Everything runs on two dice

What to read first, and in what order, to play at all.

You need two six-sided dice and one number. Roll them, add whatever modifiers apply, and try to reach 8. Every rule on this site is detail hung off that one sentence — building a character, fighting, trading, crossing a parsec.

A session is a conversation. You say what your character does, the referee says what happens, and the dice settle anything that could plausibly fail. Some scenes resolve in a minute; some run for weeks of play. Combat and space combat get more structure than the rest because more is at stake in them.

One participant is the referee: organiser, narrator, rules arbitrator and everyone you meet. In Nowhere Yet the referee is an AI, and it plays exactly those roles — it frames the scene and decides what a scene means. It does not decide the numbers. Dice are drawn by the server, and prices and distances come from tables.

You control one character. Everybody else in the setting is a non-player character, run by the referee. Your character is a set of numbers that grows and changes over a career, and the numbers are there so the fiction has something to push against.

Characters are not bought with points. You live a life instead: a career is served in terms, and a term can teach you a skill, promote you, hurt you or throw you out. What you leave with is what you take into play. A skill is written as its name, a hyphen and its level — Gambling-2 is two levels of Gambling — and the level is added straight to the check when the skill applies.

Two six-sided dice, added. Every roll in the game is this roll.

Two six-sided dice, added together. That is every roll in this game, and you always want the total high.

2D6

die + die = a total from 2 to 12

Two dice added are not a flat spread. Seven comes up six times as often as twelve, and the totals bunch hard around the middle — which is why a single +1 is worth so much more here than it looks, and why an unlikely roll stays genuinely unlikely no matter how badly you want it.

A few tables want a D66 instead. Roll two dice and read them as a pair rather than a sum: the first is the tens digit, the second the ones. The lowest entry is 11 and the highest is 66, but neither digit is ever above 6, so there are 36 entries rather than 56. A D66 is a two-axis lookup wearing a number, and it has no middle to bunch around — every entry is equally likely.

How dice, modifiers, skill levels and targets are written down.

A target written 8+ means eight or more. Exactly eight meets it. The number in front of the plus sign is the lowest total that succeeds, never the first total above the line.

The single-character digits that carry values above nine.

Values above nine are written as a single letter, so a whole profile fits in one unbroken string. Zero to nine are themselves; ten becomes A, eleven B, and the letters keep going from there.

The ladder does not stop at F the way ordinary hexadecimal does — G is 16, H is 17, and it runs on to Z at 33. Two letters are skipped outright: I and O never appear, because in a string of digits they read as 1 and 0. Do not compute this from character codes. Read it off the ladder.

Rounds, minutes, days, weeks and the calendar the game keeps.

When a fight starts, time is measured in rounds of six seconds. A round is long enough to do one real thing, and what you may spend it on is a short fixed list.

The credit, its abbreviation, and the scale of ordinary prices.

Money is credits, written Cr in front of the number. Large sums get a prefix rather than more zeroes.

Reference rule — not active yet

The compact strings that describe a character, a world and a ship.

A profile is a run of pseudohex digits that says everything essential about one subject in one string. Characters have one, worlds have one, and each is read position by position.

A character is described by six characteristics: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education and Social Standing. Seven is about average for a capable human. A high score is worth a bonus of +1 or better on checks that lean on it, and a low one costs you as much as -2.

A world gets the same treatment as a Universal World Profile, the string a list of worlds carries for the main world of each system. The exact layout of each profile is printed with the rules that build it, which is where to go when you need to read one digit by digit rather than recognise it on sight.

Reference rule — not active yet

The kinds of game these rules are built to run.

These rules are built to run several different kinds of game, and a long-running one usually settles into a theme. The theme decides which chapters you live in, not which rules apply.

The list is not exhaustive and the boundaries are soft. A campaign can sit between two of these, or open as one and end as another — a trading run that goes wrong often finishes somewhere closer to rebellion than to commerce.

The terms the referee uses, defined once.

These are the words the referee uses when it is talking about the rules rather than about the scene. Each one means exactly this, everywhere.

A term that carries a rule of its own is defined where that rule lives rather than here. The distance a ship must reach before it can jump, the tonnage that separates small craft from starships, the line between lethal and non-lethal damage — each is a number as well as a word, and the chapter that owns the number owns the definition.