Resolution and Ranks
When you attempt something dramatic, or try to avoid danger, roll one of your Abilities. The GM chooses the ability based on the situation – you’ll often be able to influence this.
Take your ability rank, and move it up 1d6 ranks and down 1d6 ranks: in other words, roll 1d6-1d6.
Your outcome will be a rank. Ranks are ordered into rough groups of three, with some extreme results.
- Terrible: whenever the dice show a minimum result, or you roll lower than Poor, it is a Terrible result – an unmitigated disaster. This is shown on the character sheet and in rolls as Red.
- Poor: A Poor success is a definite failure, Here the GM gets to make a move against you, if using Apocalypse World-like rules.
- Mediocre: This is just like a Poor result, but at GMs option, can be treated as a lesser defeat of some kind.
- Fair, Good, Great: These can be thought of as the partial success ranks. You succeed, but your opponent succeeds as well. In some situations, the GM might differentiate these ranks, but they don’t need to. When facing a Danger (see below), you suffer Harm. This level is shown in some shade of yellow or green. (As an option, Fair can be an even more complicated success, a lesser success of some sort.)
- Superb, Spectacular: These are shown in Blue, and are unqualified victories over your opposition or the obstacle. No failure effects accompany this level of success.
- Legendary: This is shown in Black, and only happens when the dice show the maximum possible result. It is an unqualified victory, with some extra benefit on top. If you don’t know what bonus they should be, or you and the GM do not agree, refresh one of your aspects.
An Optional Rule
Fair and Mediocre can be treated as borderline results, results that need to be qualified with a different Ability. When you get one of these rolls, you need to roll again to find what the actual result is. On a Fair roll, the player narrates some conflict that grows out of the current situation and chooses a a different ability. On a Marginal result, the GM chooses a different ability.
So Fair results are biased towards success, since players will choose their best abilities. Mediocre results likewise should be biased towards defeat – the GM is encouraged to choose the players lowest abilities. In this way, Fair and Mediocre results rarely happen – they simply provide opportunities for other results.
Note: you must always roll a different ability to the one that caused the roll.
Inigo is facing the six-fingered man in a contest of Ferocity. The roll is Fair, so it’s a borderline victory. Inigo’s player must choose a different ability, and chooses Courage, representing intimidation and his opponent’s bravery. He narrates a duelling exchange, then declares as their swords cross that he states in a menacing tone, “You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Now a Courage roll is made to replace the Ferocity roll.
Warning: if you use this rule, there’s a strong chance that players will succeeed more than they should. The worst ability players have is Mediocre, and even there there’s almost a 50% chance that a reroll will give a victory, whereas on a Fair result, every ability that players choose has more than a 50% chance of leading to success – often significantly more. So, only use this rule if you want to see more successes than the default.
A Thing About Losses
We can take an XP idea from Apocalypse World: if the roll ends up as Poor or Terrible, the character gains 1 XP. This means players will sometimes avoid using an aspect to boost the roll.
When aspects grant +1d6, and rolls have a change in effect on every 2nd rank, there’s at least a 1-in-6 chance that an Aspect gives no benefit. Optionally, the GM can decide that the aspect is not used if the quality of the roll does not change.
Though this incentivises aspect rolls when you get a very low Poor result – why not roll if you will get it back on a failure? So, maybe instead use a rule: if the outcome doesn’t change, you get 1 XP. This isn’t cumulative with the XP for Poor results.
Actions and Reactions, Threat and Danger
In game terms, there are Actions and Dangers (sometimes called reactions). Any time players declare a goal, it is an Action: “I want to convince the magistrate to help me,” “I want to capture the big bad,” etc.
The GM has a pool of Threat they can use to create Dangers. These are extra actions the players must take before they can attempt their Action. The GM will have from 3 to 15 Threat per player character to distribute across the session. Exactly how much is defined elsewhere (but it is initially quite low, with a minimum of 3 – but as characters grow more powerful, their adventures become more dangerous).
Let’s say three players come across a cultist planning to sacrifice a virgin to summon an evil god. The players as one shout their intention to rescue the virgin. At this point, the GM spends three Threat and describes the evil cultist’s minions swarming the PCs. If any players defeat their challenge, the GM can spend more Threat to create more challenges (maybe there are more minions, or the cultist has supernatural powers granted by the god they worship, or the virgin mistakes them for attackers and accidentally resists being rescued, and so on).
Dangers as Obstacles
When a player faces a Danger, they cannot accomplish any other action until the danger is dealt with. Any character can deal with a danger, but you need to deal with any Dangers you personally face. first.
Our heroes each face a danger, the minions. Alexis handily defeats the minions facing him, and things Georgia will have a better chance of freeing the cult victim. So, he attacks Georgia’s minions, freeing her up to take her own actions.
When the players finally attempt their Action, if not blocked by another Danger, it is decided by that roll. The situation frequently determines what Ability must be used, but players can always choose to just not do it. This is at their option.
Dangers and Harm
Harm is an important [art of the system, and is described below.
Narrating Actions
Each Ability has a range of things you can do with it. Some abilities are great for certain kinds of things, and not great for others. This is partly established by the campaign and setting.
If you attempt to use an Ability for something it’s not suited, the GM will tell you that – since every player-character has every Ability (but not at high ratings!), the fallback will often be to use the Ability that does suit the situation you are in. The player may then change their actions.
When facing a Danger, you might not have the ability to refuse the roll. If the evil cultist’s minions are attacking you, they are attacking you and you have to react to that.
But for player Actions, the player can often back out. “Attacking the evil cultist takes Ferocity? I’m Poor at that, I’ll sneak quietly away.”
Only roll if there is a risk involved in failure. Sometimes the GM will say, “You can’t do that,” and sometimes they’ll say, “You can do that, but it’s dangerous so you risk Harm.” And they might say, “Yes, you do that, what happens,” or, “You can do that eventually, do you want to commit the time?”
For situations where there is no risk, take a character’s rank into account in deciding if a roll is necessary, as well as deciding what is humanly possible (in this game). “You want to walk across this chasm? Even with your Spectacular Daring, you can’t do that. You can’t even leap it.”
Whenever you allow a roll against an Ability, you are declaring that this thing is possible for at least some people in your game.
Initiative and Creating Actions and Dangers
These should arise naturally out of the situation and shouldn’t appear too arbitrary. Players likely create one Action per Scene. Generally, create a cliffhanger before each player attempts an Action and ask what the other players do. In this way, you easily create a situation where each player is attempting an Action (that action might be to help another player).
Once you know what the players are doing, create Dangers if desired (and maybe Compels), and after the Actions and Dangers are done, move on to the next Scene.
An adventure cannot end while Threat remains, and the GM cannot face a PC with more tha one danger at a time. Eldritch Powers might tweak this system – they are dealt with elsewhere.
Harm
The damage and conflict section of the sheet looks like this (the second pic is for sheets where you don’t use colours on certain boxes):
Characters have three levels of Harm – Weary, Hurt, and Doomed. You take Harm on Dangers – on a green success, you take none. On a red result, you always take Harm (and that Danger is stll here), on a Fair (or Yellow) result, the Danger is removed but you take Harm in the process.
Each time you mark Harm, check the lowest free one of these. Harm doesn’t just mean injuries – it can be any kind of setback.
If you go beyond Doomed, you are out of the scene and roll Courage. On a failure, you die or are otherwise removed from the campaign (or must take a Manifestation if you can, if you want to keep playing the character). On a successful roll, you are found recovering somewhere (still Doomed, and probably scarred from the experience). Of course, if you want to use a Manifestation, you can just do that, and bypass the Courage roll entirely.
Aspect Use
After seeing the result, you can describe how an Aspect comes into play and roll +1d6 to add to your roll. This is almost guaranteed to turn a failure into a victory (and the system is based on you using these quite often).
If you use an aspect and the outcome is still a failure, you can leave the scene. Describe how uou are defeated or taken out but live to fight another day.
You can only spend one aspect on a task. You can’t add together multiple aspects to guarantee success.
Special Uses: Concession, Sacrifice, Refresh, and Compel
These are special situations that players can choose which can greatly improve their longevity. Each of these can be taken once per Chapter.
- Concession: After describing how you fail a roll (you don’t actually have to fail, but in using this, you turn it into a failure), the character can immediately recover that Harm level and leave the scene. Describe how this happens, and you can create a friendly NPC just as if creating a Story Detail.
- Sacrifice: After failing a roll, the character can immediately recover that Harm level and describe how they lose someone or something of value – they absorbed the damage instead and die or are destroyed. The player can choose to leave the scene or remain for another attempt. The current attempt is considered stalemated.
- Refresh: The player-character chooses another character and reveals something about themselves that makes them vulnerable in some way to another PC. This is a roleplay-scene. The character immediately recovers one level of Harm. One of the chosen PC’s can reciprocate and benefit from this at the same time.
- Compel: The GM creates a situation that creates a new complication while playing off one of the character’s Aspects. Compels are covered in more detail under Aspect (as are Concessions). The user immediately refreshes one Aspect (this supersedes any text in Aspects). Players can ask for a compel and suggest something that the GM may agree with.
Concession and Sacrifice both present a way to leave a situation, but that role might not be needed. Players can often leave after winning against a Reaction. The GM might use another Reaction to pursue them, depending on the situation. Both Concession and Sacrifice ignore that – the character has left the scene, (if that’s what they choose on a Sacrifice), and that must be respected.
Experience Gain
On any Terrible result, if you accept that as the final outcome, you learn from your mistake and add one to experience. This is in addition to any other XP gained during the chapter – add it immediately.
Influences
This system is obviously inspired by Apocalypse World, but adds a few wrinkles. You can choose to ignore the ranks, or involve them in the narration of outcomes.
