Term: Penalty

Bonuses and Penalties apply to checks and certain statistics.

There are 3 types of bonuses and penalties. Numerical, Bonus/Penalty Dice, and Advantage/Disadvantage.

Numerical Penalties are infinite, but are usually permanent and are rare.

Penalty Dice stack in stages and come from situational or semi-permanent debuffs. They start at a d4 and going up to a d12 before starting over (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, then d12+d4, d12+d6, etc). An easy way keep track of them is knowing that a d12 is every 5 stages.

Disadvantage comes from only temporary buffs, and forces you to reroll two d12 or d20s and keep the lower result. You can only gain Disadvantage once, and it is canceled out by any Advantage.