When your character attempts a task, the gamemaster tells you the Difficulty of the task (a number, usually from 0–5). Check your character sheet and select an attribute and department best fitting the desired action. Add the selected ratings together to establish your target number.
Then, roll 2d20 (sometimes more, depending upon the situation) and check if any die rolls equal to or under the target number. If a die rolls lower, it counts as a success against the task’s Difficulty. The more difficult the task, the more successes are needed.
Roll too high on the dice and you fail to accomplish the task. It may put your character in danger, or worse, but it makes the story more exciting. Rolling a 20 creates a complication.
Whenever you attempt a task and generate more successes than the difficulty, extra successes become momentum, a valuable resource allowing you to improve on your success or save for the group. You don’t begin a mission with momentum — it only comes from taking action.
The normal use for momentum is to improve the outcome of a successful task, such as gaining more information from research, inflicting more damage with an attack, or making more progress with an ongoing problem.
When you succeed at a task, the GM describes what happens. You can then spend momentum to improve what happens, or to gain other benefits such as those from the table below.
When attempting a task, each d20 that rolls a 20 creates a complication, which comes into play once the task has been resolved. If you roll a 20, and you don’t want to suffer a complication, or the gamemaster doesn’t want to impose a complication at this point in the scene, the complication can instead be ‘bought off’ by adding 2 threat. In essence, this turns an immediate problem (the complication) into a problem for later (more threat).
Some circumstances can make a task more uncertain, though not necessarily any more difficult. These factors increase the complication range of a task, making it more likely that complications will occur.
A task has a complication range of 1 normally, meaning whenever you roll a 20 on a d20, you generate a complication. Increasing the complication range by 1 means complications occur on the result of a 19 or 20 on a d20. Increasing the complication range by 2 means complications occur on an 18, 19, or 20, and so forth, as summarized in the following table.
