How can I make sure my Roll For Shoes character gets XP or new skills?

Question

I played some RFS (Roll for shoes) recently and I was having so much fun I didn't really check to see what XP or skills I had acquired.

Going back I noticed over the 45 minutes of play I hadn't gotten any XP or skill. Maybe not surprising given it was a short impromptu session. I'd passed my rolls without getting a 6.

But I would like to know what I can do to get more XP or new skills during a game? I have to roll more, and for more thing that could fail, but I'm not sure how best adopt a gameplay style that does that.

Answer 1

In order to guarantee you get XP or skills in Roll For Shoes, you'll have to cheat.

That's the proper term for influencing a random system to come out the way you want, right? "Cheat"?

If you're lucky enough (from a certain perspective) to always succeed on a single die without rolling a 6, then you'll never get a skill and you'll never get a point of XP to turn your single die into a virtual 6 to get a skill. I'd say "start trying harder things", I'd say "after a certain amount of gametime this becomes very unlikely in the aggregate", but unless your GM invents 5-die challenges it'll never really be impossible.

There's nothing for it but to keep going and hope the odds catch up with you.

Answer 2

You can't make sure of it

As Glazius explains in their answer, this ultimately depends on random, and thus the only way to make sure of it would be cheating

But you can improve your odds

In Roll For Shoes, you get skills when rolling all-6s and xp when you fail a challenge. Thus you can improve your odds by:

• rolling more: for that the best way is to think about how things could fail before your DM lets things go forward. For example instead of saying "hello" to the NPC, ask the DM if you speak their language (this should yield to a roll).

• rolling "better": you can also improve your odds on each roll. This is quite simple: use poor skills. If you roll less dice you have both a better chance of rolling all-6s and of failing the challenge. Of course having a higher chance failing the challenge presents its own issue!