The Roll
There is one roll in this game. You will learn it in about ninety seconds and you will never learn another, no matter how strong you get.
Build a pool of ten-sided dice and throw it. Every 7 or higher is one hit. Every 10 is two. Count your hits, compare them to what the GM asked for, and the fiction moves.
Building the pool
Four things go into the pile:
| Source | Range |
|---|---|
| Attribute — Body, Reflex, Mind or Will | 1–5 |
| Approach — Force, Finesse, Focus, Fade or Face | 0–5 |
| Power Rating, if a power is doing the work | 0–5 |
| Edges — a piece of gear that plainly applies | +2 each, two maximum |
Pick the Attribute and the Approach that match what you said you were doing. You do not get to shop for a favourable pair; you get the ones your described action actually used. If the pool would exceed twelve dice, stop at twelve and turn every two extra dice into one automatic hit.
What the GM asks for
| Hits needed | What that means |
|---|---|
| 1 | Routine, under pressure |
| 2 | Tricky |
| 3 | Hard |
| 4 | Extreme |
| 5 | Should not be possible for you |
When two people want incompatible things, you both roll and the most hits wins. The difference between the two totals is how decisively.
Zero hits is not nothing
If you roll no hits at all, that is a Setback, and a Setback is not a wasted turn. The GM must introduce something: a complication, a new fact about the world, a cost you can choose to pay. Sometimes you still get what you wanted and it costs you a Wound, or Heat, or the thing you were standing on.
You will never hear "nothing happens" at this table. The dice do not have that outcome.
The five Approaches
There is no skill list. There are five ways to do things, and every action you describe is one of them.
- Force — overwhelm, break, endure
- Finesse — precision, acrobatics, sleight
- Focus — analyze, hack, concentrate, hold a power steady
- Fade — stealth, escape, move through the city unseen
- Face — persuade, intimidate, read, lie
This is deliberate. There is nothing to look up and nothing to argue about, and a character who is good at Force is good at every problem that force solves, forever, without a list telling them which ones.
Remember two of these in particular. Face and Focus ignore Scale entirely — which is the single most important sentence in this book, and it will not make sense until the next chapter.