Each day that a character lives rough, he/she must make a dice roll using his/her Survival (including making shelter/living rough specialism and any specialism in the environment type) + ST to avoid exposure damage.
If a character is underground, he/she may substitute his/her Mining (including surviving underground/living rough underground) for his/her Survival in the dice roll.
The dice roll takes into account actions that the character makes to build shelter, wear the right clothing, avoiding dehydration and hypothermia, etc. If an experienced survivor is helping others he/she is travelling with, each other person in the party may use the average of his/her Survival skill score and that of the experienced survivor, in the dice roll.
The difficulty of the dice roll depends on the conditions; examples are as follows:
| Circumstances | Living rough difficulty value |
| Benign conditions (e.g. a park in temperate sunny weather) | 0 |
| Normal conditions (e.g. woods or plains in autumn) | 3 |
| Hostile conditions (e.g. very wet conditions, such as heavy rain or swamp) | 7 |
| Very hostile conditions (e.g. desert, frozen wastes) | 11 |
| Appalling conditions (e.g. sandstorm, blizzard, hurricane) | 15 |
If a character fails the dice roll, he/she suffers some exposure damage. Exposure damage acts like a wound that accumulates with each living rough dice roll that is failed. For every 2 points (or part thereof) that a character fails a living rough dice roll, his/her exposure damage level is increased by one wound level.
For example, Cogan the barbarian and Ben Ruben are lost in the frozen wastes. Cogan has a Survival skill score of 6 with no relevant specialisms but he does have a bonus of +2 due to his talent for survival, and his ST is +4, giving a basic value of 12. His expertise in survival techniques means that he can automatically avoid exposure damage, even under these conditions, provided there isn't a blizzard. His travelling companion, Ben Ruben, is in more trouble. His survival skill score is 3 with no relevant specialisms and his ST is -1/2. Fortunately, he is travelling with Cogan, who helps, and so Ben Ruben uses the average of his survival skill score (3) and Cogan's (6) making 4 1/2 in the dice roll, giving him a basic value of 4. He rolls 2D-2, gets a 4 and a 5, making a dice roll result of 7; this is 4 points lower than the difficulty, and so Ben Ruben's exposure damage increases from none to a Light wound. Ben Ruben had better use some magic to heal himself or get himself out of these wastes, or it will not take long for the exposure damage to increase in severity.
A character without food or water suffers a penalty of -2 on the living rough dice roll for that day.