Charisma is used to bullshit (Bluff), Wisdom is used to Sense Motive, in 3.5 at least.
Eta: you made your Reflex save to edit the post before I corrected you LOL
On the other hand, I’ve long suspected that Stickworld has a “genre savvy” skill, which is Cha-based. Elan and Tarquin both have high cha and have maxed out their ranks, so they’re both very good at it. Xykon hasn’t bothered with any ranks, or only one if it’s trained-only, but his monstrously-high Cha means that he’s still pretty decent at it. Haley has a decent Cha, and since she’s been dating Elan, has been dropping a few ranks in it, so she’s OK at it, too.
The fake one certainly has a new chain on it.
All those protection spells they put on the real one probably keeps it from even getting minor srcratches that ordinary objects routinely acquire during normal use. That would make it difficult to tell the difference between the real phylactery and the fake one.
As for the real one, the last we saw of it, Redcloak put it in his Bag of Holding.
Redcloak had a master craftsman copy, literally, “every scratch” on the amulet. Assuming he cast the same spells on it, there would be no way for Xykon to know it’s a fake.
That doesn’t make sense, since the craftsman didn’t have the original to compare it with. Yes, I know that’s what RC said, but it still doesn’t make sense.
I guess i would have thought that a thing that contains… something like your soul… would feel special to you, in a way that an exact physical replica wouldn’t.
I assume RC worked on it with him, describing every scratch and correcting any mistakes. Bear in mind that RC is more familiar with the phylactery than Xykon is - after all, while it may contain Xykon’s soul, RC was the one who actually wore it all the time.
Apparently not.
The problem is that memory of things like scratches is not going to be very good. Even if it’s something you look at all the time,[*] which this was not. He was wearing it around his neck, not looking at it.
[*] As an exercise, put away your smartphone and then describe all the scratches on its screen. See how accurate you are with that. If you don’t see any, hold it at an oblique angle to a light source so you can see the reflection of that light. That should show scratches you don’t normally notice.
RC’s memory doesn’t have to be very good - it just has to be better than Xykon’s.
Redcloak says “Every detail, every scratch, exactly as I remembered them” so I’m going with describing it from memory and having a stronger awareness of what his Holy symbol looked like than the average person is aware of their phone.
I believe it was his old Holy symbol doing double duty as Xykon’s phylactery, wasn’t it?
He probably stares at it while praying or something
Not to mention that he probably knows it really well by touch.
Plus, it may not have been a spontaneous plan. Redcloak may have considered replacing the real phylactery with a fake as a contingency plan back when he still had the real one in his possession and therefore put some effort into preparing for that possibility.
This is what I assumed. He’d specifically taken the time to memorize it in detail in order to be able to pull this off whenever he could find a craftsman he could trust (both in skill and in secrecy). Also, with all the protection on it, the scratches probably didn’t change over time–they were just the ones it got before the protections were on it. And he clearly didn’t bother with the chain, since he just said he “replaced” it.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if there was some way to magically boost memory, either. Any spells y’all can think of?
I like the idea that it’s hard to lie to Xykon due to his wisdom/charisma score. No magical restriction needs to be there (since Sense Motive would detect deception, even you were telling the truth, I believe). But it’s still wise to not risk him getting suspicious enough to use such spells.
Technically, RC doesn’t have to have a great memory of the phylactery. If the craftsman made a good enough mold of it, then all the surface damage would be copied, too. That would allow the craftsman to “age” the new one accurately.
At the time that Redcloak had the Fakelactery made, he didn’t have access to the real Phylactery, as it was lost thanks to V and Blackwing. So no mold.
Where does it say that he started the fake fabrication process after the original was lost? I suspect that he had begun it long before that confrontation.
That’s certainly possible, but there’s no textual evidence for that claim, and Redcloak does describe the scratches of the Fakelactery as “exactly as he remembers it”
But my point still stands that one does not have to rely on memory alone to reproduce the original. There are actual techniques to carry over fine details accurately.
Redcloak says this in a panel where he has both the real and fake phylacteries in his hands, comparing them. I think this is more praising the (dead) craftsman than commenting on his own memory.