Cortex Quick Rules
Tests
The GM assembles an opposition pool and rolls it, setting the difficulty by adding together two dice from the roll and announcing the total.
That difficulty is the number you need to beat with your own total when you roll your dice for the test. If you beat it, the test is a success. If you didn’t beat it, the test is a failure. Beating a difficulty means rolling higher than the difficulty total. If your total is the same as the difficulty’s total, you didn’t beat it, so this still counts as a failure. The difficulty dice are always two dice of the same number of sides, based on the situation:
Very Easy →Easy →Challenging →Hard →Very Hard
In addition to difficulty dice, the GM picks up one or more dice based on appropriate traits from the location, opposing GMCs, or the scene itself. When in doubt, the GM can simply add one or more six-siders to represent increasing risk, threats, or challenges.
Tests are usually uncomplicated. A success means the character does what they wanted to do, and a failure means they don’t. Occasionally, the player sets the difficulty for a GMC’s test. In this case, the player rolls first and the GM rolls to beat the difficulty set by the player. Usually, though, the GM sets up scenes where the players roll tests to change the status quo being maintained by the GMCs.
Contest
When you engage in a contest, you’re the one initiating it, so you pick up the dice and roll first, adding together two results for a total. If your opposition decides against opposing you after seeing what you rolled, you automatically get what you want. If your opposition decides to stop you, they assemble a dice pool and try to beat the difficulty you just set.
If your opposition doesn’t beat your difficulty, you’ve won the contest and you get what you want. If they beat your difficulty, the ball’s back in your court. You can choose to give in, in which case you define the failure on your own terms, you cannot immediately initiate another contest with your opponent, and you get a . Otherwise, your opposition’s total becomes the new difficulty, and you must roll again to try to beat it. Failing to beat your opposition means your opponent gets to define how they stopped you.
Contests go back and forth until one side gives in or fails to beat the difficulty. The losing side picks up a complication or, if it’s a high stakes scene, is taken out of the scene - they’re beaten, knocked down, or possibly even on their last breath. Players can spend to avoid being taken out, but they still take a complication.
Sometimes the GM may initiate a contest when a GMC chooses to do a thing; the GM is essentially asking the players, “What are you going to do about it?” However, because Cortex Prime games are about the PCs more than the GMCs, this shouldn’t happen very often in any given session.
Outcomes
When you win a test or contest, you get what you want, and you can narrate the outcome. What this means usually depends on what you said you were trying to do. Was your character trying to hack the mainframe? It’s done. Knock out the bad guy? They did that, too. The player describes it and then the story moves on. If the player can’t think of what might happen if they succeed, the GM can do the honors, and remind the player to think about what the consequences of success are before they roll the dice next time.
When you fail, however, try to be entertaining in how you describe your failure. The only lasting effect is the story heading in a different direction than you wanted, unless you picked up a complication or you rolled all hitches and came up with a total botch.
Outcomes Change the Status Quo
When your character fails, it doesn’t necessarily mean the scene ends and their goals are thwarted permanently. A scene can have many tests and contests in it, involving many characters, sometimes even several tests or contests going on at the same time. Failure should always mean that the situation has changed in one way or another. Consequences should always come from failure, even if they’re as simple as “You dropped it; now what do you do?”
In some cases, losing a test or contest can result in your character being taken out of the scene. But in most other cases, your character only needs to revisit their new circumstances and take a different course of action, perhaps with a complication now making their lives a little trickier.
Heroic Success
In a test, if you beat the difficulty by 5 or more on a roll, you’ve got a heroic success. You not only get what you want, your roll produces unexpected beneficial results. In a contest, if your opponent loses by 5 or more, you’ve got a heroic success and are the clear victor. As with any success, the GM should ask you to describe your amazing efforts, but that’s just icing on the cake. There’s an added benefit, as well. The effect die is stepped up by one for every 5 points you beat the difficulty by.
Effect Dice
The effect die is chosen from the dice pool after the dice used for the total are taken out and added together. The effect die is used for things like determining the size of an asset or complication, or (if you’re using the mod) stress. Only the size of the effect die (number of sides) matters; the result rolled on the effect die has no further use in the roll. You won’t always need an effect die, especially when you’re only concerned with pass/fail outcomes.
Ineligible Dice
You can’t choose a die that produced a hitch for an effect die. If you spend to add more dice to a total beyond the first two, those dice can’t also be used as effect dice. If there are no dice left in the pool once the total is determined (or the remaining dice are hitches or otherwise spoken for), the effect die is always a .
Action-Based Resolution
This mod takes the rules for tests and contests and sort of smashes them together. Using this mod, anything a player character or GMC does is called an action. If you want to carry out an action, you declare it, gather up your pool, and roll the dice, just as if you were starting a contest. Instead of moving to a back and forth escalation like a contest, the action is opposed by a reaction, which is either the target of the action rolling their own dice, or a difficulty set by the GM rolling difficulty dice. If the reaction beats the action’s total, the action fails.
An action-based resolution approach places heavier weight on who goes when and the order in which actions take place. The scenes are more structured, each player tends to take their own turn, and an action order (page 98) is established to manage this.
Because the action’s dice are always rolled first, before difficulty dice or opposing reactions are rolled, action-based resolution can make actions seem chancy. Players may not know whether they should include more dice into their totals with . To off set this somewhat, the GM’s difficulty total or the reaction total must exceed the action’s total for the action to fail.
Action Order
If the order in which things happen in a scene matters, it’s often a good idea to shift conversational back and forth between players and GM with the occasional test or contest to an action order. This is especially true of fight scenes or moments when there’s chaos and confusion and it becomes important to know who goes first and when. Other names for action order include handoff initiative and elective order.
Actions and Reactions
When using an action order to track conflict, tests and contests are replaced with actions and reactions. An action is like the initiating roll of a contest; a reaction is a defensive or reactive roll to avoid it and only defensive traits apply. The character whose turn it is chooses which character they target with their action. If there is no opposing character, use difficulty dice as the reaction.
Challenges
Starting the Challenge
The Narrator sets out a challenge pool based on how difficult the challenge is and how long it will take to overcome it.
The base difficulty dice are the same as those for a test:
| VERY EASY | |
| EASY | |
| CHALLENGING (default) | |
| HARD | |
| VERY HARD |
Added to the difficulty dice are a number of extra dice that varies based on how long the challenge is expected to take, or the scale of the challenge itself. You can use the following as a guide:
| +1 Dice | SHORT |
| +2 Dice | MEDIUM |
| +3 Dice | HARD |
Taking Turns in a Challenge
In a challenge, every PC in the scene takes their turn to do something, one turn per player per round. A challenge is usually too much for a single PC.
When it’s your turn, the Narrator rolls the challenge pool to set the difficulty for you, just like a test. One of your stress dice, if any, is included in the Narrator’s dice roll, along with the challenge dice. They announce the total and the effect die. Then you roll your own dice pool and try to beat the difficulty.
The Narrator decides which PC goes first, but once a PC has had their turn, that player chooses which remaining PC goes next. On each player’s turn, the Narrator rolls the challenge pool to set the difficulty for the active player’s turn. In other words, players don’t share the same difficulty. The player who went before you might have knocked out a challenge die, reducing the size of the challenge pool. Also, your PC may have stress to be included in the opposition that other PCs do not.
On your turn, you may choose not to attempt to reduce the challenge, instead doing something like creating an asset using a test, or trying to recover your or somebody else’s stress. Tests in these cases still use the challenge pool as the opposition base difficulty because the scene is dominated by the problem at hand. Additional dice may be added to the opposition pool like any other test. (See Example: Taking Turns in a Challenge.)
The Challenge’s Turn
Once all players have taken their turn, the Narrator gets a turn for the challenge pool as if it were a character. The Narrator chooses a PC to test against, describes what perilous moment confronts the PC, and that player sets the difficulty with their dice
Instead of acting against a PC, the Narrator may have the challenge strengthen itself. They pick one of the challenge dice—the smallest, the largest, it’s up to them—and step it up by one. If the Narrator chooses a already in the challenge pool, it stays as a and a new is added to the challenge pool. The Narrator describes this new wrinkle and how the problem appears to get worse or more complex.
Once the Narrator has had their turn, it’s back to the players. The player who went last in the previous round gets to choose who goes first (it could be themselves!), and play continues like it did the first round, with each player choosing a player to go after their turn. (See Example: The Challenge’s Turn.)
Challenge Outcomes
If you beat the challenge difficulty, you make progress, and compare your effect die to one of the dice in the challenge pool. If it’s bigger, the challenge die is removed from the challenge pool. If it’s equal to or smaller, the challenge die is stepped down by one step. If a challenge die would be reduced below , it’s taken out of the pool. You or the Narrator may choose to describe what that success looks like and how your actions contributed to reducing the problem.
If you don’t beat the difficulty, you fail to progress the challenge, and you take stress equal to the Narrator’s effect die. The Narrator chooses which type of stress this is. You should feel free to describe your own setback, here—how did you misstep? Was the task overwhelming? Did you have a moment of insecurity or doubt?
Stress Mod
With this mod, instead of using complications to track injury, damage, or other negative personal effects on characters, you implement a distinct trait called stress. Complications can still be in play, but they represent external hindrances, obstacles, or other problems that aren’t direct injury or negative personal conditions like exhaustion or pain.
Stress replaces the rule about players choosing to spend to take a complication instead of being taken out. Stress doesn’t require players to spend ; any time a failure at a test or contest might take you out or cause harm, you take stress instead.
Any attack or effect that can take you out:
- Inflicts stress equal to the effect die in the attack (if the PC currently has no stress or a lower die rating of stress than the new stress die).
- Steps up stress (if the PC already has a stress die rating equal to or greater than the new stress die).
Stress rated at functions just like a complication rated at ; it goes into a player’s dice pool instead of being added to the opposition dice pool and earns the player a . Right after that test or contest, it either goes away or - if the player rolls a hitch on one of their dice - gets stepped up as the injury gets worse.
Only one type of stress can be used against a character at any given time, unless the GM pays the player a to add an additional stress die to the opposition dice pool. Characters can be affected by both stress and complications at the same time, however.
Types of Stress
PHYSICAL
MENTAL
SOCIAL
Characters can still choose to inflict complications on their opponents; these are created in the same manner as stress, but represent such things as deliberately hindering an opponent, creating distractions, and so on.
Recovering Stress
All stress die ratings are always stepped down by one during any scene specifically framed to act as a rest period, downtime, or transition between action-heavy scenes. If a character takes stress in one scene from a battle, and the next scene is another battle soon after the first without any time spent resting up, then no stress is recovered.
To recover any remaining stress, characters can attempt a recovery test vs a dice pool consisting of the stress die and a base difficulty of . The GM may rule that other traits affect the roll, similar to a standard test. The PC or their circumstances must be capable of improving the situation to make a roll.
When the test is complete, one of the following happens:
- If the PC beat the difficulty and the effect die is greater than the stress, the stress is eliminated.
- If the PC beat the difficulty and the effect die is equal to or smaller than the stress, the stress is stepped down by one. Time must pass before another test can be made to recover the stress.
- If the PC failed to beat the difficulty, the stress remains as it is.
- If the PC beat the difficulty but rolled a hitch, the GM may hand over a and introduce a new stress or complication related to the one that was just recovered.
- If the PC failed to beat the difficulty and rolled a hitch, the stress is stepped up by one step for every hitch rolled.
Stressed Out
If any stress die rating is ever stepped up past , the character is taken out (or stressed out) and no longer takes part in the scene. By default, you can’t spend a to delay this effect, though certain SFX or other rules may be implemented to do that. When you’re stressed out, you are assumed to have stress for the purposes of taking any additional stress, even though you can no longer act in the scene.
Pushing Stress
With this mod, players may choose to have their character shoulder through their pain and suffering and use it as a motivator rather than a setback. To do this, you spend a and instead of adding the stress to the opposing dice pool, you add it to your own dice pool for that test or contest.
Using stress in this fashion has an additional cost. After the test or contest is resolved, the stress die included in your dice pool is stepped up by one. This may result in the PC being stressed out if the die is stepped up past .