The Core Roll

Almost everything you attempt in this world comes down to a single roll of ten-sided dice. Learn this one roll and you know how your character picks a lock, talks a guard down, fires a shotgun, soaks a beating, resists a vampire's gaze — and, at the far end of the scale, whether you wrench that car door off its hinges. It is the same engine every time; only the numbers attached to it change.

The Pool

Your pool is a handful of d10s equal to a relevant Attribute plus a relevant Skill. The Storyteller tells you which two apply. Trying to aim a pistol at a moving target is Dexterity + Firearms. Sweet-talking your way past the bouncer is Charisma + Persuasion. Keeping your nerve while something claws at the window is Composure + Resolve. Attributes run from 1 to 5, Skills from 0 to 5 — an untrained Skill is 0, so you roll only your Attribute. A newcomer with Dexterity 2 and no Firearms training rolls 2 dice; a marksman with Dexterity 4 and Firearms 3 rolls 7.

Reading the Dice

Roll the pool and count every die:

• Each die showing 6–9 is one success.
• Each die showing 10 is two successes.
• Each die showing 1–5 is nothing.

That is the whole mechanic. No adding totals, no comparing to a target number, no arithmetic beyond counting. In a hurry: glance at the dice, count successes, done.

Difficulty and Margin

The Storyteller sets a difficulty for the task:

• 1 — standard. The default for almost everything.
• 2 — hard. A demanding shot, a tense lie, a rushed repair.
• 3 — extreme. The kind of thing that makes other people stop and watch.

Your margin is your successes minus the difficulty. A margin of 0 is a bare success — the bullet hits, the lock clicks, but nothing more. A margin of 1 or 2 is a comfortable success. The higher the margin, the better, faster, cleaner the result, and the more leeway the Storyteller has to hand you genuine advantages.

Exceptional Success

When your margin reaches 3 or more, you score an exceptional success. This is the roll that ends a scene. The single shot drops the vampire at your feet. The forged passport passes not just this checkpoint but the next three. The interrogator folds and tells you everything, unprompted. Exceptional successes are where the Storyteller is expected to be generous — the strong bonus outcome is the point of the roll, so take it.

Failure, Costs, and Complications

If your successes fall below the difficulty, you fail. But you rarely just fail. The default assumption is that failure succeeds at a meaningful cost — or fails with consequences attached. The bullet misses but your gun jams. You talk your way in, but the secretary remembers your face. You fail outright only when the situation truly offers nothing to salvage.

On top of that, every 1 you roll gives the Storyteller license to introduce one minor complication: a dropped key, an unwanted witness, a snapped shoelace at precisely the wrong moment. Three 1s, three small disasters stacked on your head. A roll can succeed and carry complications — that hot getaway drive works, but the 1s mean a police cruiser clocks your plate.

Willpower

When the stakes are worth it, you can push. Spending 1 Willpower point adds 3 dice to any one pool — attack, defense, resistance, anything. You decide after you've seen your roll; that's the point of Willpower: to turn a close failure into a success, or a success into something spectacular. You have as many points as your Composure + Resolve, and they start full. Spend them like the emergency brake they are. At 0 Willpower you cannot spend, and it shows — you move like a man who's given up.

When Do You Roll At All?

Only when failure matters. Opening an unlocked door, walking down a street, tying your shoes — no roll, no drama. The Storyteller calls for a roll when the outcome is genuinely uncertain and something real rides on it: your skin, your cover, your conscience. If failure would be uninteresting, you simply succeed. This keeps the dice where they belong — at the moments that matter — and lets the story breathe between them.

A Worked Example

Vera is sighting along a rifle at a target 40 meters out, dust in the air, wind shifting. The Storyteller calls it a standard shot: Dexterity + Firearms, difficulty 1. Her Dexterity is 3 and her Firearms is 3, so she rolls 6 dice.

The dice come up 3, 6, 8, 10, 1, 7.

• The 6, 8, and 7 are each one success — that's 3.
• The 10 is two successes — that's 5.
• The 3 is nothing. The 1 is nothing — and it's a complication waiting to happen.

Five successes against difficulty 1 is a margin of 4: an exceptional success. The bullet hits dead center. The Storyteller rules the shot is so clean it startles the shooter beside her, who flinches and gives away his position. But that 1 still bites — a scuffed boot scrapes loose gravel as Vera adjusts her stance, and two hundred meters away, someone turns their head toward the sound.

Had she spent 1 Willpower to add 3 dice first, that pool becomes 9 dice — and her near-certain hit becomes a near-certain exceptional one. Willpower is exactly for this: when the margin is already good but the cost of missing is too high, buy yourself the difference.

One Roll, Every Scale

The same handshake powers the whole game. Picking a lock is Dexterity + Larceny against difficulty 2; a handful of successes opens it clean, a margin of 0 means the lock yields but your pick snaps off in the mechanism, and 1s drop your tools in the dark. Hurling a car across a parking lot — a punch of pure rage — is Strength + Brawl against difficulty 3; raw successes beyond that are the difference between a dented door and a full launch through a storefront. It is always dice, successes, difficulty, margin. Master the core roll and you have already learned the language every other chapter speaks.