benlehman

That isn't entirely accurate. Raises "raise" the risk you take of failure for a more difficult action. For something like blind perception rolls, the gm has the ability to add raises onto your roll themselves when you make the roll, or change what info you get as though you had called raises. In combat though it makes it so when you specifically are trying to do harder things, you have a greater chance of failure. If all raises were called after you rolled it would be pointless. You would never fail to take the right choice in combat as you would know you did not roll enough to be able to knock the man's sword from his hand, or feint, or whatever.

As to usually not making them? Also false. The dice pools on the current system make taking raises fairly easy, on top of a ton of static bonuses written into the system. My combat char can roll 9k4 on the attack, without spending void. This means on average I can easily take 2-4 raises on the attack, with reasonable chance of success.