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, it's similar:

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

When you're done, you assign the results to outcomes. Resistance rolls are only going to have one possible outcome, how much stress you take, but action rolls can have multiple outcomes. That will be explained more in the relevant sections.

Rolling two or more 6s, at any point, is called a crit, and for an action roll, you might also get some sort of additional bonus on the outcome(s) if the GM can figure one out, and for a resistance roll, you don't take any stress at all. Additional, regardless of the type of roll, you get an edge and clear a stress.

Negative rolls?

But there's an obvious problem. What do you do if you have zero dots in something? You don't have anything to roll, so you can't assign anything to the outcome. But it's even worse than that, because level 3 injuries and some abilities can give you -1d to some rolls, so you can in theory be required to roll -1 or -2 dice.

Whenever that happens, you have to roll with disadvantage. First, take the number of dice your stats tell you to roll, which can be zero, and roll them. Then roll two additional dice, and take the lowest result. If that's still not enough results, do that same thing again with two more dice, until you get enough results to assign one to each outcome.

This is not a good thing to be doing, and it's recommended you do anything else to change the odds if you can.