Recon Stunts (Action)

Heroic Action Role-Play

Main article: Action

Recon stunts cover basic hide-and-seek abilities.

Alertness

Trigger Action (Defense)

You get a +3 bonus to your Recon when it is used as the difficulty of an action. This includes both staying alert and keeping your head down. Outside of action scenes you cannot initiate actions or stunts of your own while staying alert.

Make Camp

Limit Break

You can find a safe hiding place and rest spot. A camp can be a campsite, cave, hidden cove, safehouse, untraceable flophouse, abandoned attic, sheltered mausoleum... Whatever suits the story. You must be out of direct harms way and a reasonable distance away from the base of your enemies. Make a Recon check against the median Recon among the opposition; on a success your camp is hidden well enough not to be found except with extensive searching (which allows the opposition a Recon check against your Recon skill.

Scan

Basic Action

You look around, trying to spot hidden enemies and dangers. Make an opposed Recon check against an enemy trying to Sneak. Scan cannot find someone using Surveillance unless you are actively out scouting for them.

Sneak

Basic Action

Make a Recon roll and compare it against the highest Recon rating among the opposition. If you fail and it is important to know who spotted you, observers can make opposed Recon rolls to see who noticed you first, but generally this is a moot point as long as the enemy is able to communicate. You must be in some plausible place of concealment to sneak, but the GM is encouraged to be lenient on this. Basically you need to give a suitably cinematic description of your stunt.

Your Sneak roll gets a bonus or penalty based on circumstances, as normal - generally being more than their Mind meters away or on the other side of a solid barrier is good for a +3 bonus.

If successful you are under cover and hiding, effectively invisible. You cannot be selected as the target of an attack and gain a +3 bonus to Dodge against area attacks. Any attacks you make in the shot where you exploit your cover gets a +3 attack bonus and your attacks do not allow Trigger Actions.

You need not make additional Recon rolls to stay hidden and can perform other actions as long as you remain still and under cover, but opponents can actively use Scan or schticks to find you. You become visible if you call attention to yourself, move, or take an action that directly affects someone other than yourself. If you start hidden, move (thus revealing yourself), and then successfully sneak again, enemies have only a vague idea you are in the area.

Stay Low

Trigger Action (Defense)

When you are hidden and an opponent tries to Scan and find you, you can stay low and gain a +3 bonus of your Recon for defense.

Surveillance

Hours

You stay hidden at a distance (from 50 meters to several kilometers away, depending on cover), trying to keep a place or person under surveillance while concentrating on staying hidden. You are far away and under cover, enough that foes will only find you if you fumble or if they start an active search, but you have a limited perception of what goes on. If your opponent's security measures are strong, you have to focus more on hiding and will notice less. Range as such is not a factor, but tighter security keeps you at a distance while also making the task harder. Surveillance of a person is harder than of a place. Depending on what surveillance methods you use, it might be pretty easy for the enemy to prevent or disrupt your surveillance, such as by unpredictably changing modes of transportation or using a secret passage. Paranoid enemies might use such methods even if they don't know they are under surveillance.

To gain information this way you make an opposed check against the targets' Recon. You gain valuable information based on the outcome of this roll; if the outcome matches the target's Mind you gain clear and important insights into the target's activities. On a failed roll, you learn obvious details and trivia; if the negative Outcome matches your Mind you learn misleading information or the target notices your spying. If organized security exists, use the Recon value of the chief of security. Depending on the security present your opponent might use other skills to defend, such as Create for an electronic counter-surveillance system.

Track

Basic Action

You can retrace the path of other creatures. If those creatures were aware they might be tracked and are trying to avoid it, this is a roll against their Recon or Ride, otherwise the difficulty is their Reflexes. The roll is heavily modified depending on the situation.

Condition	Tracking Modifier
Each creature being tracked	+1
Each hour since the tracks were made	-1
Hard ground	-5
Traffic or interfering tracks	-5
Heavy Traffic	-10 to impossible

Tracking requires constant Basic Actions to stay on the trail, making tracking rather arduous and impossible to do when moving quickly. An actual roll is only needed every hour and at each obstacle, such as a stream, branch in the road, or other problem.