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 the roll can be 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 negative one or possibly even negative two dice. And with Action Rolls, adding additional Outcomes can bump that back up, so you start at with zero dice for one Outcome, add another Outcome, so add one dice, so now you roll one dice but need to assign two result dice.
The way you roll things like 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. That pair of dice, together, count as one result dice in the dice pool.
Repeat that last step if you're still short result dice. Eventually you'll have enough results, and can assign them. When you assign a pair, you use the lowest, and discard the rest.
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.
You may be asking "Can't I just discard the highest dice earlier, why this roundabout thing of 'pairs'?", and the answer is that you have to keep them until you're ready to assign them, because anything that triggers off of or alters specific dice rolls, like Crits and Invoking a Distinction for Drama, happen before you discard dice.
This fact, interestingly, makes it way way more likely for you to Crit as you go down from 'at least one dice' in your roll. One dice can't crit, zero dice can, somehow, because you really roll two. Doesn't matter you're taking the lowest, you still crit off two 6s.
If you're in a bad enough situation that you're rolling 'negative two' dice, things get crazy, because you're actually rolling six dice. The odds of that roll getting at least two sixes and thus a Crit are 26%. The odds of getting three sixes and thus two Crits are 16%, which is more than your odds of getting a single crit rolling essentially the best possible Action Roll of 5d, which requires maxed-out dots and two extra +1d from something.
Or, since this is a TV show: If you're completely unskilled at something and also very badly hurt and you have to do it anyway...you probably will fail, that's just how it works. But the audience sees that you were very clearly outclassed. The narrative hit you when you were down, and you went down and you're dragging yourself to your feet. You can pretty much get away with anything for a bit, no matter how unrealistic.
Sometimes it pays to do the absurd things that you're pretty sure you're going to fail.