9 · Dice, and Not Knowing

Dice are optional here, and how they behave was decided once, at installation, by whoever built your world.

Three things were set, and none of them can change later without breaking the feel of everything that came before:

MODE        whether dice exist at all, and how deep the maths goes
NOTATION    what is rolled — d20, 2d6, d100, dice pools
DIRECTION   whether high is good, or low is

9.1 · The four depths

Mode is not a yes/no. It is a ladder, and a world sits on one rung of it.

None     no modifiers exist at all. Capability is narrated. A strong
         character moves the crate; nobody ever says by how much.
Flat     the stat IS the modifier. The indie-RPG default.
Linear   the stat is converted by a formula. The d20 family.
Table    the stat is looked up on a curve, for worlds that are not lines.

Here is the trick almost nobody spots: the curve carries a label per band, and labels resolve in every mode — including None. So a world with no dice whatsoever still gets unremarkable, practised, peerless out of the same table. It narrates the word instead of the number. Nothing is lost; the arithmetic just never surfaces.

DON'T · Don't ask what you need to roll. You will not be told a target,
and that is deliberate — a number turns a moment into a calculation, and you
would start playing the number instead of the scene.

9.2 · Direction is the one that matters most and gets noticed least

Roll Under inverts every band in the system.

A world configured one way and narrated the other reads as relentless, inexplicable bad luck for weeks before anybody works out why. The tell is subtle, the failure is quiet, and by the time it is identified the campaign has a mood nobody chose.

If you are building rather than playing, the Builder's Manual carries the version of this with the schema fields in it. For you, it is enough to know the symptom: if the world feels cursed and nothing in the fiction explains it, ask which way the dice point.

9.3 · You may not be shown the number

Whether results appear or get narrated is its own setting.

A world can roll honestly, every time, and never once tell you the figure — describing the outcome instead. That is not the GM hiding things from you. It is a deliberate register choice: numbers on screen pull hard toward optimisation, and some tables would rather keep the uncertainty than do the arithmetic. Tales of Maj'Eyal will show you every last modifier; plenty of very good games will show you none, and they are not being coy about it.

9.4 · You will never be told a target

Even in a world with full dice on display, difficulty is named, never numbered.

"That is a Trained lock." — not "DC 15."

Two reasons, and the second is the real one. It keeps the fiction intact, and it stops difficulty from quietly drifting: without a fixed band table, a target gets invented per turn, and the invented one gets a little kinder every time you are losing. The band is set before anyone knows whether you can make it. Set afterwards, it stops being a difficulty and starts being an opinion.

9.5 · Not every roll in this system is your roll

Two different things wear the same notation, and only one obeys your world's settings.

In-fiction rolls resolve something your character is attempting and you live with the result. Those follow your world's dice absolutely.

GM-side rolls are machinery — how the weather turns, how a threat adapts, which of several plausible things somebody does while you are elsewhere. You never see those and they never touch your sheet. They run on their own numbers because they are not about you.

So a world with dice switched off completely is not a world with no uncertainty in it. The uncertainty moved behind the curtain, where it was always more interesting anyway.

9.6 · Narrative-first worlds

If dice are off entirely, outcomes come from the fiction — what your character is capable of, what the situation permits, what the world would actually do about it.

This is a complete configuration, not a degraded one, and it is what most worlds built here end up running.

The thing worth knowing: uncertainty is preserved either way. A world without dice is not a world where you always succeed. It is one where the reason you failed is legible instead of numeric — and legible is, for most people, the thing they actually wanted from the numbers.