Say you have a 2 in brawn and a 2 in Melee do you upgrade any dice? or do they just stay 4 ability dice?

You do upgrade dice.

In this case, you would be rolling 2 yellow

start with the largest of ability or skill. In a tie it does not matter. upgrade by the amount of the smaller. So for a melee attack with your pool. It would be 2 yellow vs. 2 purple. add situational modifiers. IE fighting with someone engaged with an ally upgrades the difficulty. Adversary talent upgrades the difficulty. things like darkness add setback dice and so on.

start with the largest of ability or skill. In a tie it does not matter. upgrade by the amount of the smaller. So for a melee attack with your pool. It would be 2 yellow vs. 2 purple. add situational modifiers. IE fighting with someone engaged with an ally upgrades the difficulty. Adversary talent upgrades the difficulty. things like darkness add setback dice and so on.

Boost/Setback come from your or the target's being prone etc.

Say you have a 2 in brawn and a 2 in Melee do you upgrade any dice? or do they just stay 4 ability dice?

On a tie you upgrade all the dice. Note that you never add characteristics and skills together, the dice pool is limited by the higher of skill or characteristic.

-EF

Say you have a 2 in brawn and a 2 in Melee do you upgrade any dice? or do they just stay 4 ability dice?

The way my group has always done this is to "build the pool". You start with your Characteristic, in this case a Brawn of two, so you gather two green dice. Your Melee skill of two then upgrades the pool twice. You replace one green with a yellow for one upgrade and then do the same for the second.

Another example would be my character's Stealth roll. Bren has an Agility of four and a Stealth skill of two. I gather four green dice and then replace two with yellows. My character also has a Survivalist talent that allows me to add a blue die on Stealth rolls for each rank I have bought. I have two ranks in the talent, so I add two blue dice. My starting pool, based entirely off of my character sheet, results in two yellow, two green and two blue. I then investigate any other potential factors to increase my pool, such as narrative boost dice, using destiny points, etc. The GM then responds with his own pool and I roll the whole mess onto the table.

I've been using OggDude's character creator since the beginning of our campaign, so the skill is neatly displayed in front of me. I don't technically need to "build the pool" for my own skill rolls, but it's a good way to learn how to construct your roll, especially for newer players.

One minor clarification, Bren, is that you start with skill or characteristic, whichever is higher. So if you had a Stealth of 4 and Agility of 2, you'd have the same dice pool, since you'd build it from 4 green dice from Stealth, and upgrade two based on your Agility.

If you always started with characteristic, the 2 Agi 4 Stealth would result in 3 yellow—base of 2 green, with 2 upgrades making them both yellow, third upgrade making it YYG, and a fourth upgrade making it YYY.

-EF

One minor clarification, Bren, is that you start with skill or characteristic, whichever is higher. So if you had a Stealth of 4 and Agility of 2, you'd have the same dice pool, since you'd build it from 4 green dice from Stealth, and upgrade two based on your Agility.

If you always started with characteristic, the 2 Agi 4 Stealth would result in 3 yellow—base of 2 green, with 2 upgrades making them both yellow, third upgrade making it YYG, and a fourth upgrade making it YYY.

-EF

Very true, thanks for pointing that out!