2.2 Rolling Dice

When you need to determine whether something succeeds or fails, you roll a die. This can happen as part of using a specific ability that tells you exactly what to roll, or because you tried to narrate your character taking an action that has a dramatically relevant chance of failure. In either case, you’ll roll a single ten-sided die, also known as 1d10. You’ll add some modifier that represents how skilled your character is at the particular thing that they are trying to do. At the GM’s discretion, they may also give the roll an extra bonus or penalty based on the circumstances that your character is in. If your die roll is high enough, your character succeeds at whatever they were trying to do. Otherwise, your character fails, which may sometimes have additional consequences.

In Rise, it’s entirely possible for characters to be so skilled that they succeed at what they are trying to do even if you roll a 1. Likewise, there are tasks that are so obviously impossible for your character that they cannot possibly succeed. In those cases, there’s no reason to roll! Of course, the GM is the final arbiter of whether rolling is necessary. They may have information that the players do not.

In some cases, you roll multiple dice at once. This generally happens when you deal damage in combat. A collection of dice is called a dice pool. Dice pools are written with the number of dice, followed by “d”, followed by the size of dice to roll. For example, 2d6 means you roll two six-sided dice.