Pants on Fire

Question: What attribute + ability combo do you use when your players want to lie to someone? I know that with Epic Manipulation this almost becomes moot, but none of the abilities seem to really fit for concealing motivations or lying.

Oh, it's never moot. Dots of abilities become a big deal when you have one and your opponent has ten, and that's not even counting all the Arete users in our home audience.

This is one area in which we don't change the rule from the original book; we use Manipulation + Empathy for lying unless the Scion has a knack/boon/Birthright power that lets them change it. There isn't a perfect lying ability in the game, but I'm not sure there needs to be (good grief, do we need another ability?), and Empathy is the best catch-all ability for it, since it relates to your ability to understand and play off of the feelings and reactions of others.

We have occasionally tinkered with the idea of adding a new ability for lying, along the lines of the World of Darkness's Subterfuge, but we've always tabled it after discussion because Epic Attributes make it less than viable. Manipulation is, itself, subterfuge, after all; you'd just be rolling two of the same stat, rather than two stats that complement each other (to a lesser extent, Charisma + Presence suffers from the same problem, but luckily Presence is versatile enough to be used other ways). So Empathy it is and will remain, for the time being.

We do occasionally entertain alternative ability substitutions for lying in very special situations when the player makes a good case for it and the ability they want to substitute makes more sense. For example, someone trying to bullshit about the historical date of an obscure battle might be able to roll Manipulation + Academics, or someone lying about the intricate workings of a sophisticated security system they know all about might be able to roll Manipulation + Larceny. Once in a while, it works better that way, especially if the player can articulate exactly why it should ("My roll is higher that way" is not an acceptable justification), but in most situations, Empathy covers that ground for us without any real issues.