All Posts

We have all been there. Your master archer is in position to cover the party. Your healer is having a bad day against a raider, so you take a breath, lean out from the tree, nock an arrow, draw, and release in one fluid motion — rolling a natural 1 on the d20. Critical failure. That massive +14 to hit? Ignored. All that careful character building, and they just whiff — a victim of a flat 5% failure rate, no matter how good they are. It's deflating.

Critical failures typically exist in games to balance out the thrilling highs of critical successes. Most TTRPG systems treat the critical failure as a binary pass-fail check — you do, or you do not, to quote the master. We do things a little differently in Abraxas.

The Solo Roll vs. The Pool

Abraxas uses pools of six-sided dice to determine the success or failure of an action. The more dice you roll, the more likely you are to succeed — and, just as importantly, the more predictable your results become. That predictability is the whole point: your master archer, rolling their 7D Missile Weapons skill, tends to land in the same reliable range roll after roll, which is why they don't whiff much. A single d20 can't promise that. That's some kingdom-saving level math right there 🏹

Math for the nerds 🎲

Why is a pool predictable when a d20 isn't? A single d20 is flat — every result from 1 to 20 has the same 5% chance, every single roll. A pool of dice creates a bell curve instead: results cluster near the average, and uncommon combinations fall farther out toward the tails. That's why a 7D roll should generally land within a defined range, and why a big Wild Die swing feels like an event rather than the norm.

But The Wild Die…

The Wild Die, for those uninitiated, is described in the source as a catalyst for fate. Every roll in Abraxas must include a die that is different in color or size. This special die is counted normally on a 2, 3, 4, or 5. Things get spicy on the extremes.

Exploding Dice!

On a six, the Wild Die is said to have exploded! The player picks up that Wild Die and rolls it again. If it's another six, they add it to the total and keep rolling until it isn't a six. This gives thrilling moments where the underdog achieves the impossible. In Abraxas, we use something called Degrees of Success to adjudicate exceptional results: if you just meet the Target Number (TN), you succeed; exceed it, and you gain narrative and mechanical bonuses depending on how far over the TN you land. Exploding dice naturally feed into the Degrees of Success mechanic.

It's not all about the upside in the Wild Die game.

Critical Failures

When the Wild Die shows a 1, you have triggered a critical failure. Here we are again, talking about the thing I said I didn't like in the opening of the post. And the Wild Die trips a lot more often than a d20's natural 1 — more than triple as often (the exact odds are below, if you're curious). This makes no sense, right?

Math for the nerds 🎲

There's a 16.67% chance of the Wild Die landing on any given face, including a 1 — so a critical failure triggers on roughly one roll in six. That's more than triple the flat 5% critical-failure rate of a d20-based game. The key word, though, is triggers. That 16.67% is a trigger rate, not a failure rate — and as we're about to see, tripping the Wild Die is a long way from actually failing.

No one likes to fail when we're playing a game. It's not fun to just not hit 5% of the time. That's why, in Abraxas, a critical failure threatens a failure — it doesn't guarantee one. A critical failure simply lowers your statistical odds of success by subtracting both the Wild Die and your highest die from your total. This can easily tank a roll and cause you to fail the task, but not always.

The Mechanics of Failing-Forward

Let's tackle that example of the master archer with the 7D Missile Weapons skill. The TN to strike the target is static — let's say a respectable 18. Our archer rolls 7D and scores a 5, 3, 3, 6, 4, 4, and the Wild Die turns up a 1. The penalty subtracts the highest die (6) and the Wild Die (1), turning a massive total of 26 into 19. In this scenario, the player is well within their rights to just accept the penalty and take the win — they only needed an 18, so 19 gets it done.

The other option — and the more narratively interesting one — is the Complication. Let's take the same roll, but say the TN to hit the target isn't an 18; let's say it's a 22. Taking the numeric penalty reduces the total to 19, missing the target. Now what?

Enter the Dragon's Den

This is where the player has a choice: accept the numerical penalty and fail the roll, or accept a Complication that lets them keep their total. What is a Complication? It's a twist of fate that moves the scene forward. You succeed at the action but accept a small narrative penalty. It could be as minor as being left off balance for a −2 Evasion modifier next round, or as severe as falling prone. There's a ceiling, though: a Complication can knock you around, but it can never leave you incapacitated or out of your own control for more than a round. It costs you position or tempo — never your turn.

When Should You Take One?

It's a numbers game. That original, unmodified roll of 26 clears both TNs easily. So the player has an often diabolical deal to ponder: take the Complication and succeed, or take the L. Not wanting to leave our poor party healer stranded, you take the Complication. The GM offers one: you make the shot, but your bowstring snaps unexpectedly. It'll cost a full-round action to restring it, or you can switch weapons.

Remember our archer from the top — the one whose perfect +14 evaporated on a single die? Same shot, same rotten luck. Except this time the story doesn't end with a shrug — it ends with a saved healer and a bowstring to deal with next round. It's a genuinely tough choice for the player, but ultimately it moves the story forward.

Abraxas GM Huddle: GMs carry a high cognitive load — juggling encounter math, dialogue, and pacing, to name a few — and adding to it can be a lot on a Friday night after a long week. The most successful tables turn Complication generation into a group sport. If you're tired of coming up with interesting Complications, open it up to the table — you may be shocked at what comes back.

Closing Thoughts

It may look like a lot to track, but it really comes down to comparing two numbers against a single TN. In our example, those numbers are 19 (the penalty roll) and 26 (the full total), with a TN of 22. Here is every way it can shake out:

The comparison	Outcome
The penalty roll already clears the TN	You succeed outright — no Complication needed.
The penalty roll misses, but your full total clears it	The diabolical deal: take the Complication and succeed, or accept the miss.
Even your full total misses the TN	You fail — no Complication can save this one.

In our case, the penalty roll (19) misses a TN of 22, but the total (26) clears it — so we land squarely in that middle row, staring down the hard choice. Most of the time, though, your dice pool absorbs the hit, and you never leave the top row.

Dice pool 7D A crit-fail still clears TN 18: 29.4% · TN 22: 6.2%

Clean roll Wild 2–5 · avg 24.5Critical-failure penalty Wild 1 · avg 15.4Exploding Wild 6 · avg 31.2

One wrinkle the table glosses over: even when your penalty roll already clears the TN, you might still take the Complication — trading a twist for the full 26 and a better Degree of Success. Exceeding the TN isn't just a hit; it's a better hit. Call it Degrees of Success working in reverse.

Abraxas Tactician Corner: Abraxas rewards overshooting the TN through Degrees of Success, so anything that shrinks your dice pool costs you twice. Take a Multi-Action Penalty (MAP) — the dice you shed for cramming extra actions into a round — and you feel both edges. First, fewer dice means a lower total, which drags down your Degree of Success even on a clean hit. Second, a smaller pool leaves less headroom above the TN, so a Wild Die 1 is far more likely to sink your full total below the target — the one row of the table where a Complication can't buy you out. That's the dreaded whiff: a full stall, no twist of fate to save it.

What do you think? Does this mechanic engage players, or keep them trapped in a flowchart? Is injecting player agency into a failure a good idea?