The Wheel of Time dice system uses five six-sided dice. Whenever a character is called upon to make a skill test these five dice will partially determine their performance. The rest of the test is based upon the character's skill rating. The skill rating and dice roll are added to yield the character's effective skill total for that test. This total is then compared with the difficulty of the task to determine how successful the character. If the skill total beats the difficulty rating of the task, the charcter has succeeded. If the skill total is lower, they have failed their task in some degree. How badly the character has failed is determined by how far off the character was.

Example: Mara and Jain are travelling through the Mountain of Mist when they come upon an old stone structure. Seeing no way in, Jain suggests they attempt to climb one of the walls, since he's a big dumb male an not very bright. The GM decides that the wall is fairly smooth and hard to climb. He assigns a difficulty number of 30. Jain's Climbing skill is a 20 and he rolls a 14 on his dice. His skill total is 34, a success. He reaches the top of the wall. Mara's Climbing skill is a 12 since she's a woman. She only rolls an 15 on her dice. Her skill total is a 27, a failure but not by much. She isn't able to climb the wall but doesn't fall either.

Since the range of possible values given by the five dice only goes from 5 to 30 some skill tests will pass automatically. If the difficulty rating for a task is less than 5 greater than a character's skill rating they cannot possibly fail at the task. As a result, no roll is necessary.

Example: Mara looks around for another way in and notices a tall tree growing next to one of the walls. She anounces that she'd like to climb the tree to reach the top of the wall, a much easier task for a clever woman such as herself. The GM decides that the task of climbing the tree has a difficulty number of 15. Since Mara's Climbing skill is a 12 and her minimum roll is a 5 she cannot fail. She does not need to roll. Mara reaches the top of the wall and gives Jain a snide, superior smile.

By the same token that allows some rolls to be skipped because they automatically succeed, some rolls will also automatically fail. If the difficulty number for a task is more than the character's skill rating plus 30, they cannot succeed. Character's in this situation are not given the option of rolling.

In addition to the degrees of success and failure possible based upon the character's skill total versus the difficulty rating, two other options are possible. If the character rolls all ones on his dice roll he has rolled 'the Dark One's eyes'. In a game sense he has drawn the attention of the Dark One is some manner and not only do they fail their skill test, they fail it is the worst possible manner. This may seem a bit extreme but remember that a result of five on five dice happens only once every eight thousand rolls or so.

The opposite of 'the Dark One's eyes' is, of course, rolling five sixes. This result of 30 indicates that the weaving of the Pattern directly guided the character, a those around him, for a brief moment. A success of this nature yields results well beyond the normal positive outcome of the skill test. In fact, it will often cause additional effects in the characters favor well beyond the skill test itself.