The Shadow of Yesterday is a fun game, and for the most part it's pretty simple to play! But when I ran it for the first time, I bogged down in a couple of spots. Here are some points to keep in mind.

Bonus and Penalty Dice

I didn't read the core rules very carefully the first time I played, and got confused about bonus dice and penalty dice.

The correct way is: you have three dice to start with. If you get two bonus dice you end up rolling five (3+2) dice and taking the highest three. On the other hand, let's say you had one penalty die instead: you'd roll four (3+1) dice and take the lowest three.

If you have two bonus and one penalty dice, the penalty cancels one bonus die before the roll. Then you roll with the one remaining bonus die.

How many points can I spend from my pool at a time?

When making an ability check, you can only spend one die from the appropriate pool. The Secret of Enhancement allows you to spend as many as you like on a single ability, but that is a special case.

Bringing Down the Pain

BDTP is Strange. How Should I GM it?

One thing to remember about the Shadow of Yesterday: it doesn't have any "hit point" system. This means that any hero can die with a single roll if the attacker strikes with lethal intent. Furthermore, due to the dice mechanic, even a lowly n00b can beat the world's greatest adventurer on a lucky hit. Naturally the endangered player won't stand for this, and will Bring Down the Pain.

Here's what that means for your game: any time you design an adventure where a random puny kobold attacks Sir Lancelot with malice aforethought, you should be prepared--your players may Bring the Pain, and you'll end up spending twenty minutes resolving something that would take two seconds in D&D. Thus, in the Shadow of Yesterday there's not much room for "filler combat."

Although only a player can Bring Down the Pain, the Storyguide is the one who provokes it by having NPC's act with intentions that are unacceptable to the player. If I'm a player, and immediately upon meeting a kobold that little critter wants to kill me, you have forced me to Bring the Pain by dropping me into a high-stakes situation. If you don't want me to Bring It, you need to make sure that kobold's intention is not that objectionable. If I'm gonna die, I have to fight back--but I might not choose to squander my pools on this "throwaway" encounter if the kobold just wanted to scare me away, or steal my gold, or whatever.

James Nostack? suggests making sure that the antagonists of a story each have clear motivations, possibly with room to escalate. "You see some goblins, they attack to kill" will get very tedious in this game.

What's an "intention" in Bringing Down the Pain?

This is a little vague in the rules. I think what's trying to be conveyed is the overall goal. If you win Bringing Down the Pain, this is what you want to get out of it. Each of the little skill tests in the process builds up to that goal.

Changing your tactics doesn't cause you to lose your turn: if your goal is to humiliate someone, you might try that by insults (savoir-faire), a punch in the nose (scrapping), or pushing them into a mud puddle (athletics). Shifting between these options doesn't count as changing your intention.

On the other hand, if you suddenly realized that this guy you've been insulting all this time is the King in disguise, and he wants to cut your head off, you'll probably need to change your goal in a hurry! Going from "humiliate this guy" to "apologize profusely" or "run like the dickens" constitutes a change of intent, and would cost you one turn.

Bringing Down the Pain with large groups

Use the Gestalt method, mentioned in the section on players working together. It simplifies play a lot.