Since your character actually lives in the game world and you're only vicariously inhabiting it through gameplay, there's a vast gap between the character's knowledge about and first-hand experience of the world and the approximation of it that you get at the gaming table. Brains helps to fill in the gap by allowing you to make a die roll to access the things in your character's head that you don't know about or can't experience. The rolls described in this section are standard one-and-done rolls for common RPG situations where Brain is relevant.
Even if the player normally rolls Challenge Dice alongside their die pool, we recommend that the GM roll the Challenge Dice in secret for most knowledge rolls. If the player knows for sure they succeeded or failed (and how well or badly), that player knowledge may affect how they player their character.
Knowledge Rolls
Knowledge rolls determine whether or not a character knows (and can recall) something that the player doesn't know but the character might--the names of the three owlbears who guard the gate to the underworld, the location of The Agency's secret headquarters in Prague, or the fine for public drunkenness in Buzzard's Gulch, for example. The number of Challenge Dice required for a knowledge roll is extremely contextual and can vary considerably from from character to character. Automatic successes (for things a character would definitely know) and failures (or things that the character has no chance of knowing) are common.
Though it's less common, knowledge rolls can also be used when the player knows something that it seems unlikely the character would know. For example, if you're a gamer of a certain age you know without a doubt that Mel was the cook on
Alice, but it might stretch credibility to assert that your Zoomer PC who's never exhibited any special interest in 20th Century American sitcoms would also know this fact. Therefore, if the name of Vic Tayback's most iconic character is important to the plot, the GM might require you to make a knowledge roll to see if your character has somehow acquired this information in their relatively short and diner-based comedy deficient life.
Memory Rolls
A memory roll is basically just a knowledge roll for something that we know the character knows, the question is whether they remember it. Examples include things that were established in a previous session (the name of the barista at Mean Gene's House of Beans), general knowledge that the character definitely would have learned at some point but might not remember (who wrote
Slaughterhouse Five), and things that haven't been established on screen, but that the character has experienced and may or may not remember correctly (what color are the barstools at the Regal Beagle?). As with knowledge rolls, Challenge Dice for memory rolls are very contextual.
Perception Rolls
Since everything you know about what your player sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels comes from the GM's descriptions of the game world, there's a good chance that anything the GM mentions is important. Even if the GM uses long-winded descriptions with tons of details, players who get stuck are likely to just investigate the things from the description until they find something clickable. Perception rolls alleviate this problem somewhat by determining whether the player notices something that the GM hasn't told the players about: the bullet casing under the desk, the ritual scars on an NPCs legs, or that black Crown Victoria that's been following them for half an hour.
Thinking Rolls
Thinking rolls are used when a player is doing intellectual grunt work that doesn't lend itself to exciting storytelling: poring through books or files, analyzing data or evidence, working math problems, etc. While thinking rolls can occasionally represent on-screen actions--can the character solve an algebra problem in time to deactivate the bomb by typing in the answer?--they're more likely to appear a a component of a
Puzzle, with thinking rolls resolving the parts of the operation that take place between the panels or in montages: digging through data, conducting routine tests, translating ancient texts, debugging code, checking the math, etc.
Successes for Simple Brains Rolls
Some of the Brains rolls here are strictly pass/fail. For example, a character rolling to solve a math problem either gets the right answer or they don't. In these cases, a single success indicates the player has succeeded and additional successes don't matter. Usually, though, the extra successes can be used to determine the completeness of the answer or provide additional context: 1 success indicates that you know that Mark Twain wrote
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or that you notice the shadowy figure skulking along behind you. Additional successes indicate your familiarity with the book or indicates that you were able to pick out some details about the person following you. If there are specific details that the characters would recognize as being important (the guy following you is wearing the uniform of a rival organization), the GM should give those out first at a cost of 1 success for each piece of information. If the player still has successes left over (or if there was no clearly relevant information to impart), the GM can allow the player to ask one question per success. The GM can overrule questions whose answer the character has no way of knowing (Was the murder victim a Mark Twain fan? or What is the pursuer's name?, for example). If a question is overruled, the player should be allowed to ask something else.
In addition to the amount of information obtained, some rolls (especially thinking rolls) may have a time component. If this is the case, the GM determines a default timeframe for doing the necessary intellectual labor. If the roll succeeds, the player may use successes either to glean additional information or to reduce the time spent by a set amount of time.
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