About Resistance Rolls

Resistance Rolls

Each attribute resists a different type of danger. For example, if you are embarrassed, you might resist social harm with your Willpower rating. Resistance rolls always succeed - you diminish or deflect the bad result - but the better your roll, the less stress it costs to reduce or avoid the danger.

When the enemy has a big advantage, you’ll need to make a resistance roll before you can take your own action. For instance, while dueling a rival relic hunter from Tomia Drevez, she disarms you before you can strike. You'll need to make a resistance roll to keep a hold of your weapon if you want to have a chance to counter-attack.

Another example: one of your crewmates unknowingly brings aboard a shiny trinket that targets anyone who works on the ship’s mechanisms. The curse causes the ship’s mechanisms to attack anyone working on them.

Enter you, our Engineer who has to face that challenge while your ship is being attacked. You settle in to fix a damaged set of gears as the curse goes off. Gears break, lashing out to pummel you into a bloody mess. But, you have a chance to avoid it! Quickly, you calculate and roll your Grit to diminish just how badly the curse is trying to hurt you. If you survive, you might want to talk to your friend the Wavebinder about getting that curse lifted!

The GM judges the threat level of the enemies and uses these "preemptive" resistance rolls as needed to reflect the capabilities of especially dangerous foes.

How It’s Done

Resistance rolls come from a character’s attributes, where the value of the Attribute is equal to that many d6 dice to roll. So, if a character has a Wits of 2, because they only have ratings in two Actions under Wits, they get to roll a 2d6. This is unless you have armor or some other means of defense, then that would be used instead.

As it’s been stated, resistance rolls always succeed. This is because it’s used to reduce the severity of the outcome, if not allow the character to avoid it entirely! A character can also choose not to resist, depending on the story and what they are doing. But it’s perfectly fine for a character to try and resist any stress they are about to take, or reduce the severity of harm they are about to suffer.

See Resistance and Armor for a full breakdown on how Resistance works, along with Armor and more.