Abilities
The ability cards in your hero's ability draw deck and their core ability on their portrait card represent the cool things your hero can do. Abilities deal damage in combat, protect you or your allies, make it easier to succeed on difficult tasks, allow you to heal, cure conditions, and more. Each ability is labeled with an icon that describes its purpose: swords for damage-dealing, hearts for healing, shields for protection, and gears for all the other useful skills not related to combat.
Each ability card explains when the ability may be used, such as during your turn during combat, at the end of an encounter, or any time you need to roll the dice to determine an outcome.
Generally, only one ability card may be played on a single turn, though there are exceptions.
When an ability card is played, discard it to the ability discard pile. When the ability deck runs out, shuffle the discarded abilities and turn them over to form a new abilities deck.
Ability cards that offer bonuses to dice rolls must be played before rolling the dice and ability cards that allow a player to re-roll a failed check must be played immediately after failing.
Ability cards are unique to each hero and may not be traded with other players.
If, during combat, a player has a hand with no pertinent ability card, they may discard any number of ability cards and draw new ability cards until they have five in their hand.
At the end of each round, there should always be five ability cards in your hand at the end of each round.