Skill tests operate as they always have in DnD. However these rules apply two new concepts to how skill tests can play out: motivation and alignment.
During Performance Reviews, characters should nominate personal goals, and strong bonds or rivalries that have developed between them and other team-mates. These sources of internal and external motivation help drive characters to try harder when it counts and therefore boost the chances of success.
<aside> ⏫ Each time a character levels up they gain one point of ‘Inspiration’, (or rather, Motivation), that they can use for a check that is linked to their goals, bonds or rivalries. Motivation dice act like Lucky points, you can choose to use them after a d20 check has been made and use that result instead. If a character has a particular bond with another character, then they are also able to lend their Motivation to a check that the other makes, if they are helping them.
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Goal-based bonuses apply when the test being attempted applies to a goal that the character nominated when they levelled up or started the current quest.
Bond-based bonuses apply when a character does something in partnership with or for the sake of someone they have developed a deep relationship with.
Rivalry-based bonuses apply when a character attempts something in competition with another character that they feel they really wish to win against. For example, two characters in a race to climb a mountain.
If an individual character test can benefit from help, the characters need to nominate how their tool proficiencies, keywords, or alignments can assist with a test. Assistance from help lends the character making the check advantage on the roll.
Group tests, such as group sneaking tests, require all Characters to roll against a given DC. If some characters fail their check, other players can donate any excess points from their rolls to those characters to improve their overall score and ensuring they pass. If any characters still fail, the GM may decide if the consequences of failure impact the whole group or just the failing characters. For example, if the group check involves a sprint across a collapsing bridge, then only the failing characters may fall into the river. Or if the group check is made to move stealthily past some guards, then even if one character fails, the guards may be alerted to the whole group.
Once upon a time, alignment in DnD meant something interesting and useful to the kinds of games that people were running. Nowadays people don’t run those kinds of games, but the language of alignment has stayed the same and alignment has gradually come to mean something different and worse.
Crossroads takes the idea of alignment, and reapplies it to the context of modern TTRPGs. In Crossroads, being liked is not as easy as being like-able. There is no universal charisma statistic or suite of social abilities that accounts for a player’s ability to convince or threaten other people irrespective of local customs or values. The world is simply too unknown and uncertain for anyone but the most naive street vendor to take someone at their honeyed words alone.