You don’t need to roll dice for many actions. If your character isn’t in a stressful situation — nobody’s actively trying to tear his throat open, nor is the building being demolished as he works — you don’t need to roll.
When the dice hit the table, the Storyteller should have some idea of what will happen if the roll fails as well as if it succeeds. Sometimes, that’s coded in the rules. If you fail on an attack roll, you don’t deal any damage. Other times, it’s up to the Storyteller.
If you fail a roll to jump between buildings with a rival mage’s hit-squad on your tail, do you make it but fall on the other side, grab the next building by your fingertips, or plummet to the alley below?
Permutations
This is a list of the most common dice effects
9-Again
You re-roll dice that show 9 or 10, as opposed to just 10. Keep rolling until you get a result that isn’t a 9 or 10.
8-Again
You re-roll dice that show 8, 9, or 10 — any successful die — and keep rolling as long as your dice show successes.
Extra Successes
Assuming your roll succeeds, you get a number of extra successes added to your total. This permutation mostly applies to weapons, which add their damage bonus as extra successes on your attack roll.
Rote Actions
When you’ve got plenty of training and the steps you need to follow are laid out in front of you, you’ve got a significant chance of success. When you make a roll, you can re-roll any dice that do not show an 8, 9, or 10. If you’re reduced to a chance die on a rote action, don’t re-roll a dramatic failure. You may only re-roll each die once.
Successive Attempts
When you fail a roll, you may be able to try again. If time is not an issue and your character is under no pressure to perform, you may make successive attempts with your full dice pool. In the far more likely situation that time is short and the situation is tense, each subsequent attempt has a cumulative –1 die penalty — so the third time a character tries to break down the door that’s keeping her inside a burning building, her roll has a –2 die penalty. Successive attempts do not apply to Extended Actions.
Teamwork
When two or more people work together, one person takes the lead. He’s the primary actor, and his player assembles his dice pool as normal. Anyone assisting rolls the same pool before the primary actor. Each success gives the primary actor a bonus die. If one of the secondary actors rolls a dramatic failure, the primary actor gets a –4 die penalty.