Roll When You Need

Only roll when necessary. Roll d6s. 5s & 6s are counted as successes.

Places, situations, and characters all have qualities. Every quality pos & neg. Crit fail & sux has PC choose place, person, or circumstance: that thing goes good or bad.

Difficulty is rated one thru five, as are abilities. If your ability is equal to or greater than the difficulty you roll normally, looking for one success at least.

If your ability is below the difficulty, you roll and also roll disaster dice equal to the difference. Successes on the disaster dice cause problems, tho you may succeed anyway.

You get to pick a number of effects equal to your successes. The first is always "I accomplish the task," with others being things like "quickly," or "smoothly" or "silently," etc. Disaster successes add things like messiness, being spotted, losing an advantage of some kind, etc.

You can sacrifice successes to reduce the number of disaster dice rolled (e.g., you have 3 in an ability, the difficulty is 5. You roll 2 successes on 3 dice, and spend one to eliminate a disaster die, leaving only one to be rolled against you). You cannot eliminate the last disaster die.

A roll that includes more 1s than successes is a mixed result, regardless of success or failure. If it's a failure (no successes) then there's some silver lining to the outcome. If it's a success the success is tainted somehow (though less terribly than a disaster).

Players roll all the dice. An enemy's "moves" have difficulties instead.

Everyone has stress tracks for both physical and social stress that allow them to absorb hits before going out. A character's physical stress is equal to their Resilience ability, and their mental stress is equal to their Poise. These, like everything else, are abilities.

When a character's stress is filled they take consequences. The first is a minor consequence. The second is a moderate consequence. The third is a major consequence. A character can avoid a consequence by being 'taken out,' removing themselves from the conflict by running away, being knocked unconscious, or similar. If a character takes a fourth consequence they are automatically taken out per the GM's desires - usually death or abject social disaster.

Academics Art Athletics Awareness Brawling Charm Debauchery Devices Endurance Guns Gymnastics Insight Mathematics Melee Performance Poise Science Stealth Subterfuge Survival

In addition to most 'static' abilities PCs have a few that they can pick up: Wealth and Reputation.

A character uses Wealth to make purchases small and large. A character can buy, without trouble, anything that has a cost less than their Wealth (in limited quantities; no buying 4,000 cars at once, for example). They can buy, more or less without restriction, anything two or more below their Wealth score. They can make a check to buy something equal to their Wealth score, as per normal (looking for at least one success). They can also make an attempt to buy something more expensive, and in this case each disaster die success reduces their Wealth by one, permanently (until bought back up with XP).

A character treats Reputation much the same, except that they 'spend' it to gain social favors. This gets them into clubs, gets meetings with the right people, or excuses strange behavior. Reputation outweighs Wealth when it comes to society, legal systems, and the like.

Coincidentally, those with Wealth often have Reputation, and vice versa.

In addition to the abilities listed above characters have qualities and talents.

Qualities are things that are intrinsic to the character and describe something about them. Qualities range from physical descriptors to their ancestry to their personality traits. These features are picked at character creation, though more may be acquired through gameplay or character advancement. Every quality has a benefit and a drawback.

For example, a character that's assertive may also be hot-tempered. A character that's quick to react to danger may also suffer from anxiety. A character that's intellectually astute may also be easily distracted by their own thoughts.

Talents are things a character knows how to do: combat maneuvers, special areas of training, and the like. A character gains one or more talents at character creation and can gain additional talents through character advancement. These include things like halving the time it takes to use or create a device if the character gets at least one success, or allowing a character to move again after striking an enemy, or allows them to leverage their debt to maybe avoid losing Wealth when attempting a purchase above their Wealth level (i.e., a re-roll or something).

Much of this is borrowed from a) Spirit of the Century (and other Fate projects), and b) Apocalypse World.

When rolling, you always cap out at 10 dice in a pool. If you would roll over 10 you pick up one automatic success per two additional dice that would be rolled. E.g., if you’d roll 19 dice you instead roll 10 and pick up 4 extra successes.

This helps handle the natural “50% success ratio meridian” that falls around difficulty of 3 at the high end. When building the game we actually want the difficulty to START around 3: that gives us room to make a curve like:

Simple 1, Easy 2, Moderate 3, Tough 4, Hard 5, Impossible 6+

We want an average adventurer to hit moderate about half the time. That means an average adventurer would be, ideally, rolling about 8 to 10 dice on a roll.

That’s maaaybe too high for the start.

We can find ways to bring the curve down: expand successes to 4-6 rather than 5-6; give folks auto-successes in controlled circumstances (like, say, if you take your time you can pick up one auto-success, if you take a lot of time you can get two; you must have an ability of 2x the # of auto-sux you’re seeking); we can make dice pools BIG to start by making abilities & attributes start at 5 & rated from 1 to 10.

A more-or-less ideal structure, then, is rolling with half the die’s total showing successes: a difficulty of 4 on a d6, or 6 on a d10. That spread gives us a 50/50 on a difficulty of 3 at 5 dice (and every +1 difficulty needs two more dice to hit that same spot).