How to play Mystika? The basic concepts

Whenever the outcome of an action is uncertain, you roll a Test. For a basic test, roll a D12 lower than or equal to a target number to succeed. If you succeed, your success number is equal to the number rolled. If you fail, your success number is 0.

The narrator may assign a difficulty; in this case, the success number must be equal to or higher than the difficulty to succeed. The narrator may also assign modifiers to your target number: boni increase the target number and make the roll easier, while mali decrease the target number and make the roll more demanding.

After the test, you tell the narrator your success number, and the game continues with the narrator describing the outcome.

When competing with an opponent, this is called a Duel. In a duel, both opponents roll an appropriate Test and the higher success number wins. A failed test with a success number of 0 won't win you any duel.

The winner of the duel subtracts the loser's success number from their own. This new number represents the duel success points. After you win a duel, you can use these points to your favour.

Whenever you fail a test you could have succeeded in, your character gains an experience fragment for the skill used.

You can spend these fragments whenever you want to advance your character, even in the middle of combat, if you like.

Of course, the narrator can also award experience fragments for completing an adventure. These fragments can be put into any skill you want, not being limited to the skills actually used.

Tests are rolled with an additional die, which should be of a darker colour, called the temptation die.

When the number rolled on the temptation die is better for your character than the number on the regular die, you may use the temptation die.

But beware, this comes with a catch: whenever a player uses the temptation die, the narrator gets a die for the chaos pool. The narrator can add dice from the chaos pool to every test they roll, giving them more results to choose from. So every time players use the temptation die, the threat of future encounters rises.

Some abilities grant you boosts for certain Tests. A boost is a number of points you may add to your die result. The “may” is important: you may add all, none, or some of the points as you like. An added boost increases the possible success numbers but may also increase the chance of failure. So, choose wisely.

Whenever your character has enough experience fragments to buy a skill point, you may opt to buy a stunt point instead.

Stunt points can be used in several ways to change the situation, for example, to reroll a failed Test or to negate modifiers. (There are more options for what you can do with stunt points.)

Stunt points are a finite resource. After spending a stunt point, it's gone forever. Before using a stunt point, you should consider its worth: it could have been a skill point.

You can increase your skills as high as you want. Higher skill levels are not relevant for simple tests, but they allow your character to “ignore” more negative modifiers before the target number reaches 12 or lower. Higher skill values also allow for higher boosts to be used safely.

Talking about skills … All your character's abilities are represented by their skills.

Skills are used to determine the target numbers for Tests and to keep track of the special abilities your character might have learned.

Your character can learn passive abilities that apply automatically when their condition is met, and active abilities that you have to use intentionally. Most active abilities have a cost you must pay in advance to use the ability; for example, using them may drain a bit of your stamina.

All skills are grouped into skill lines. When a Test is rolled, the narrator announces the appropriate skill line. If your character has learned a more specialised skill that might be used here, announce this to the narrator. If they approve, your target number is based on the chosen skill.

Announcing your character’s skills is your responsibility as a player, as you know your character best.

The damage of a weapon is relative to the duel success points you scored. Every weapon has a base damage value that is always applied on a hit intended to damage the opponent. Better hits score more damage, as you can spend the duel success points for extra damage. How these points translate to damage is weapon dependent. For example, a club has a high base damage but does only moderate extra damage through skilful wielding. A dagger, however, does a small amount of base damage, but skilful use might increase the damage substantially.

This also allows scaling the damage between weapons of different sizes without adding more dice to the equation.

Tying damage to the Test success number also makes a special rule for critical hits unnecessary: if you roll a high success number and your character's opponent fails the test and thus has a success number of 0, you get a high amount of points to spend on damage and other options against your character.

When damage hits armour, the armour absorbs this damage, decreasing the damage number by the armour value. Damage lower than the armour's value does not impact the wearer.

If your character has to endure more damage than the armour could absorb, you check whether the rest of the damage is high enough to blow through the armour. For this, armour has a blow-through threshold. If this is reached or exceeded, the damage is considered heavy. Damage below the threshold is considered light.

When your character is hit, you do not only check how much damage reaches them. You also check the damage absorbed against the armour's hardness value. Simply divide the absorbed damage by the hardness value, ignoring any fractions. The armour value decreases by the result. For example, if an armour of 20 points armour value and a hardness of 7 is hit by 16 points of damage, the armour absorbs the damage completely. But as the absorbed damage of 16 divided by the hardness of 7 gives 2 (ignoring any fractions), the armour value is decreased from 20 to 18.

This sounds tedious at first, but it's actually done quite quickly once you are used to it.

Handling armour layers this way saves many special rules regarding combined armour values. Additionally, this provides a tool to simply handle any situation where additional layers of protection are found in the scene. Your character flips over a bar table and kneels behind it to avoid being hit by a gun? Simply apply the bar table as an additional armour layer.

Armour rules do not only apply to armour. For example, depletable resources like health or even wealth are handled by variants of the armour rules.

Even armour layering rules are used all over the system. You have an accountant overseeing your wealth and handling your transactions to prevent overspending? Add their service as an additional armour layer to your wealth.

In some use cases, there is no blow-through threshold given. This means there is no special handling for light damage for this use case; all damage is handled the same.

In some other cases, no hardness value is given. This means in this use case, there is no ablation. ¹⁾

Many rules offer simplified handling with lower detail. The armour rules are a good example of this: the medium detail level does not use independent armour layers, while the lowest detail level does not use ablation. Please note that you might still need the ablation rules for resources or other use cases of the armour rules.

The combat system was written with a tick-based continuous initiative in mind.

If this does not match your play style, you can instead use a “normal” turn-based initiative system. This is a lower level of detail, as it disables options to speed up actions, but it's fully playable if you prefer it this way.