The roller will happily roll whatever you hand it. Knowing what to hand it is the actual skill, and it comes down to three questions asked in order.
Compare the characteristic against the skill. Take the larger of the two as your number of dice, then upgrade a number of them equal to the smaller value from Ability (green) to Proficiency (yellow).
Three dice, two upgraded → 2 Proficiency + 1 Ability. Talented and trained.
Two dice, one upgraded → 1 Proficiency + 1 Ability. Competent, still learning.
Three dice, none upgraded → 3 Ability. Naturally strong, completely untrained.
Three dice, one upgraded → 1 Proficiency + 2 Ability. Well drilled, not naturally charming.
Note the last one: the pool is capped by whichever value is larger, so pouring points into a skill while ignoring its characteristic gives diminishing returns. This is why characteristics are expensive at character creation.
Difficulty is set by the GM in purple dice, before anyone considers who is attempting it. A locked door is exactly as hard whether a slicer or a pilot is standing in front of it — the difference shows up in the attempt, not the lock.
Do not roll. If failure is not interesting, just say yes.
Routine for anyone, but circumstances make it worth checking.
The workhorse difficulty. When unsure, use this.
Genuinely demanding. A trained specialist expects to sweat.
Near the edge of plausible. Reserve it for real turning points.
Should feel absurd. Used sparingly, it is memorable.
When the opposition is a person actively resisting rather than a passive obstacle, upgrade Difficulty dice into Challenge (red) — that is what makes an adversary feel different from a stuck hatch.
Boost and Setback are deliberately cheap to hand out. They are the fastest way to make the fiction matter mechanically without recalculating anything — if a player describes something clever, give them a blue die and keep the scene moving.
A smuggler (Agility 3, Piloting 2) threads a damaged freighter through an asteroid field while being chased. The GM calls it Hard — three purple. The ship is damaged, so one black. The co-pilot spends their turn assisting, so one blue.
Roll: 2 Proficiency + 1 Ability + 3 Difficulty + 1 Setback + 1 Boost. Set that up above and roll it a few times — watching the same pool produce a clean escape, a scraped hull, and a spectacular near-miss is the fastest way to understand why this system is built the way it is.
Compare total ✅ Success vs ❌ Failure. If Success ≥ Failure, the action succeeds. 🌟 Triumph counts as Success + narrative benefit. 💀 Despair counts as Failure + narrative consequence.
Compare total 🔷 Advantage vs 🔺 Threat. Net Advantage = beneficial side effects. Net Threat = complications or setbacks. These are separate from success/failure.
Force users can spend ⚪ Light Side points freely. ⚫ Dark Side points can be used but generate Conflict. Non-Force users cannot use Force dice results.
🌟 Triumph: Exceptional success with major narrative benefit
💀 Despair: Catastrophic complication, even on success
Multiple ⚪/⚫: More powerful Force effects possible
d100: Used for random tables, skill checks, and percentage-based mechanics. Roll low (01-05) for critical success, roll high (96-00) for critical failure, depending on your system.
The roller is a tool. These pages explain what it is telling you: