Polemos is a game played primarily with the use of pencil, paper, and dice. You are the game master (GM)- you craft an imaginary world and tell an interactive story with the help of your players. They each control a character in the story, and you control everything beyond that. You should strive to be fair and consistent when applying rules in general, but feel free to bend or break, add or subtract from the rules given here or elsewhere. The enjoyment of your players should outweigh everything else.
As GM you will be responsible for determining the difficulty of skill rolls, as well as their results.
The following can be used for determining a skill roll's difficulty qualitatively. You may choose to tell your players these difficulties before they roll, after they roll, or not at all. As always you can adjust this based on your judgment. First choose a skill value based on the level of experience or knowledge required to do the task:
Then use a roll difficulty added to the skill value based on how difficult the task is for that experience level:
Alternatively, you may also choose to use a character's current experience level instead of a required experience level so that there is always some element of chance. Some examples:
It is perfectly valid to let players see skill rolls you make for NPCs, and to have knowledge on the roll totals for any and all rolls you make. However, in certain circumstances you may want to hide these rolls from players for dramatic effect. For example, if a player is disguised and passed by a guard, you may wish to keep tension high. You could hide the roll and not announce the total when the guard uses the test identity ability, so the player is unsure of whether they have been made or not. The fact that you rolled at all may tip the player off that the test identity ability was used, which may or may not be desirable. You can make assumed rolls (see section below) if you don't want players aware something happened at all.
Sometimes it is useful to not have a skill roll be performed with actual dice, but to assume some value was rolled for easily or secretly determining outcomes. This is usually called an assumed roll, and for 2D6 a roll of 7 is most commonly assumed, but you can assume any roll value you like. You can either announce the assumed roll and its results, or make a hidden assumed roll to keep player's unaware anything happened at all. For example, if an enemy has assassinated a player's NPC friend in the next room and you do not want to tip the player off by prompting them to use a perception ability, you can assume they rolled some number on their perception, and secretly determine if they noticed the assassination.
Dating in the 8th Age of Polemos is usually based on the AE calendar. For simplicity it is a solar calendar with 12 consistent months of 28 days, or four weeks each. While different cultures and locales have different names for certain months, days, and might use different calendars altogether, feel free to use names from our modern Gregorian calendar for ease of terminology. For example, while some may be interested it how you'd say AE238/04/18 in the land of Agothos, using "April 18th, 238" works just fine as well. If consistent 28 day months are tripping people up, it's also perfectly fine to use the modern Gregorian calendar for the length of months. In general, don't stress about dates being 'realistic' in-world; dates are difficult even without adding the unfamiliarity of a different calendar. Dates should help players reckon time (e.g. a hundred years ago, two weeks from now) and give flavor to the setting, and not become a minutia to confuse or argue over.