FATE Da Cool Shit! Skill: Investigation

Overcome: Investigation obstacles are all about information that’s hard to uncover for some reason. Analyzing a crime scene for clues, searching a cluttered room for the item you need, even poring over a musty old tome to try and find the passage that makes everything make sense. Racing against the clock to collect evidence before the cops show up or disaster occurs is a classic way to use Investigation in a challenge.

Create an Advantage: Investigation is probably one of the most versatile skills you can use to create an advantage. As long as you’re willing to take the time, you can find out just about anything about anyone, discover nearly any detail about a place or object, or otherwise make up aspects about nearly anything in the game world that your character could reasonably unearth. If that sounds broad, consider the following as just a few of the possibilities for using Investigation: eavesdropping on a conversation, looking for clues at a crime scene, examining records, verifying the truth of a piece of information, conducting surveillance, and researching a cover story.

Example Stunts:

• Attention to Detail. You can use Investigation to defend against Deceive attempts at lying, by analyzing micro-expressions.
• Eavesdropper. When you Succeed on an Investigation create advantage action by eavesdropping on a conversation, you can discover or create one additional aspect. Only one of the aspects, your choice, gains a free invocation.
• The Power of Deduction. Once per scene, you can spend some minutes of observation and 1 fate point (FP) to perform an Investigation create advantage action exhibiting your deductive prowess. For each +shift, you can discover or create either a situation aspect or an aspect on the target of your observations. Only one of the aspects, your choice, gains a free invocation.