a flexible resolution mechanic

I won't say a "universal" resolution mechanic, which would be against the spirit of Mosaic Strict, which this is. But you can use it in a lot of situations - think of it as in the same phylum as Dreaming Dragon's Stopwatch Dueling Game. Works best when there's both reward and risk, but they can vary independently.

Use for finding the research question without your shit getting stolen or for stealing shit without getting noticed. (Howard Lyon)

Materials needed

A bunch of d20s.

Advantage Level

You intuitively already get this, but advantage level is just how many dice of advantage/disadvantage something at. Consult the following chart:

advantage level	dice thrown
+X	best of (X+1)d20
+2	best of 3d20
+1	best of 2d20
0	1d20
-1	worst of 2d20
-2	worst of 3d20
-X	worst of (X+1)d20

What the Player does

I'd say "declare what your PC is doing," but actually the GM should invoke this minigame only after you've declared what your PC is doing. So starting there...

Start with your SUCCESS and SAFETY pools at ADVANTAGE LEVEL 0 (physically represented by 1d20 each.)

For each of the following:

• You do something like this routinely
• You've succeeded at doing something as difficult as this before
• You were present when another PC died trying to do something like this
  
• You've prepared for this exact situation
• Multiple people with complementary skills are working together on this
• You're approaching this in a clever way (can be invoked multiple times, but GMs should consider sufficiently clever approaches to simply succeed) 
• Some other circumstantial advantage
  

increment by one the ADVANTAGE LEVEL of either the SUCCESS or SAFETY pools by one. You can do this by physically adding 2d0s: feels great, right?

What the GM does

For each of the following:

• No one in living memory has done this before
• No one has done this before, ever
  
• Someone's interfering with the PCs
• There's a time limit
• The environment is chaotic
• A tool or ability the PCs would normally have to deal with this isn't present
• They're trying to do something else at the same time
• Some other circumstantial disadvantage
  

decrement by one the ADVANTAGE LEVEL of either the SUCCESS or SAFETY pools by one. Do this by physically taking away and then, once you hit negative levels, adding ominous d20s: makes the players squirm, doesn't it?

Resolution

Roll both pools separately. Interpret each pool as so:

die result	diegetic result
20	as good as one could imagine
11-19	better than expected!
2-10	worse than expected
1	as bad as it could possibly get