Pool of Dice

Keepers in the Dark, like all Forged in the Dark systems, uses a pool of d6s. You don't ever roll anything else, at least not for the mechanics of the game.

You are almost always going to be rolling one of your Action or Attribute score.

Each die is interpreted as such for an action roll:

• 1-3 = Failure - You have failed. Whatever you were trying to do has not worked, or whatever you were trying to avoid has not been avoided.
• 4-5 = Partial Success - You succeeded, but not perfectly. What you were attempting did mostly work, or you partially avoided the problem.
• 6 = Success - You succeed perfectly. You have done what you were trying to do, or avoided completely the bad.

For a resistance roll, which we'll get to later, it's similar:

• 1-3 = 3 stress
• 4-5 = 2 stress
• 6 = 1 stress

Crits

Rolling two 6s at once, at any point, is called a Crit. If you somehow roll three at once, you get two crits, four gets you three crits, etc.

Every crit gets you an Edge. See Stress and Edge for more information.

You then assign the dice as normal. You then select one (Or however many crits you just got) of the Outcomes, and increase or decrease (Whichever is better for you) the Effect. You can even do this for Outcomes that did not get one of the 6s.

Zero and Even Negative Dice?

What do you do if you have zero dots in something? You don't have anything to roll, so you can't get a result to assign to an outcome. But it's even worse than that, because Level 2 Harm and some abilities can give you -1d to some rolls, so you can in theory be required to roll -1 or even -2 dice. And for Action Rolls, multiple outcomes can bump that back up, so you roll 1 dice but need two results. Huh?

The way you roll this is that you start by rolling whatever dice already exist in the dice pool. Don't assign them yet.

If you're short at least one result, you roll two additional dice, discard the highest, and add the lowest to the result pool. Repeat this step if you're still short. Eventually you'll have enough results, and can assign them.

If you think that sounds like 'Disadvantage' in other systems, you're right, it is. If you're rolling 0 dice for one outcomes, it is exactly that. It's just more complicated when you are multiple dice short of what you need.