Chapter 6 — Advantage & Disadvantage
Characters in Wanderstar have six characteristics. Unlike many roleplaying games, these do not add numeric bonuses to rolls. Instead, they tilt the dice: a high characteristic gives you Advantage, a low one gives you Disadvantage. This chapter explains both the characteristics and the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanism they drive — the single most distinctive piece of the system.
Index§
- The six characteristics
- Advantage and Disadvantage
- Setting characteristics at character creation
- Gaining Advantage during play
The six characteristics§
| Characteristic | Governs |
|---|---|
| Strength | Physical force, lifting, close-quarters power |
| Dexterity | Agility, precision, speed, fine motor control |
| Endurance | Stamina, resilience, sustained effort, pain tolerance |
| Intellect | Reasoning, analysis, problem-solving, quick thinking |
| Education | Formal knowledge, training, institutional learning |
| Social Standing | Reputation, presence, authority, social capital |
Advantage and Disadvantage§
When a characteristic is relevant to a test:
- Advantage: Roll 3D6, keep the highest two
- Disadvantage: Roll 3D6, keep the lowest two
- Neutral: Roll 2D6 as normal
If both Advantage and Disadvantage would apply to a roll — regardless of how many sources of each — they cancel out entirely and the roll is made normally. Three sources of Advantage and one source of Disadvantage still results in a neutral roll.
Receiving Advantage from a characteristic costs 2 Momentum (other sources, such as a Boon, are cheaper — see Chapter 7). If you have no Momentum to spend, you cannot activate Advantage even if a source of it applies.
This Momentum cost applies only during play. The Advantage and Disadvantage that characteristics grant during character creation — on career entry tests and term rolls — are applied freely; Momentum is a per-session play resource and is not spent or tracked during creation.
Each skill has a default characteristic (listed in Chapter 8). The GM may call a different characteristic when the situation warrants — for example, a Negotiate test might use Intellect when parsing a complex contract, but Social Standing when making a first impression.
The effect in practice§
Advantage meaningfully raises your floor. Disadvantage meaningfully raises your ceiling of failure. Both matter more on rolls without a skill bonus (Untrained tests, entry tests) where the raw dice carry more weight.
| Condition | Average Roll |
|---|---|
| Disadvantage | ~5.5 |
| Neutral | ~7.0 |
| Advantage | ~8.5 |
Averaging understates the effect, though: what matters at the table is the success chance at the target number. Against the default target of 8, a neutral roll succeeds ~42% of the time, Advantage ~68%, and Disadvantage ~19% — a far larger swing than the one-and-a-half-point shift in the average suggests, because Advantage and Disadvantage reshape the whole curve rather than sliding it.
Setting characteristics at character creation§
During character creation, players mark characteristics as Advantage or Disadvantage in equal pairs. The valid splits are:
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 |
Remaining characteristics are neutral — they have no effect on rolls. A character with 0/0 is balanced across the board. A character with 3/3 is sharply defined: excellent at some things, genuinely vulnerable at others. The full creation procedure is in Part III.
Gaining Advantage during play§
Certain career D66 results can upgrade a characteristic from neutral to Advantage. The standard phrasing is:
[Characteristic] becomes Advantage if not already — if already Advantage, gain 10 XP instead.
The Advantages & Disadvantages chosen or gained during character creation are permanent.