Swinging a sword, picking a lock, running your hands over a suspicious wall, getting a fire lit in a room that does not want you there — all of it comes down to one procedure. Learn it once and you have learned the whole game’s arithmetic.
You do not roll one die and add your bonuses to it. You roll a pool — several ten-sided dice at once — and then you count how many of them came up well. The total is meaningless. What matters is how many dice cleared the bar.
The bar is six. A die showing six or better is a success; a die showing two through five is nothing at all. One success is enough to do the thing. More than one means you did it well, and the game usually finds a way to make that pay.
Ones are the exception to “nothing at all”: every 1 you roll cancels one of your successes. A wide pool is not purely free — more dice is more chances to shine and more chances to fumble, though the odds stay firmly in your favor.
The bar does not move. It is six for a veteran and six for a novice, six for the lock on a storeroom and six for the lock on something that has been waiting for you. Nothing in the dungeon is harder to roll against than anything else.
This is worth sitting with, because it is where most systems differ. Difficulty in this game is never expressed as a higher number to beat. It is expressed in what you are bringing and what is pushing back — how many dice are in your hand, and whether something on the other side is rolling too.
A die that shows a ten is a success like any other, and then it does something extra: it earns you another die, rolled immediately. That new die can also come up ten, and earn another. A pool can, on a good night, pay out considerably more successes than it had dice to start with.
This is the game’s only source of genuine drama on a single roll. There is no separate critical hit, no natural-twenty table. There is just the small, live possibility that a roll keeps going — which means no pool, however thin, is ever mathematically incapable of a spectacular result.
Two things feed it: the attribute the task draws on, and the skill that governs it. Might and Melee for a sword. Perception and Search for a wall that looks wrong. Every skill has an attribute behind it, and the two add together into the handful you throw.
In practice a freshly made character throws something like half a dozen dice at the one thing they are actually good at, and two or three at everything else. That gap is enormous. The difference between a trained pool and an untrained one is not a modest edge — it is the difference between usually and rarely.
It also means the first dots are the precious ones. Adding a die to a small pool changes a character’s life; adding one to a large pool is a refinement. Spend accordingly.
Dice can be taken away, too. Fighting in the dark costs you one. Running yourself past exhaustion costs more than that. The system never raises the bar on you — it just thins your hand, which amounts to the same thing and is much easier to feel.
Some rolls are against the world. A wall does not resist being searched; a lock does not get a vote. You roll, you count what is left after your ones, and if anything is still standing you have succeeded. The extra successes are usually just satisfaction.
Other rolls are challenged. There is someone on the other side, and they roll too — and their successes come straight off yours. This is the whole of combat. Your attack does not land because you beat a number; it lands because you produced more than the thing you swung at could take away.
Whatever survives that subtraction is your margin, and margin is the reason a fight is not a coin flip. A hit that barely got through is a hit. A hit that got through by a wide margin drives the weapon in much deeper. Skill, in this game, does not make your sword sharper — it makes you land the kind of blow the sword deserves.
There is a safety net under the whole system, and it is deliberately invisible.
When a roll comes up with nothing — not a poor result, an absolute blank, no die in the handful reaching six — your Fortune is quietly asked whether that is really how it went. If luck answers, the roll is made again, and you keep whichever attempt went better. You are never told any of this happened. You simply notice, now and then, that you did better than the dice seemed to be offering.
The rules it plays by are narrow, and worth knowing:
It is Fortune alone that answers — no skill, no training, nothing you can practice. A character with real luck is asked often and says yes often; a character with none is never asked at all, because there is nothing to ask with. This is the whole of what Fortune does, and it is why the attribute is worth something despite governing no skill of its own.
It fires only on a total blank. A roll that produced something and then lost it to ones is a bad roll, not a whiff, and luck does not get involved.
It happens once. The second roll is the end of it, whatever it brings — there is no third chance, and no chain of them.
And it is yours. What lives down here does not get a second look at its own bad luck; the net is under your party and nobody else.
Nothing. A roll that ends with no successes — luck asked and declining, or never asked at all — simply did not work. The wall keeps its secret, the blow goes wide, the lock stays shut. The game does not punish a bad roll with a second, separate misfortune on top of it.
What a failure costs is the thing you spent to make it: the moment, the stamina, and whatever the dungeon was doing while you were busy. That is usually enough.