Opposed Tests

Some actions are not measured against a fixed difficulty but against another character: sneaking past a sentry, wrestling an opponent’s blade aside, talking a rival down in front of a crowd. Both characters make Success Tests at the same time, and the outcomes are compared.

The victor is the character who succeeds — a Marginal or Critical Success, never a failure of any kind — and reaches a higher success level than the other. Merely doing less badly is not winning: if neither character succeeds, neither one prevails, however close the rolls were.

Success levels rank from lowest to highest: Critical Failure, Marginal Failure, Marginal Success, Critical Success.

In combat, the two sides are called the attacker and the defender. In other contests, the character who starts it is the initiator and the other is the respondent.

Victory Stars

Some situations only ask who won; others need to know by how much. The gap between the two success levels answers that: each step of success level between victor and loser is one Victory Star.

A Marginal Success against a Marginal Failure is one star. A Critical Success against a Critical Failure is three. Unopposed tests can earn stars too — ordinarily one for a Marginal Success and two for a Critical Success — and individual rules may say otherwise for their own case.

There is no ceiling on the count. When a rule or condition shifts a success level into the extended levels, the margin widens with it: a Marginal Success against a Critical Failure that a penalty has pushed one step lower is a three-star victory. The worsened Critical Failure is still just a Critical Failure in every other respect — only the margin grows.

If both characters fail, there is usually no victor and no stars to award.

Victory Stars measure one contest, and are not the star rating that names a character’s professional competence.

Ties

When both characters reach the same success level, the contest is a tie: no victor, and no stars. Two Critical Successes are as much a tie as two Marginal Successes; neither character gains an advantage over the other.

A tie is usually a perfectly good outcome — the sentry neither spots the intruder nor is fooled, the wrestlers stay locked together — and needs no further resolution.

Tiebreaks

Some rules cannot leave a contest unresolved and require a tied success to be broken. Only tied successes can be broken this way; a tie in which both characters failed has no victor to find.

A broken tie is always a one-star victory, decided in this order:

1. The character who rolled higher on the d100 takes the contest.
2. If both rolled the same number, the character with the higher Mastery Level takes it.
3. If the Mastery Levels are also equal, both roll a d10 and the higher roll takes it, re-rolling as long as they match.

Whether a given contest breaks its ties is a matter for the rule at hand, or for the table; a contest that does not call for a tiebreak simply ends tied.