A non-combat encounter is any situation that doesn't involve anything shooting at you or trying to tear into your flesh and put you in its mouth. A non-combat encounter could be something as inane as trying to talk a baby into giving you its candy, to something as inherently ridiculous (but awesome) as parasailing on the surface of the sun.
Mundane situations that don't carry a risk of failure proceed as normal, but anything with a significant chance of failure is a
test. During a test, the player (or in this case, the GM) takes the dice provided by their character's relevant skill or attribute and rolls them – or if they have none, the GM just rolls a single die. If they surpass the target number set by the GM, the action succeeds.
Doing ThingsYou'll want to make your character
do things. Two actions per post, which should keep things going at a nice pace. Actions here are defined as the things that have an effect on the game - regardless of whether or not they require a test. For example,
Trevor walks to the corner table, looking around warily as he does so. He opens the drawer to see what's inside.
There's three actions in that, but only two
Actions.
Skills, Attributes, and TestsGenerally these are all things that are good to have more of, and bad to have less of. The nature of player characters is that you'll have the same amount of points to distribute in these areas. Every point in a skill or attribute gives you an additional die to use in tests.
Generally we're using the same principle behind most target number based systems. Surpass the target number, and your action succeeds. Fail to surpass it, and your action... doesn't succeed. Fail to surpass it by a lot, and your action both fails
and something potentially amusing could happen. Of course, you don't want to fail those tests. To maximize your chances, use as many dice as you can.
Attributes give you a bonus towards related skills, while the skills themselves give you more dice to roll when the time comes for it. Attributes, however, can also be used for checks. For example, a strength check for lifting a heavy object or an endurance check while running a marathon. Unlike skills, attributes can suffer from
strain, temporarily reducing the number of available dice you have for tests.
Strain occurs when you use more than one dice for an attribute check. You effectively lose one point from that attribute until your character has had some rest. This means that you temporarily don't have access to the die provided by that attribute point
and the bonus that point would have provided to the relevant skills.
Skills don't suffer strain because that would be kind of silly. Intelligence also doesn't suffer strain.
Non-combat skills and combat-specific skills differ slightly. Combat skills are not, typically, used for skill tests, due to the fact that combat resolution is resolved differently than non-combat encounters.