Firefly Prime: Dice Pools
Determining what dice to include in your dice pool essentially boils down to a series of simple questions:
- What do I want to accomplish? Pick the most applicable Role for what you want to do.
- How will I accomplish it? Choose the best Attribute for how you want to get things done.
- Which aspect of who I am is helping me or hindering me? Choose the Distinction that best fits the fiction of your action, either as something that helps you or something that gets in your way.
These three questions will always result in one dice apiece. This forms the base of your pool.
Then ask:
- Do I have a Knack (associated with the Role I have chosen) that might help?
- Do I have any Assets that might help?
- Is there an SFX that applies, and do I want to pay the cost to use it?
Always Dice
You always include one of each of your three Primary trait dice in every roll. Primary traits are Roles, Attributes, and Distinctions.
ROLES
- Roles frame a broad range of skills that should cover most anything you want to do. Need to convince someone to do something? Diplomacy and Command is the go to for that in most situations. Want to specifically convince a passenger to throw the switch to the collector panel on your mark while you tighten the guide valve? Mechanics and Engineering is an appropriate choice.
- There are very few things that won't be covered by one role or another, but if you cannot think of one that fits, ask your GM OOC which you should use. If they can't think of one either, you get to roll two Attribute dice (same Attribute) instead of Role + Attribute.
ATTRIBUTES
- Attributes cover how you want to do a thing. Shooting someone is pretty much a straightforward Physical' action, but what if you want to shoot specifically for the purpose of impressing onlookers? Social might be a better choice. Likewise an essential trick shot to shut down a machine on the other side of the room wants Mental.
- There will pretty much always be a logical default Attribute for most actions, but that Attribute might not always lead to the outcome you need.
DISTINCTIONS
- Each of your three Distinctions offers a kind of snapshot of who your character is. If Role decides What and Attribute decides How then the Distinction you settle on tells us what you bring to the table as an individual and how that shapes the fiction
- Of all the Prime traits. Distinctions tend to give newcomers to Cortex the most trouble. It can be hard sometimes to see how a Distinction fits with a specific action. A better approach is instead of asking if a Distinction applies to ask how it applies.
If you are The Best Cook on Four Moons should that somehow help you to play the violin just because some gangster is requesting you do so at gunpoint? Maybe. Instead of focusing on if it helps, decide how it helps. Maybe years of cooking at fancy restaurants has made you a fan of violin music. Or maybe you gorramn hate violin music because it was always playing while you cooked so that distinction hinders your chances.
- Hinder means you roll
instead of 
but you get a pp for your trouble.
