At the Table
On this page
How the Dice Work
Mythras Imperative is a roll-under game on percentile dice. Everything below is the whole of what you need; there is no second layer.
The basic roll
You have a number for each skill — Crossing 52, Perception 57, Athletics 61. Roll 1d100. Equal or under, you succeed. Over, you fail. That is it.
Roll the tens die and the units die together and read them as a two-digit number. A roll of 00 is 100, and 100 always fails.
A critical is a roll in the lowest tenth of your skill, rounded up — Crossing 52 criticals on 01–06. Something goes better than it had any business going.
A fumble is a 99 or 00 when you were going to fail anyway. It goes wrong in a way that costs something.
Difficulty
Your Games Master does not change the die. They change the number you are rolling against, and they say which grade they are using out loud before you roll.
| Grade | Your skill becomes |
|---|---|
| Very Easy | doubled |
| Easy | one and a half times |
| Standard | unchanged |
| Hard | two thirds |
| Formidable | half |
| Herculean | a fifth |
A crossing through a door that is behaving itself is Standard or Easy. A crossing carrying a grown adult is Hard. A crossing through something that is actively going wrong can be Formidable, and you will be told so beforehand.
Passions, and arguing with the dice
Your three passions are not decoration. When one of them is genuinely driving what you are doing, you can augment the roll with it: add a fifth of the passion’s value to the skill before the difficulty grade is applied.
A passion of I am the one who gets there at 70 is +14 on anything that is honestly about getting there. It is not +14 on picking a lock.
Say which passion and say why. Most Games Masters will say yes, and the saying why is the good bit.
Luck
You get three Luck Points and they come back each session. Once per action, you may spend one to:
- re-roll the dice entirely, or
- swap the digits — a failed 71 becomes a 17.
Swapping is the quiet one and it is usually the better one, because it is certain where a re-roll is not.
Three is not many. By the end of a bad night you will have none, and knowing that you have none is part of how you decide what to attempt.
Getting hurt, and getting tired
Damage lands on a specific part of you and most of what happens in this campaign is wrenches, cracks and cold rather than wounds. You will know how badly you are hurt because you will be told plainly.
Crossing repeatedly in a day makes you tired, and tired is mechanical: your numbers come down. Nobody has ever made six crossings in a day and felt fine afterwards.
If you want the actual rulebook
You do not need it. Everything above is enough to play, and your Games Master has the rest.
But if you are the sort of person who wants to see the whole machine, Mythras Imperative is free — The Design Mechanism publish the PDF on their free downloads page. It is a complete game in about sixty pages, and the combat chapter in particular is worth reading once you have played a fight.
The only piece of advice that matters
Ask questions before you act, out loud, as your character or as yourself. What can I see? How far is it? Can this kill me?
You will get a straight answer every time. That is the deal at this table, and using it is not timid — it is exactly what a first-through is trained to do, and it is the entire difference between the ones who come back and the ones who do not.