Primer
This is a summary of the working design. The game is still in the pre-alpha stage.
Checks
When you attempt something uncertain, roll two dice and add them together. For most tasks, a total of 6 or higher succeeds. Which dice you roll depends on how good you are:
| Level | Roll |
|---|---|
| Unskilled | 2d4 |
| Skilled | 2d6 |
| Veteran | 2d8 |
| Expert | 2d10 |
| Master | 2d12 |
Getting better means rolling bigger dice, which is why a Master still occasionally rolls a 2 — and why an Unskilled character can succeed, but never excel: 2d4 can't total 9, so Tier 2 is out of reach forever.
Six is the target for routine work. Harder tasks raise it, on a ladder of five rungs:
| Target | Difficulty | Skilled | Master |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | Routine | 72% | 93% |
| 8 | Difficult | 42% | 85% |
| 10 | Exceptional | 17% | 75% |
| 12 | Perilous | 3% | 62% |
| 14 | Unfathomable | — | 46% |
Difficulty is a wall for the untrained and a slope for everyone else. An Unskilled character is finished at Difficult — anything above it is arithmetically out of reach, not merely unlikely. A Master declines gently across the whole range and never quite reaches certainty.
Hitting the target is a Tier 1 result — you did the thing. Every 3 points above raises it a tier: 6–8 is Tier 1, 9–11 is Tier 2, 12–14 is Tier 3. Higher tiers mean more damage, a cleaner landing, a better price — whatever the action calls for.
Roll double 1s or double 2s and something unusually bad happens. It's always two results out of the spread, so the bigger your dice, the less often you come apart — an Unskilled character fumbles one roll in eight, a Master one in seventy.
Three per player, per session, gone at the end of it. Spend one to retry with a different attribute, deal max damage, shake off a condition, or avoid taking damage entirely.
Core Abilities
Raw talent, before training. Attributes carry the roll when no skill covers what you're attempting, and they're what you roll to avoid something bad happening to you. They use the same dice ladder as skills.
| Rating | Roll |
|---|---|
| Poor | 2d4 |
| Average | 2d6 |
| Excellent | 2d8 |
| Amazing | 2d10 |
| Superhuman | 2d12 |
The ladder extends past both ends. Above Superhuman, add a d12 per step and keep the highest two; below Poor, add a d4 per step and keep the lowest two.
Never flat modifiers — always extra dice, the same size as the ones you're already rolling. Add one die per point of each, cancel them one-for-one, then roll what's left and keep the best two (leftover Advantage) or the worst two (leftover Disadvantage).
Declare you're helping and grant Advantage — but the extra die is sized to your mastery, not theirs. An Olympic weightlifter helping a child lift a loveseat means the child rolls 2d4 and 1d12, keeping the best two.
Natural talent shows without overshadowing practice. If you're Skilled or better and your linked ability die is bigger than your skill die, you have Aptitude: it never changes your odds, it changes the texture of a success.
Everyone rolls, then characters may swap a single die with one other character — the strong carrying the struggling. The group's result is the lowest roll remaining.
Combat
A character can absolutely go down if the crew gets careless, but permanently dying should be rare and usually the result of a genuinely bad decision, not a random unlucky roll. Big Damn Heroes get hurt, keep fighting anyway, and mostly walk away.
Each side rolls 1d6 once for the whole fight. The winner picks someone to act, then the other side picks someone, and so on — teeth interleaving one at a time until everyone has acted.
About 3 seconds. One Move (7 meters, splittable around your action), one Action, one Bonus Action.
Melee targets the defender's own Melee die size — a Veteran defender is target 8. Ranged always targets a flat 6: you can't dodge a bullet or a laser no matter how quick you are.
The same size for every character, forever. It doesn't grow with advancement and doesn't scale off any ability — people in this setting don't get physically tougher just because they got better at their job.
| On the sheet | Pips | Damage | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 plain circles | 1 each | 1–2 | No penalty. A story to tell later. |
| 2 split in half | 2 each | 3–6 | Disadvantage on physical actions. |
| 2 split in thirds | 3 each | 7–12 | Disadvantage on everything. |
Attacks deal damage — a plain number, equal to the attack's tier times the weapon's rating. A fist is rating 1, so it deals 1, 2 or 3; a gun is rating 2, so it deals 2, 4 or 6. Fill in that many pips, left to right. Your condition is simply the largest circle you've marked, so the sheet does the translating. Fill all twelve and you're Down — dying within minutes without aid. Penalties never stack; use the worse one.
Distance
| Scale | Unit | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Tactical | meters | Fights, rooms, ranges |
| Orbital | kilometers | Ship-to-ship, orbits, approaches |
| Interplanetary | AU | Crossing a system |
| Interstellar | light-years | The shape of the sector |
Ranges are plain numbers of meters, so a grid is optional. If you use one, a square or hex is one meter and one human takes up one square. A two-square hallway is a perfectly reasonable two meters wide.