TOTE:Rules
The Basic Rules (v1.1)
Dice
Whenever the rules ask you to roll dice in Tales from the Torn Earth, you will roll regular six-sided dice (often abbreviated as "d6"s). One die must be different from all the others... this is called the Paragon die and is only used when the heroes need to make Skill Tests (most rolls in the game are skill tests). The remainder of the dice are either called Skill Dice (when making a skill test) or Effect Dice (when making an Effect Test). Each player needs only one Paragon die and up to five plain dice.
Skill Tests
Most every time your hero undertakes a dangerous or uncertain action, the GM will ask you to make a skill test. There are sixteen different skills and each skill can have up to three specializations (special categories of actions that give you bonuses). Skills are ranked from 0 to 5 and specializations can give a +1 to +5 bonus to the total.
To make a skill test, roll a number of skill dice equal to your rating in the skill and select one die to be your final result. Many times the GM will tell you what skill to test, other times you will choose to take an action and announce the skill yourself.
After you've selected your skill die, roll the Paragon die. Add the two dice together and add any bonus from a specialization to that total. You might have other bonuses or penalties to add, based on the circumstances. The final result is compared to a Target number, which is abbreviated as Tnumber -- for example T8 means your final total needs to 8 or higher in order to succeed. A test of moderate difficulty will often be T8, a challenging test might be T10 and a very difficult test might be T12. See below for some ways to add bonuses to the result so that your hero can succeed at these higher target numbers.
Criticals
If you roll a 1 on your Paragon die and rolled at least 1 on your skill dice (even if you didn't select it for your result) you have rolled a Critical. Criticals don't automatically succeed, but they are one way to earn Experience Points and can trigger special effects (usually they trigger good effects when you succeed in the test, sometimes they trigger bad effects when you fail the test). Only skill tests can produce criticals.
Above each skill column and to the right of each skill row are Experience bubbles. When you fill in one of these bubbles, you earn an Experience Point to be used when your Tale (adventure) comes to an end. Whenever you score a critical, you may fill in the bubble in that row or column. Once the bubbles are filled in, further criticals in that skill won't produce any more experience points. In other words, any one skill can't produce more than two experience points (by filling in the column bubble once and the row bubble the next time).
The rules will call out many other times when successful or failed criticals will produce certain effects. Also, a hero's Special Abilities can also be triggered by critical tests. Only skill tests can produce criticals.
Resolve
If you don't succeed on a skill test, you can spend a point of Resolve in order to add the value of one of your hero's totems to the total. To do so, simply announce that you're spending Resolve and what totem you want to use. If the other players agree that the totem matches the action, add the value to the total. You never need to spend Resolve if it won't make you succeed in the test.
Aspects
If you selected an aspect for your hero, you can invoke the aspect once a scene to get a free point of Resolve. This free point only lasts as long as the scene. The GM can also invoke the Aspect as well, to add a -2 penalty to any skill test. The GM should only invoke the penalty when the hero is acting against the nature of their aspect.
Injuries
When you fill in a bubble on the Injury Track, there may be a number associated with that space. If so, you cannot select that value on the skill dice for your result. For example, if you've filled in the first bubble on the Injury Track ([•] 5) and you roll 5,3,1 on three skill dice, your skill die result will be 3, since you can't select the 5.
Effect Tests
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