I’m wondering if there is a specific difference between the phrasing in the thread title. Specific example would be Legacy’s Danger Sense ability which says, “Defend using Awareness” and his Heroic Interception ability which says, “Defend by rolling your Leadership die.”
My interpretation is that the former language–“X using Y”–means assemble your dice pool as normal but you must include, i.e. “use”, the named die, which in this example is Awareness. The latter language–“rolling your Y die”–means to roll only the Leadership die alone and do not include any other dice with it. Does that seem correct?
The fact that abilities that use the “X using Y” sometimes refer to Min/Mid/Max die and “X by rolling your Y die” refers to one die only is where I’m drawing my interpretation from. At the same time I know this is a starter product and there may be certain types or templating issues that might have snuck through.
This is something that confused me also - I started with the former but then mid issue changed course to the latter, after a player asked for clarification. I found it to be more streamlined.
Unity has "deal a target damage equal to the roll of your Robotics die" under her Volatile Parts ability, which is close to my above phrasing and yet different enough to merit an interpretation that it is only a roll of one die and not a pool of dice.
I also noticed that in issue #6 the ultimate villain's second ability references rolling a... Power? Quality? Perhaps a category that applies to more than one Power?... that the villain doesn't have listed under its stats. Deliberately phrased vaguely so as to avoid spoilers. It is in both the print copy and PDF that I have.
I think the intent (it was mentioned somewhere on this forum that it didn’t make into the rules of the starter kit) is for reaction abilities and incap abilities to only use the one die where everything else uses the normal dice pool.
Ah! I seem to remember this being mentioned somewhere also! Good catch!