At the Table

Root and Stem is a game of conversation and consequence. You describe what your character attempts in plain words, and the Game Master narrates the world, calls for rolls when the stakes are real, and keeps everything moving. Your dice are yours — the GM never rolls for you.

What a round of play looks like

You say what you attempt. When failure would be interesting, the GM names the skill and the required tier, then asks for a graduated Action Roll. The die you reach for is not fixed: it grows with your Skill-to-Challenge Ratio, from a humble d4 when the odds are against you up to a d100 when you are master of the moment. You roll, add your Proficiency, your Grace, and any flat bonuses, and aim to land on the tier the task demands — anything from Trivial (2+) to Nearly Impossible (5). Then the fiction moves, and you describe what happens next.

A Partial Success means you got there, but at a cost. That cost is where stories live.

Resting

A full rest — eight hours of sleep — is how you put the world back in order. Grace resets to 0, your Health and Mana refill, your spent Luck returns, and a Minor Wound begins to fade. Resting is not wasting time; it is the pause that lets Creation catch up to Entropy. Lean on it.

Hero Points

Hero Points are your session's personal reserve of cinematic agency. You hold at most 3 at once, and every session begins fresh — they reset to 0 and never carry over. Spend one to reroll a die, to auto-succeed a Luck Save before the roll, to lessen an injury, or to add +20 to a roll. Spend two to turn a Critical Failure into a Partial Success. Spend three to snatch life back from the edge and stabilize at 1 HP. Earned through reckless success and brave play, spent on the moments that matter — that is the whole economy.

Luck Saves

When pure chance — not training — decides whether you live, the GM calls a Luck Save: a plunge from a height, a collapsing floor, a fatal blow gone wide. You roll one die tier up from your action die and try to meet a target that stays fair at every level. You may spend Luck 1-for-1 to push the result, and what you spend comes back on a full rest.

The spirit of the thing

At the heart of every session sits the tension between Creation and Entropy — growth against decay. Take calculated risks, chase novel challenges, rest when you must, and push when it counts. See the Core and The Roll and the Grace chapters of the rules for the numbers behind the rhythm; here, just play, and let the story decide.