Once a character has established a rapport with another person, the character can converse with that person to draw out information from them as part of the conversation. To do this, the character uses small talk to put the other person at ease, listens carefully to the hints or nuances that the other person drops, and gently probes for more information. This is sometimes known as pumping someone for information.
To successfully obtain information in this way, a character must make a dice roll using his/her Empathy (including drawing out information specialism) + IQ and obtain a better dice roll result than the other person's resistance dice roll. Note that the other person's resistance dice roll result is modified based on the sensitivity of the information to the person (e.g. pumping someone for the location of a mafia boss is much harder than asking for the latest court gossip).
The dice roll result determines what information (if any) the character obtains about the topic discussed, as follows:
| Information gathering dice roll result less Resistance dice roll result | Meaning |
| Zero or lower | No information |
| 1-3 | General impression about attitude to topics discussed but no specifics. |
| 4-6 | Useful information that is in the public domain. |
| 7-9 | Non-specific hints or cryptic clues that indicate whether he/she knows something secret about the topic and may help the character deduce the secret. |
| 10 or more | A faux-pas or freudian slip providing a reasonably obvious clue to any secret knowledge, or even voluntarily telling the character the secret. |