Investigation

Investigation is the skill you use to find things out. It’s a counterpart to Alertness - whereas Alertness revolves around situational alertness and surface observation, Investigation revolves around concentrated effort and in-depth scrutiny

Full Article: Actions

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 pouring 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.

Investigation is probably one of the most versatile skills that you can use to create an advantage, because as long as you’re willing to take the time, you can find out just about anything about anyone, or discover nearly any detail about a place or object. Likewise, it provides you a lot of power to make up aspects about nearly anything in the game world that your character could reasonably unearth.

Because that sounds broad, consider the following as just a few of the possibilities: 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.

Investigation isn’t used to make attacks.

Investigation is not usually used to defend

See also: Stunts (list)

You can use Investigation instead of Empathy in order to defend against attempts to use Deceit against you. What others discover through gut reactions and intuition, you learn through careful observation of microexpressions.

On a successful Investigation roll to create an advantage by eavesdropping on a conversation, you can discover or create one additional aspect (though this doesn’t give you an extra free invocation).

Once per scene you can spend a fate point (and a few minutes of observation) to make a special Investigation roll representing your potent deductive faculties. You may discover or create an aspect for each shift you make on this roll, on either the scene or the target of your observations, though you may only invoke one of them for free.

You may use Investigation in place of Stealth when shadowing someone.