics of making rousing public speeches. Characters with this Ability also know how to perform a wide variety of songs, plays, dances, jokes and stories.
Specialties: Improvisation, Playing the Lyre, Singing, Storytelling, Solo Performances, Dance, In a Particular Nation, To Members of a Particular Social Class
Trait Effects: Someone with Performance 1 can sing popular tavern songs in a pleasing voice and dance well enough to get invited to the next ball. Someone with Performance 3 can move an audience to tears with a speech or tell stories so engrossing that guards ignore their duties to listen more closely. Someone with Performance 5 can start a riot with a short speech or play a song so beautiful that it will touch the heart of one of the Demon Princes of Malfeas.
Dramatic Rules for Performance
Prayer (Performance)
Creation is an animistic world in which gods exist for every facet of life and every force in the universe. At the bottom, halfaware least gods hold sway over specific objects, such as individual weapons or tools or rocks. At the top, the Incarnae govern the journey of heavenly bodies through the firmament and hold sway over the Celestial Bureaucracy that ostensibly governs all gods. Anyone can pray to a deity, making an offering to get its attention so that it actually listens to the prayer rather than simply consuming the petition's meager Essence. The dramatic action to secure a god's attention is a (Charisma + Performance) roll at a difficulty of (7 – the Resources value of the sacrifice). Players of priests (those who live a full-time life of worship and commune) subtract one from the difficulty of all prayer rolls. Among the Exalted, the Zenith, Midnight and No Moon Castes are all priests regardless of vocation, as are all Sidereals. Praying can take anywhere from a moment for extremely simple requests to involved ceremonies lasting days at a time (the elaborate exercise of which typically qualifies as a stunt). For bloodier gods, a sacrifice of sentient beings has an effective Resources value equal to the combined permanent Essence of all the victims.
A successful prayer means that the deity understands the request/message and is inclined to provide aid, although such aid will usually be subtle and seldom immediate. Greater divinities might send guiding portents or good luck, the exact effects of which are left to Storytellers to implement. Terrestrial deities might intervene directly with Charms if doing so serves their purpose, but they are also comparatively weaker and can provide less aid. Botching a prayer means the deity is offended and requires an offering with a Resources value equal to its permanent Essence (maximum 5) before it will listen to any further requests.
Demons can also be targeted with prayers, the serpentine Essence of which winds it way through cracks in the world to whisper in the hearts of those banished to the Yozi Realm. Unfortunately for their infernalist slaves—though fortunately for the world—demons have no power to intervene in the world unless they are within its borders. Even then, the bindings of summoning often shackle their response.
The collective worship of many beings generates and focuses Essence almost like a manse does, as explained in the Cult Background. Unlike spirits, Exalted cannot hear the prayers of those who worship them, though they can benefit from Essence granted by any cults large enough to produce such.