Rolling The Dice
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 do not need any of those elitist 8-sided dies or 14-sided dies or whatever the kids are always talking about. Just some good old fashion 6-sided ones, and no more than five, that’s the most you ever can roll at once. (Okay, it is technically possible to roll eight, but only in rather insane circumstances.)
You are almost always going to be rolling one of your Action or Attribute score
The amount of dice you’re roll generally works by you look at each mark in that, which is called a ‘dot’ from back when people filled out pieces of paper, and rolling that many dice. Maybe adding some more dice or taking some away first, we’ll get into that later.
When you roll whatever number of dice you’re supposed to, you get a pool of ‘results’. You then take those results and assign them to outcomes, which you can have several for an action roll, and just one result for a resistance roll. You’ll usually want to use the highest results, although that is not technically required.
In an action roll, each result means this:
- 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, it’s similar:
- 1-3 = 3 stress
- 4-5 = 2 stress
- 6 = 1 stress
Crits
Rolling two 6s at once, on any roll, is called a Crit. If you roll three 6s at once, you get two crits, four 6s gets you three crits, etc.
Every crit gets you an Edge. See edge for more information.
Only One Edge
You can have one Edge at a time. You have a bit of a grace period while you’re still resolving your roll, but if you get to the end of that, you only get to keep one. So use the others for something during the roll.
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 you did not give a 6 to.
When dice go zero or negative.
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 number to roll can be even worse than zero, 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 fill up a result pool roll those weird numbers is this:
Start by rolling whatever dice already exist in the dice pool, if any. Don’t assign any results yet.
If you’re short at least one result, you roll two additional dice. Keep that pair of dice. They, together, count as one result dice in the dice pool. Repeat this step step if you’re still short result dice.
Eventually you’ll have enough results. At that point, you’re officially done with the role, and can assign results. When you assign a pair of dice, you use the lowest, and discard the rest.
If you think that sounds like ‘Disadvantage’ in other systems, you’re right, it is. And if you’re rolling 0 dice for one outcomes, it is exactly disadvantage. 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 idea of keeping ‘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 physically rolled 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 -2d, which basically requires you to have either two Standard Harms or one Standard Harm and have some ability that has given you -1d, things get completely crazy, because you’re actually rolling six dice, which is the only time that’s even possible.
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.
But remember, this is a TV show, so, all this actually makes sense within that context: 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.
Likewise, if you have to flip down something because you invoked a distinction for drama, you have to flip down the highest dice, period, which often won’t matter because you’re taking the lowest of each pair! It’s the absolute best time to invoke it.