How to Play

You are a hero in a world of swords and sorcery, or a thief in the shadows of a grimy city, or a servant of the gods walking a haunted wood. Somewhere between one and seven of you sit around a table — or gather in a voice room, or type in a shared scene — and together you tell a story that no one has told before. One of you is the referee: the arbiter, the world, and everyone in it who is not a player character. Everyone else plays one character, their eyes and hands in the fiction.

This book teaches you the rules the game runs on. Most tables learn them in half an evening; the rest comes with play.

The basic roll

Almost everything uncertain is resolved with a twenty-sided die (d20).

When your character attempts something risky — striking a goblin, leaping a chasm, recalling a legend — the referee names how hard it is and what you must roll. You roll a d20, add or subtract modifiers, and read the result.

There are two frames for this:

• Ability checks. Roll a d20. Roll equal to or under the relevant ability score (Strength, Dexterity, and so on) to succeed. A natural 1 always succeeds; a natural 20 always fails unless the referee says otherwise.
• Attack rolls. Roll a d20. Roll equal to or over the number needed to hit the target's Armour Class. The better your combat skill and the worse the target's armour, the lower the number you need.

The other dice — d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and percentile (d100) — measure damage, hit points, luck, and chance. You will meet each in turn.

Your character, in a breath

A character is a bundle of numbers that describe a person, plus the personality you give them. The six ability scores are the bones of it: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Your race shapes your body and your limits. Your class is the profession of your adventuring life — what you are good at and how you fight and what you learn as you grow. Everything else — hit points, armour, weapon skill, spells — hangs off those choices.

Your referee

The referee is not your adversary, though they control the foes you fight. They are the world's leading actor and its honest broker. When there is no rule for something, the referee invents one on the spot and the table agrees to live by it. A good referee wants you to succeed as your character, not to win unwinnable fights. When the die goes against you, that is a story too — often the best one.

How a session flows

A session is a conversation with dice. The referee describes a place — the torchlit mouth of a tomb, the smell of it, the scrape of your boots. You say what you do. When the outcome is uncertain and the stakes matter, the dice speak. When it is not, play moves on.

Two rhythms carry most of it:

• Exploration — moving through rooms and roads, searching, listening, deciding, surviving traps and puzzles and choices. Time is measured in turns of ten minutes.
• Combat — when violence breaks out, time narrows to rounds of about a minute, each divided into segments. Initiative decides who acts first, and the fight resolves attack by attack.

And between and around both: conversation. Talking to the wary gatekeeper, the grieving widow, the prisoner, the dragon's herald. Much of the best play happens with the dice unrolled.

What you bring

The summons I bring to you is simple. Bring an idea of a person you would like to be for a few hours — their name, their face, the thing they want badly enough to crawl into a monster's lair for it. Bring a tolerance for luck, good and bad. And bring the generous attention we all owe each other: your character is one thread, but the story is a weaving.

The rest, you roll.