Rolling

Rolling in Runic Flux usually follows the same rules no matter what the situation. Consequently, this gamebook won’t explain how to roll every time rolling dice is necessary. It’s important, then, that you understand this section so you can pay attention to more important and fun things later on.

Rolling Skills

Dice rolling in Runic Flux is meant to be very simple, so you don’t have to put too much thought into it, but also random enough to account for the ridiculous luck (good or bad) that some characters have. For this reason, your character’s base stats are measured with simple numbers from 1 to 10, and each specific skill your character can learn will be between Level 1 and Level 4.

When using a skill in a certain situation requires rolling, follow this procedure:

1. Take one red six-sided die, and add to it a number of dice equal to the level of your skill. Roll them all and add it up.

2. Find out what base stat that skill relies on, and add that stat to the total.

3. Listen to the GM to see if you rolled high enough to succeed in your attempt. This will either be a set number, or you will be competing against another character to see who’s roll is highest.

You may be wondering what’s up with the additional red die. That die is the Wild Die, and it is an important part of rolling. Actually, it doesn’t have to be red, as long as you can tell it apart from the other dice.

The Wild Die

Every once in awhile, out of pure chance, something extraordinarily good happens against all odds — or, something you thought was infallible goes wrong when you least expect it. That’s where the wild die comes in. Whenever you roll dice for an action, you should add an additional Wild Die to the roll.

If the wild die comes up as a 6, you’ll get a additional bonus after you’ve added up the roll. At that time, roll the wild die again. Add the new wild die roll to the total as well This represents a “Critical Success” that ends up being much more successful than you might have anticipated. In fact, if you roll repeated sixes on the wild die, you get to keep re-rolling and adding until you stop getting sixes!

On the other hand, if the wild die comes up as a 1, then you get no points for the wild die roll at all this round. In addition, you must roll the wild die again and subtract the roll from your total. This is called a “Botch” and represents a big fluke by the character.

If you roll a 1 or a 6 on a Botch reroll, however, just subtract it from the total like any other number; don’t roll again.

Similarly, if you get a 1 on a Critical Success reroll, it’s just like any other number; the Critical Success doesn’t suddenly become a botch.

Because of the way difficulty levels work, scoring a Critical Success or screwing up with a Botch doesn’t necessarily mean the character immediately succeeds or fails, but it does mean that something unexpected happens. A character could hit an enemy with a force three times as strong as anyone thought she was capable of, only to be thrown across the room as the end result!

Difficulties

Here are some guidelines for how the GM should measure difficulties in the game. There are five levels of difficulty, and each one has numbers for the difficulty of the roll. However, when a player wants to know about how hard something seems, a simple description like the ones below would be in order, i.e. “It looks pretty easy,” rather than spouting actual numbers.

Description

Trivial (rolling optional)

Easy

Moderate

Challenging

Difficult

Extremely Difficult

Difficulty Number

5 and under

6 - 10

11 - 15

16 - 20

21 - 25

26 and up

Role-playing Without Rolling:

At some points in the game you may just be tired of rolling and want to move on to get to the good stuff. Especially if there isn’t a character opposing someone’s roll, the GM may opt to give a player immediate success in some cases.

The easiest way to do this is to give a character free success whenever they attempt an ability that they learned one skill level ago. For instance, A character with Lift ‘n’ Toss at Level 2 would be able to throw fist-sized rocks without rolling dice, because he learned that ability when he reached Level 1 (see the Skill List to illustrate this example).

When a player’s roll is opposed by another character, but the player character’s skill level is so high that the action couldn’t reasonably go wrong, the GM might go ahead and skip the roll as a freebie. Don’t be too nice, though; role-playing isn’t about instant gratification either!

Measuring Difficulties by Levels:

You’ll see that some of the actions you can use a skill for are listed next to the Skill Level descriptions in the Skill List. If you’d rather measure difficulties according to how the dice usually come up at each Skill Level, use this table instead.

Difficulty Level

Level 0

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Difficulty Number (average)