Roles and Rulings Ahead of Rolls

Every character in Oath-Bound operates through one or more Actor frameworks. The four types — Martial, Divine, Arcane, and Gray — correspond broadly to the four character archetypes that AD&D recognises as fighter, cleric, magic-user, and thief. The correspondence is deliberate, but the terminology is not a cosmetic substitution. Fighter, cleric, magic-user, and thief are mechanical categories that describe what a character can do within the rules system. Martial Actor, Divine Actor, Arcane Actor, and Gray Actor are social and cultural categories that describe how a character is understood within the world, how their capabilities are perceived by others, and what kind of consequences follow from how they operate. A fighter is defined by their class abilities. A Martial Actor is defined by their relationship to violence, capability, and visible action in the world. These are related but not identical.

The distinction matters because Oath-Bound is a game in which how you are seen is itself a kind of capability — and sometimes a kind of liability. A character who walks into a hall with the bearing and reputation of a Martial Actor is being assessed before they speak. A character whose arcane practice marks them as operating outside the oath economy carries that social weight into every interaction. The Actor framework is how we name those weights without flattening them into class mechanics.

Understanding which framework applies to a given action clarifies what is at stake, what complications are possible, and what success and failure actually look like.

A Martial Actor in a fight is operating through the hit point abstraction and the awareness model. The question before the roll is which harm track applies and what the expected outcome range is. The roll expresses variance within that range.

A Divine Actor performing a miracle is operating through concord, institutional authorisation, and covenant logic. The question before the roll — before the dice — is whether this action is within the actor’s authorised scope and whether their concord supports it. The roll, if it comes, expresses variance around a known baseline.

An Arcane Actor working a spell is operating through a process that has stages, each of which can fail independently. The question before the roll is whether the actor has the preparation, the knowledge, and the situational conditions that make the attempt sound. Unlike the other Actor types, arcane work is not simply declared and resolved — getting from intent to effect involves steps that must each hold. The roll, where it applies, expresses variance within those constraints, not a binary on the attempt as a whole.

A Gray Actor attempting to move through a restricted area is operating through subfusc logic: preparation, cover, reputation, the readiness to absorb a bad break. The question before the roll is how well-prepared they are and what the consequences of failure look like. The roll expresses variance around that preparation.

A dice roll is a strong candidate whenever a player recognises risk or uncertainty in what they are attempting. That recognition — "this could go wrong, or the extent to which it goes right is not fixed" — is the signal that a roll may be warranted. The roll exists precisely to represent that variance.

The corollary is equally important. If an action does not anticipate meaningful variance in outcome or magnitude of effect — if success is near-certain given what the character is, what they know, and what they have prepared — a roll may not be indicated. Calling for dice in those situations introduces false uncertainty and, over time, trains the table to reach for dice before establishing the frame. Dice that mean nothing teach the table nothing.

The referee’s job is to make this judgment before reaching for the dice, not after. What is the realistic outcome range here? Is there genuine variance that matters? Only then does a roll add something.

Dice are good at expressing variance within a known outcome range. They are not good at determining outcomes whose nature has not yet been established. A roll whose result could mean anything has not been set up correctly.

Establishing the role frame before the roll ensures that the expected outcome is known before randomness enters, that the players understand what they are risking, and that success and failure both produce meaningful fictional results. The referee is not improvising the meaning of a die result after the fact.

This is not slow. In practice, most role framing takes a sentence or less. "This is a combat track situation — she’s aware of the attack, full abstraction." Or: "This is decisive harm — she didn’t see the falling beam, no reflexive opportunity, expected outcome is serious injury."

The skill framework tracks what characters can do within their roles, at what level of expertise, and how that expertise was acquired. Three tiers apply, recorded by the referee as B, C, and M: Basic, Competent, and Master. Basic means functional and reliable in ordinary conditions. Competent means properly trained and dependable under pressure. Master means the tradition has been absorbed deeply enough to extend it — rare, visible, and carrying social weight of its own.

Skills are not tied to level and do not occupy advancement slots. They develop independently, from evidence accumulated during play and confirmed at the Session Retro.

These distinctions express not just what a character can do but how they do it — the difference between functional and excellent, between adequate and authoritative, between surviving a situation and owning it. Before a roll, knowing that a character has Master in a relevant skill is as important as knowing which track applies. Master shifts the baseline. It changes what counts as a good outcome.