Once you’ve gained Hope and recorded it on your character sheet, you can spend it to power special abilities (erasing it from your character sheet when you do). Your Hope carries over between sessions, but you can only hold up to six Hope at any given time, so you don’t want to save it for too long. Hope can be used in several ways: to Help an Ally, to Utilize an Experience, or to Activate a Hope Feature.

Help an Ally

You can spend one Hope to help an ally who is making an action roll that you could feasibly aid them in. When you do this, describe how you’re helping and roll a d6 advantage die (see “Advantage and Disadvantage”). They can add the result to their action roll. If more than one PC wants to help an ally, each spends a Hope to roll a d6 advantage die, and the highest result among all those advantage dice is added to the roll.

If the PC who is being helped already has advantage on the roll from another source, they can roll that d6 along with the other players’ advantage dice from Help an Ally, then pick the highest result among all of them.

Utilize an Experience

You can spend a Hope to utilize one of your relevant Experiences on an action roll, adding its modifier to the dice results. If more than one Experience could apply, you can spend an additional Hope for each Experience you want to add to your result.

Activate a Hope Feature

Spells and abilities may also allow (or require) you to spend Hope to activate certain effects. A Hope Feature is any effect that asks you to spend Hope to activate it. If the text instructs you to “spend Hope,” that means you must immediately spend the specified number of Hope, or you can’t trigger the Hope Feature.

When using a Hope Feature, if you already rolled with Hope as the higher Duality Die for that action, you can just spend the Hope from that die instead of erasing a Hope from your character sheet. Otherwise, you’ll need to spend Hope you’ve stored from earlier rolls to activate the effect.

Unless an effect states otherwise, you can’t spend Hope multiple times on the same feature to increase or repeat its effects. For example, if a feature says you can “spend a Hope to add 1d6 to the damage roll”, you can’t spend two Hope and add 2d6 instead.

Tip: Some effects only trigger “on a success with Hope”. This doesn’t mean you can spend Hope on a successful roll with Fear to get the effect; it instead means the effect only takes place when you roll with Hope and you succeed on your action roll. On this kind of effect, you don’t have to spend Hope to activate it—it just happens as long as the conditions of the roll are met.

Each class also has a unique Hope Feature, such as “Druid’s Hope” or “Guardian’s Hope.” These powerful abilities allow the character to spend all six Hope on a display of great power in keeping with their class’s theme, turning the tides in a combat or other scene. If you find yourself maxing out on Hope, using your Hope Special could allow you to get the upper hand—but don’t neglect other uses of Hope like helping an ally and utilizing experiences. Hope is a liquid resource, and it’s meant to be used frequently.