“Mount and come to prison,” the knight replied. “There you’ll see how serious it is!”
“You’d have an easy victory, sir, if I went to prison just because you told me to!”Le Roman de Perceforest
The amount of special challenge facing a roll. Some things aren’t especially challenging1, but for everything else:
- The task is very hard? +1 Cut
- The character’s strategy to handling the issue is unusual or questionable? +1 Cut
- The character’s gambling on a harder approach? +1 Cut
- The character has some injury, or similar impairment to what they’re trying to do? +1 Cut
- The situation or environment is going to make things difficult? +1 Cut
After you roll your Dice Pool but before you determine whether it will be a Victory, Struggle or Disaster, remove the highest die for every point of Cut you have.
If you would cut all dice in the pool, you automatically face a Disaster.
Example
If you had a roll like this one, for instance…
…cutting one die means taking one of2 the highest dice away…
…which in this case doesn’t change what the highest roll was. But if you had a Cut of 2…
…you’ve snatched Disaster from the jaws of Victory due to the challenge of the action. This is already pretty much as bad as you can get, but just for clarity’s sake you’d take that 3 next, then one of the 2’s, then the other, until finally there was just that 1 left.
How Much Cut is Hard?
You can see some math in this post but the summary is that even one point is big and at 2-3 points of Cut you’re almost surely going to have difficulties. 4 and above should almost always be reconsidered, or may just count as impossible.