Tests, Opposed Tests, and Attacking

This is a basic post to give you the overview for those that have never played End of the World, or a similar d6 system. If you don't have the corebook I'll give you the basics of what we need to play here. If you've played other RPGs the basics of skill checks (tests) are here and they determine most everything in the game.

Make Checks:
If you've played an RPG before you know many things you do require you to make checks using your stats. This game is no exception. If you want to climb a rope, drive a car through a building, talk your way out of a standoff, or fend off the mindless undead, you need to make a check, or as they are called in this game, a 'Test'. The basics are as such:

1. DM Determins appropriate characterstics for the test.
2. Assemble a number of positive dice and negative dice to roll (always d6s)
3. Roll the dice and, after all factors have been accounted for if there is at least one positive dice left that is under the stat number you are rolling with you succeed.

Assemble Dice Pools:
You always get one positive dice to start any task. Then you and the DM add a number of positive and negative dice to the pool based on various factors.

Positive dice can come from positive features, equipment that may help you, assistance from your friends, and other situational benefits that can aid your task.

Negative dice are added from the tasks danger or difficulty, negative features, traumas, and any other situational hinderences that may cause failure.

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Example:

You are trying to pick the lock on a door as a horde of the undead swarm closer and closer to you. You start with a positive dice. You add another positive because you found a lockpicking kit, and another because you have a positive feature of "Can pick locks". That book you picked up at the library seemed useless at the time, but now look where it got you.

On the downside you get a negative dice because of the stress of the zombie horde baring down on you. You are also working with the trauma of a sprained wrist, normally not such an issue, but it is making this dexterous task very difficult, so you have another negative.

So your pool is:
- 3 positive dice
- 2 negative dice

You can try and make arguments for adding more or less of either, but GM has final say.
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Once per test you may also push yourself to add a positive and negative dice to the pool.

Rolling and Results:
You roll both your positive and negative dice at once (or in GamersPlane you roll as two separate pools of d6s.) and then remove any positive and negative dice that match. This is good because it removes negative dice. It is also bad because it may remove successes. Once matches are removed if there are any positive dice that remain that are under your stat number for the task (dexterity in the lock picking example), you succeed.

However, succeed or fail, any remaining negative dice in the pool add stress to your character and they creep closer to death, insanity, or a complete catatonic social shutdown. There are rules for built up reduction in stress we can touch on later.

Rolling Against Others:
This works just like a regular test. Each person assembles a dice pool, rolls, removes matches, and counts successes. The higher success count wins. In a tie the higher stat value wins. Stress is still incurred on both sides in the event of negative dice remaining in the pool.

Attack:
You simply make a dexterity test, but instead of just a single dice for having a single piece of equipment, you now add dice based on how hard the item is to wield as a weapon (could be positive or negative dice added for this depending on how unwieldy the weapon), and the weapon will generally (but not always) give you a boost to the amount of physical stresses you apply to your opponent.

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Example:

A small kitchen knife will give you an extra positive dice to the pool, it's small, but easy to wield. If you succeed in the task you add +2 to whatever the number of your successes are, and apply that much stress to your opponent (remember, stress is like reverse life, they more they have the more likely they die).
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If anything else comes up I will post about it. This should give us enough to start with for trying to accomplish things and survive.

Here is an example of an attack roll in a post.

An undead beasty crawls towards me, it's legs no longer attached to it, I try and make an attack against it with my pocket knife. It's a small bladed weapon which gains me a positive dice and +2 on damage if I succeed.

After a confirmation from the DM and the negative dice are added I get to roll 3 dice (one default, one for the knife, and one because situationally it is at a disadvantage on the ground). I also have two negative dice (one because this is the first time I've ever tried to stab what resembles a person, and another because more zombies are closing in on our group nearby, situationally it's stressful)

So I roll them both.

Either you can copy the results and edit the post, or just post again, doesn't matter.

Positive ( 4, 2, 6 )
Negative ( 3, 4 )

After I drop matches I have:

Positive (2, 6)
Negative (3)

Now my dex stat is 3, so I have one success with the 2, the 6 misses. I hit the thing and do 1 damage +2 for the knife. 3 total damage. However the trauma of stabbing something in the head for the first time gives me physical stress. (since I use dexterity to attack I'm using the physical stat group)

Let me know if any of that needs clarification.

Let me go through an example, just to make sure I understand.

Using my first End of the World character, Howard, I'm trying to climb up onto a fire escape on the exterior of of a building. Howard has a DEX of 3, but he has bad knees (negative physical feature) and something horrible is coming down the alleyway.
To jump up and catch the edge of the ladder to pull it down and start climbing, I would then roll 3 positive dice (for the DEX score) and 2 negative dice (1 for the bad knees, and 1 for the dread of the situation), for a total of five 6-sided dice.

On gamers plane, I would roll the positive dice (three six-sideds) as a separate roll from the negative dice (two six-sideds), as I've added at the bottom of this post.

Then I compare the actual numbers rolled on the dice, correct?
So, if I'd rolled a 3, 6, and 2 for the positive dice, and a 6 and a 6 for the negative dice, I would remove the positive 6 and one of the negative sixes, correct? That would leave me with a positive 5 and a negative 6, for a total of -1, meaning I'd failed, AND (because one of the remaining dice was negative) Howard gets additional stress. Is that right?

In your example above (pocket knife stabbing) how long does the stress last?

Heh. I was writing this as you posted your example. Whoops!

In my post, I rolled dice at home for my hypothetical example. But now that I can see the actual GP rolls in my example, I'd remove the two 3s, leaving me with a 5 and a 2 positive, and a 1 negative...a mildly different result. I also see that I misunderstood the instructions...you don't total the results even after removing the dice, do you? So in my original example, with a positive 3 and 2 (both equal to or less than the DEX of 3), and a negative 6, Howard would have succeeded (because his DEX is 3), but with stress (because a negative die remains). In my updated example (using the GP rolls), I'd have a positive 5 (not a success), a positive 2 (a success), and a negative, so I'd succeed, with stress. Is that correct?

Do the number of successful positive dice have an in-game effect? Does the value of any remaining negative dice have an in-game effect, or is the stress of a 1 equal to the stress of a 6? Also, do positive 6s have any effect, given that they will always exceed the skill value?

Stress is an accumulative thing, such as HP in most other RPGs. So they last pretty much forever for opponents, unless they escape and have a way to heal them up.

For players it's a little more unique. There are three levels of stress. We start with level 1. Each level of stress has 3 segments. It looks like this on the official characters sheets.

3 [ ][ ][ ]
2 [ ][ ][ ]
1 [ ][ ][ ]

We start at level 1 and fill in that first before moving to the next. Every point of stress you endure during tests gets checked off in these boxes. Starting with the left side of 1, and once that is filled up on the left side of 2, etc.

Every time you fill a level of stress, you are closer to death, but you have also become slightly resistant to the rigors of the world. Each level of stress you have filled allows you to shake off negative results. So if I had level 1 completely filled in from stress, I can ignore one negative dice that may be left in a dice pool. This happens anytime I need to make a test, so I always have that resistance.

Now to heal these for players you need to you need to take five minutes or so to look yourself over and assess the stress. So let's go with this example. My physical stress levels look like this.

3 [ ][ ][ ]
2 [X][ ][ ]
1 [X][X][X]

If I have 5 minutes to look myself over I can remove stress from the whole category (physical) and convert it into a trauma. The trauma level and severity is equal to the highest level that I have any stress marks in. So in this case recovering my stress from this state will give me a Level 2 trauma. Could be something like a major wound that needed to be sewn up (could be a month or so to recover and hinder me until then).

So I heal myself up physically (although gained a trauma in the process), but I also have lost some of my resistance to failures. So maintaining your levels of physical stress, mental stress, and social stress are important to keep your life and sanity in this world.

The few caveates for this are you can only have 3 traumas in any category. If you ever have to take a 4th trauma in a single category you immediately die without a chance to cling to life.

The only thing is in your example you do not role positive dice for the number of your DEX score. You don't consider that until you are trying to determine your successes after rolling.

To setup the positive pool you get one dice by default. You add extra dice if you happen to have anything that could help you out. If someone was already on the ladder, or down below giving you a boost, you would get an extra dice. If you had a feature such as "good climber", you would get an extra dice.

Your negative pool would probably be right, bad knees gets you a negative dice, and racing against time may also give you a negative.

Also if you have multiple successes, or a good number of them, the DM may reward the efforts. Such as if you are searching for weapons in a store or something, if you succeed with 1 dice, maybe you found a small knife, if you succeed with 3 dice, maybe you found a small caliber hand gun with a clip full of bullets.

But yes, as far as your example, you succeed with your numbers either way since you had at least one success, but you do take the physical stress because negative dice remain in the pool (their value doesn't matter for final result). You read it correctly in your second post, you do not actually add the numbers from these dice ever (GP just does that by default with all rolls.) Each success dice left is considered on its own as a success or failure.

Unless we disagree, I'd like to take 5 and convert all my physical damage to a level 2 trauma. If the group feels this would jeopardize our position - ie bring another doggie here, I can wait.

You could probably suggest it in the story. There was previously another dog in the lobby, but you have no idea where it is now. Also as far as the mechanics of converting to trauma, just remember it will be a level 2, which is something that could likely heal within a week. So just some sort of physical malady that will more than likely heal up within the week. Bandaged arm, or maybe you realize you had dislocated your shoulder and had to pop it back it and do a makeshift sling or something. Be creative as you want with it.