Dice Pools

Dice rolls in Cogent Roleplay fall into two categories, unopposed Actions and opposed Conflicts, both requiring the player to roll a group of dice known as a Dice Pool.
Cogent Roleplay uses traditional six-sided dice for its gameplay, known colloquially as D6’s. (D indicating “Dice” and the 6 referring to the number of sides.) When making any roll in Cogent, you gather a group of D6’s together and roll them as a group.
Your dice pool is determined by the stats on your character sheet, and is made up of three parts. The exact type of roll you are required to make will be called by the narrator, and will always be linked to a skill on your character sheet. (EG: General Knowledge.)
Let’s look at forming the Dice Pool you will use in every roll you are required to make while playing a game.

Step 1: Add Base Three: Your dice pool always starts with 3 dice. This represents the capacity for an untrained person to always have some ability to attempt any given task. These core three dice are included in every single check, and are often referred to simply as your ‘base three’.
Step 2: Add Skill Points: Skill points represent the specific knowledge and practical skills of your character. When being asked to make a check to attempt a task, one of your 15 core skills or any of your vocational skills will be used. When creating characters, you assign points to these skills as you see fit. These points correspond to dice that you add to dice pools. (For example: If you had an ‘Infiltration’ skill with 2 points assigned to it, you would add 2 dice to your dice pool in this step).
Step 3: Add Core Attribute: Core Attributes represent the natural talents and capacities of your character. Each skill you are using is governed by a Core Attribute, you also assign points into these attributes during character creation. Any points assigned to a relevant core attribute is also added to your dice pool. The skills on your character sheet are grouped under their relevant attribute. (For example: Infiltration has “Intelligence” as its Core Attribute. If you are making an Infiltration check, you would add any points of Intelligence you have marked on your character sheet to the dice pool.)
Step 4: Negative Modifiers: Finally, occasionally during games your character will have negative modifiers to their dice pool, whether via injuries, unique characteristics or situational penalties. The negative modifier will be a number, and that number represents how many dice you remove from your dice pool.
Note: It is entirely possible for a character to have negative points in a skill or attribute, if this is the case, instead of adding dice to the pool, subtract them at the relevant step.

Example: The narrator asks Rob to make an “Athletics” check. He first gathers his ‘Base Three’ dice. Then, checking his sheet he sees that he has two points assigned into Athletics, he adds them to his pool. Finally, checking the skill Athletics he sees that it uses Strength as its Core Attribute. He has one point assigned to Strength, so he adds one further dice to his pool. He has no negative modifiers, so he does not need to subtract any dice. Rob has now gathered his dice pool for the Athletics check, he has six dice, and will roll them together to determine the outcome.

*** Note: The only time dice pools are built differently are when making dice pools for combat checks, here, the only difference is that Combat dice pools treat all attributes as their Core Attribute, and as such you add a number of dice to your dice pool equal to your combined total points spent in attributes. (This is usually 2). This will be covered again in Chapter 3: Combat.
Now that you understand how to form a dice pool, it is time to move on to how those dice pools are utilized and what they are rolled against.