Long Task

A long task is a special type of Skill roll, made for a task which is difficult to do quickly, but which can usually be solved with patience. The difficulty for a long task will often be 10 or even 20 successes, depending on the size of the job.

A character starts by making a normal skill roll. As long as their number of successes is at least ¹/₁₀ of the required number (rounding down), they have made some progress on the job. You gain accumulated successes equal to the number of '0's rolled (or a minimum of 1 if they didn't roll any '0's). This represents 5 minutes of work (or 1 hour, or a day for very time-consuming tasks).

After 5 minutes, the character may roll again. If the number of successes they roll plus their accumulated successes from the previous attempt beats the difficulty, the task is complete. Otherwise, they may add on further accumulated successes for any '0's rolled this time (if your previous number of accumulated successes is less than the relevant skill, you may add 1 even without rolling any '0's - once the number of successes you have stacked up exceeds your skill, a successful roll without any '0's means that you have made no further progress, but you haven't lost anything either).

If the task requires 10 or more successes, every success by which you get less than ¹/₁₀ of the target number means that you aren't quite good enough to keep up. For example, a character trying to break a difficulty-20 combination lock needs to get 2 successes every turn. If she only gets 1 success (before adding on the accumulated successes), she loses an accumulated success as she forgets one of the numbers she'd already deduced.

In addition, every '1' that you roll during a long task becomes an accumulated failure. If the number of accumulated failures plus the number of '1's on a roll ever beats your accumulated successes plus the successes on that roll, you have screwed up and probably lost some of your previous work. For every extra failure, you lose one accumulated sucess. In addition, this roll counts as zero successes for the purposes of accumulating or losing any more successes.

In some circumstances, rolling excess '1's may also result in a catastrophic failure. For example, when picking a lock you may set off an alarm.