There are only four rules you need to remember: make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan. Follow my lead and you’ll be fine.-Leonard Snart, Legends of Tomorrow

If You Fail

The roll didn’t go like you wanted, and at least one of the Outcomes is not ideal.

Don’t forget that a Devil’s Bargain is always possible to ask for. But barring that, you have one option.

Push Yourself

Luckily, your character is so skilled you can fix your mistake. You just Push Yourself and you bump up one Outcome on a roll, from a failure to a partial success, or partial success to full success. You don’t have to roll for that, it Just Happens.

However, you then have to immediately do a Resistance Roll using one of your Attributes to figure out how much stress you take, so you do have to have at least one Stress free if you are going to Push Yourself.

Alternately, you you can use up your edge to Push Yourself for free.

Hint

As stated on edge, it is almost always best to use your Edge to Push Yourself, mathematically.

If you use it to Push Yourself, you have saved between 1-3 Stress. If you use it reduce Stress, you have reduced 1 Stress. If you use it to help your roll, you might theoretically come out ahead if that extra die makes a Failure into a Success, but in reality, the odds are going to, at most, be one step higher, which you could have Pushed yourself to get.

The only useful alternatives to consider is that you can also use an Edge to reduce Stress in others, or Assist others for free. But if you’re going to use your Edge on yourself, Pushing Yourself is the place you should use it.

Some Abilities might grant you the option to take one less Stress on a roll, or a specific amount of Stress, or perhaps do something else entirely. Note you can always just use the normal rule instead.

You can only Push Yourself once per Outcome, but you can do it multiple times for multiple Outcomes…if you can afford the Stress.

Incidentally, nothing forbids Assistance on a Resistance Roll, assuming they can justify it narratively. Maybe someone tries to catch you with their own body, or step in front of a punch aimed at you.

This a mathematically a bad idea, assisting you means they’ve just taken one definite Stress so that you have slightly higher odds of rolling higher to take less Stress. But it might make sense if you have taken so much Stress it has become an emergency.

Someone else cannot do a setup on a Resistance Roll. Narratively, they don’t have time for it, but more importantly, it would mess with game balance and flow and plausiblity, if people could just retcon in reasons that you didn’t actually fail to do something. Instead, fail to do it and then retcon that failure into being part of the plot.

Rolling

When you roll to figure out how much Stress you take from Pushing Yourself, the attribute will usually be the one that the Action Roll belonged to. However, it can be other things if they make more sense.

For example, if you were Modifying electrical wiring and failed at avoiding getting electrocuted and took harm, it might be a Body Resistance check to reduce that, even though you were making a Mind-based Action Roll. Ultimately the GM decides which one if there’s a question.

The results are:

  • 1-3: 3 Stress
  • 4-5: 2 Stress
  • 6: 1 Stress
  • Two 6: 0 Stress

Crits

You get zero Stress on a crit because rolling a crit increases the Effect of one of the outcomes of a roll, and the only outcome of a Resistance Roll is the amount of Stress. So increasing the Effect of that bumps it down to 0. Sadly, if you roll a double crit, the extra increased Effect is wasted.

Note that this is the only thing that ever alters the Effect of a Resistance Roll. No ability or anything that changes Effect can do that. Anything that impacts Resistance Rolls will say that directly.

Don’t forget to take your Edge for rolling a Crit!

If you have an Ability that changes the amount of Stress, for example if you have one that allows you to take ‘one less Stress’, it will stack with a crit, meaning you will end up taking negative Stress.