'Succeed with Condition' and Advancement

If someone doesn’t win the die roll but I let them succeed with a condition, does that count as a Pass or Fail for advancement?

  • Sean Musgrave

What does your gut tell you?

I would think that it would be a Fail. They failed the actual die roll, after all. You are only letting them “pass” at your whim.

Well, my gut right now says “Fail”, but my gut at one time during the game said “Pass”, and I don’t know why, guts are strange things like that, what with entrails and whatnot!

“Doesn’t win” is a round-about way of saying “fail.” :wink: The dice test is separate from how the scene progresses. You pass or fail on the roll, not on whether the scene moves to the players’ intended resolution. As you said, you can fail and achieve your purpose (with a condition) but you’ve still failed the test for advancement in that stat/skill/etc.

I hear ya there. Think we’ve all had situations arise that we look back on a ruling and think “Did my players drug me or something? Why the hell’d I do that?”

The player failed the roll. You granted success with a condition. But they still failed the roll.

Righto.

I think the ambiguity for me set in after reading about the ‘purposefully lose tiebreaker’ rule, in which whether you get a Fail or Pass note isn’t dependent on whether you ‘roll a failure’, but whether you alter the outcome so that your character succeeds or fails.