Empathy
SenseLight- Cost
- 1 FP
- Activation
- Action
- Range
- 30 ft
- Recommended Lv
- Lv 1+
Effect
As an Action, you extend your senses into a creature's surface feelings within 30 ft. You learn its current emotional state — calm, afraid, hostile, grieving, or deceptive — and whether its most recent statement was a deliberate lie. A creature that does not wish to be read can resist with a Wisdom saving throw against your Force DC, sensing the brush of your awareness. This reads the emotional truth beneath the words, not the specific thoughts above them.
At the Table
A Padawan sits across the cantina table from a Twi'lek fixer who swears the cargo is "clean, friend, completely clean." The player spends 1 FP and takes an Action to reach out with Empathy against the target 4 feet away. The fixer doesn't want to be read, so the GM rolls a Wisdom save against the Padawan's Force DC — and fails. In a flicker the Padawan feels the man's slick layer of hostility under the smile, and knows for certain that last sentence was a deliberate lie.
In the Lore
Empathy belongs to the Sense discipline, the branch of the classic Control–Sense–Alter triad concerned with perceiving the living Force and the feelings of others. Reading emotions and detecting deception are foundational Jedi skills: in The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn gauges Anakin and others through such impressions, and across canon and Legends Jedi routinely "sense much fear," anger, or deceit in those they speak with. Because it touches the living Force gently rather than dominating a mind, this kind of empathic reading sits comfortably on the Light side, distinct from the invasive mind-probing and influence the Sith favor. Telepaths and especially attuned species — and beings like Jedi who train the Sense disciplines — are noted for feeling the emotional currents around them without ever hearing a single spoken word.