Action Rolls
Explain what you’re doing
State what you’re trying to do, and how you’re trying to do it. Explain it both narratively and say what Actions you’re using. If you’re not sure of the Action, the GM can help. Ultimately, you are in charge of what you do with what Action.
The GM tells you what might happen
They will list one or more Outcomes, which you can mentally divide into ‘benefits’, the thing(s) you’re trying to do (usually just one thing), and ‘consequences’, the things you are trying to avoid. Those are the same thing mechanically, but people tend to think about them separately.
Often, you’ll just get consequences, because your character is so good that the GM thinks you are unlikely to fail. Or just get benefits, because nothing bad is going to happen but the GM wants to see how well you succeed.
Sometimes technically you did roll, even if you didn’t
Obviously there’s a lot of stuff you don’t have to roll for, but there is a difference between ‘No one has to roll for driving a car’ and ‘Your character is so good at that they can just open that lock, no roll’. The second thing is, technically, in the mechanical sense, an Action Roll, you just auto-succeeded on it. Whereas the first is not anything, it doesn’t exist mechanically. This distinction normally does not matter, but something being technically a roll can trigger various character things.
This is one of the reasons that invoking a Distinctions for Drama explicitly requires the possibility of failure, so it can’t be done with an Action Roll that’s an auto-success. But everything else that you can do with an Action Roll is fair game.
If you don’t like what the GM has offered, you may want to pick a different action, or do nothing at all. You don’t ever have to do anything, although sometimes you will already be in danger, and if you do nothing, the bad thing will happen.
You figure out how many dice to roll
For an Action Roll, you start with 1d in each dot you have in that Action, if any.
If you have more than one Outcomes, you add a 1d for each additional Outcome after the first. Then you add any bonus dies that might apply.
And then decide if there’s something that The Odds Look Bad or assist want to do before you roll if the situation doesn’t look great.
You roll your dice
Traditionally, you hurtle them as hard as you can, along the edge of the table, so they go over and you have to scrabble around to find them. Then roll them again but less like a lunatic.
You assign results to outcomes
Those dice are now result dice.
You take each Outcome and assign a different result die to it, and discard any extra dice. Nothing requires you to use the highest dice, but you almost always want to. The meaning of the rolls:
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.
Or sometimes you can just decide you didn’t do it.
If you are in Lesser Peril, and you rolled badly, you can just stop what you were going to do before you do it, if you want. Narratively, you see the upcoming failure and realize your plan will not work.
Doing this means you cannot try that specific thing again, you have to approach the problem from a different direction. So it might be better to actually still fail, if there are no real alternatives.
And once all that is resolved, once everyone is sure what things came out to, the GM tells you the results, narratively.
Gameplay
Rueben: I want to take the knife from the guy waving it around.
GM: That’s tricky from where you are, so I’m going to make you roll for that. You also might cut yourself in the struggle. That feels like Assault.
Unspecific levels of harm default to Moderate, assuming Moderate Peril
Rueben: Sounds good. I have 2 dot in that, two outcomes, so rolling 3d. And got 3, 1, and 5. Two failures and a partial. That’s not good. I do need to disarm him, so I’ll put the partial success in that, and a failure in the ‘not getting hurt’.
GM: You grab at the knife and get the blade, cutting yourself badly. Give yourself level 2 Harm of ‘cut hand’. You do get the knife out of his hand, but can’t keep hold of it. It slides away on the floor, away from everyone.
Player Explanations
In a somewhat carefree setting like this, it’s entirely likely the GM will sometimes ask you to narrate what happened after an Outcome. It makes makes things more interesting if the person who knows the character best explains what happened.
How did you fail at that thing, was it just inability to do it, or sheer bad luck? How did you success at that thing, was it confidently doing it perfectly, or was it a whole lot of mumbling under your breath trying to get it to work?
However, ultimately the GM is the authority if that is what actually happened. And it’s less likely for this to happen on a partial success, because sometimes only the GM knows where they want the difference split.