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Saving Throws

Dungeon Crawl Classics runs three saving throws. Fortitude covers the physical insults: poison, disease, the dragon’s breath you failed to dodge. Reflex handles area effects, the pit trap and the fireball. Will guards the mind against charm, fear, and the gaze of things better left unseen. Each class advances one of these faster than the others, which is ordinary enough.

The part people misread is Luck. A character’s Luck modifier does not quietly improve every save. The birth augur fixes which single save type Luck touches, and only that one. Roll a d30 at creation, read the augur table, and you learn not just a number but a channel. One warrior’s Luck feeds his Fortitude; another’s feeds Reflex. The common table assumption that a high Luck score softens all three saves is simply wrong, and it tends to surface at the worst moment, when a player burns Luck points into a Will save that the augur never blessed.

The burn still works on the roll, point for point. But the standing birth-augur bonus applies to one save only. Know which before the DC 15 trap goes off.

At the table: Before session, note each character’s augur-linked save on the sheet (for example “Luck: Reflex”), so nobody wastes a burn expecting phantom bonuses on Will.

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