Hi all,

I have recently started to read the rulebook, and loving it so far, although coming from old d6 I am having troubles with some concepts. Hope you can help me!

Please tell me if the following is correct:

1. - Failure counters success. You can have success in excess and triggers beneficial results (like more damage), but having failure in excess doesn't bring extra pain to the PC's.

2.- Threat counters advantage. You can have them both in excess. It's the active player (the player whose turn is currently on) the one who decides how to spend advantage. It's the GM the one who decides how to spend threat.

3.- Triumph and Despair have two effects: as success and failure, and also to trigger special effects. This second "ability" cannot be cancelled. so it's possible to have in a single roll Triumph and Despair at the same time. Tipically, a player decides how to spend Triumph, and the GM decides how to spend Despair.

4.- When not in combat (for example, calculating Astrogation), any Advantage or Triumph is also selected by the active player, and any Threat or Despair, by the GM.

5.- When building the dice pool, in general and as a rule, it's the player who contributes with positive dice, while the NPC's bring the negative dice. Even for opposed checks, unless rules suggest the NPC should be the "active player" (comes to mind Defensive Slicing, where you add setback dice to opponent's roll)

Thanks all!

1. Correct.

2. Correct

3. Sort of. A Triumph can do different things, but for it to trigger a crit or weapon effect the attack has to be successful.

4. Correct

5. In an opposed check, yes.

Hi all,

I have recently started to read the rulebook, and loving it so far, although coming from old d6 I am having troubles with some concepts. Hope you can help me!

Please tell me if the following is correct:

1. - Failure counters success. You can have success in excess and triggers beneficial results (like more damage), but having failure in excess doesn't bring extra pain to the PC's.

2.- Threat counters advantage. You can have them both in excess. It's the active player (the player whose turn is currently on) the one who decides how to spend advantage. It's the GM the one who decides how to spend threat.

3.- Triumph and Despair have two effects: as success and failure, and also to trigger special effects. This second "ability" cannot be cancelled. so it's possible to have in a single roll Triumph and Despair at the same time. Tipically, a player decides how to spend Triumph, and the GM decides how to spend Despair.

4.- When not in combat (for example, calculating Astrogation), any Advantage or Triumph is also selected by the active player, and any Threat or Despair, by the GM.

5.- When building the dice pool, in general and as a rule, it's the player who contributes with positive dice, while the NPC's bring the negative dice. Even for opposed checks, unless rules suggest the NPC should be the "active player" (comes to mind Defensive Slicing, where you add setback dice to opponent's roll)

Thanks all!

You're correct on everything but to clarify:

1. Some skills do have a potential chance to be effected by failure (correct me if I'm wrong, but medicine might have this? I don't have my CRB...) Degree of failure can have affects and can be acted upon narratively. While 'no successes' may mean that nothing happened, per say, Failure can dictate how bad something happened. For instance, PC 1 attempts to use a ranged heavy attack, but PC 1 rolls no successes, perhaps they simply miss... Or their gun jams (no successes, no advantage/threat, no triumph/despair). However, if the have three failures, they fire, miss so bad that the blaster bolt bounces around the walls. It doesn't have any 'mechanical' effect, but it allows the players to use the dice, if you will, to aid in their narration. This isn't required but its a way to use the dice if you'd like.

5. You are correct, but if skills are direct interactions with NPCs they are opposed rolls. Players also get increased degrees of difficulty when attempting checks against multiple NPCs.

5) For opposed checks yes. The rest of the time the GM just selects the dice pool based on what he feels is appropriate. The GM is encouraged to regularly find reasons to apply at least one setback die to most checks, and GENERALLY if the GM wants to upgrade a difficulty (change a purple die to a red one) he's to spend a destiny point to do so (but he can just upgrade it if the check is to do something especially dangerous, difficult, or Alderaan shatteringly stupid).

Also not all "opposed" checks need to actually be opposed. If the NPC is a throwaway extra and the check isn't vital, the GM can just throw down a normal difficulty pool to keep the game moving.

Thanks all for the input. I have been reading more deeply the rulebook, and also checking is those forums, and I've noticed that although there's a table with some examples of how to spend threats, advantages, triumphs and despairs, am I wrong to suppose that basically you can make up any possible result if the players and GM agree it's good to the story? In other words, you are not constrained when you adjudicate these results and are free to add other possibilities?

What sorts of possibilities? I only ask out of curiosity because the idea of the narrative game is that you don't just roll and generate numbers but that you 'narrate' what your character is doing. Spending the various results really is a about telling a story. So whatever you can think up that sounds cool and seems appropriate.

The reason of my questioning is that I come from games very rules-strictly and never tried narrative games like this before. So I am used to have tables and rules to tell me how to do things. I was having problems with the dice results because I wanted guidelines on how to spend threats, despair, etc. I found the table on page 206 but that only covers combat, and reading the forums I realized people use their own interpretations to spice up the game. That's what I meant by possibilities. For example, if a pc bluffs his computer roll to slice a system and a Despair symbol appears, the computers silently notifies the intrusion to the closest sysop and a force team is sent to deal with the hacker.

Yes, the idea is that you can make things up to match the situation, the table is just a list of suggestions that establish common effects and a baseline to use when generating your own results. How exactly you interoperate the results will be different from roll to roll. Once you get the hang of it you almost don't need the table at all.

Also, for best results...

1) gm, don't arbitrate every result. If the players get triumph or advantage, give them a chance to tell you what that does. If they can't decide, then arbitrate.

2) If they just decide on an effect, ask them "and how does that happen?" This is the point of the shared narrative, the player colors the story with his own ideas. An upgrade on the opponents next check is meh, having an upgrade because the player just thew his flaming moe in the opponents face, now you've got action and details to run as well as a mechanical effect.

If you want there's an order 66 podcast from a couple episodes ago where they compare and contrast the narrative mechanic to the D20 mechanic that goes over the differences between a this system and one that has tighter rules.

In other words, you are not constrained when you adjudicate these results and are free to add other possibilities?

This is true, and the heart of the system. The table you referred to is a handy guide to get an idea of the scale of impact, so you can apply that sense of scale in non-combat situations (eg, suffering and recovering Strain is always an option). The skill descriptions also have some guidelines. Ideally the GM will also have planned some ways to apply extra results tailored to the situation. The adventure modules have great examples of how to do that.

Thank you all! Now everything makes much sense. I'll look for those podcasts, since we played SAGA a lot back in the day.

Thank you all! Now everything makes much sense. I'll look for those podcasts, since we played SAGA a lot back in the day.

D20 Radio

And the episode you want is "Kung Pow Chicken" (They compare D20 systems to hamburgers and EotE to Chinese food)