Editing Betrayal at House on the Hill (section)

== Trait Rolls ==
So as the players walk around in the house with hideous stuff happening to each and every one of them they will often have to make Trait Rolls. Each character has a number in each of the four Traits - Speed, Strength, Sanity and Knowledge. The characters starting value in that Trait is colored yellow on their pentagonal character board. The characters each have slightly different configurations for the Traits shown on their character boards, which generally make sense such as the little kid usually being faster than the old dude. When it comes time to make a Trait roll the game is equipped with some janky [[dice]] - strictly speaking, they're six-sided d3s minus 1, meaning they can show 0, 1 or 2 on any given roll. On a Trait roll you roll as many dice as your Trait's value and see if you reach the target number for that particular roll, or suffer the consequences. If you're lucky, your Trait values go up, and if you're unlucky, they go down.  You keep track of the current value of your character's Traits with small clips that slide over the four edges of the cardboard character board (though those fucking clips tend to be a little loose, so it probably wouldn't hurt to use a bit of clear tape around the edges of the board, or some other trick, to make them a little thicker to keep those damn clips on there).

When you succeed or fail a Trait roll you will often be made to change the value in one of your character's Traits, though sometimes the game will let you pick which from either the two Physical Traits (Strength and Speed) or the two Mental Traits (Sanity and Knowledge). You will sometimes have to roll the dice to determine how many steps you have to move the marker. For example: the card message "Gain 1 sanity" means "move the sanity marker on your board up one step" which doesn't necessarily mean that the sanity value goes up. For instance, the configuration of that character's Trait might be 1-2-3-3-4-4-5 or something similar.

The lowest value on a character's Trait board will always be a 💀 skull symbol. While you would think that this means horrible instant death, characters cannot die during the Exploration phase, before the Haunt starts, so if you are told to lower Trait ''x'' below its lowest value before the Haunt, then nothing happens. However, ''after'' the Haunt starts, if any trait goes down below the lowest value, the character immediately dies. And it's these Haunts that make the game worthwhile.