This is a role-playing game. It needs "adventures" or "modules" to be played. Feel free to construct these yourself or just plain improvise. It is played by one or more players controlling their characters and one player controlling the rest of the game (we call this person "the GM" or just "GM" (this is short for "game master)). The aim of the game is to have fun. If everyone has fun, everyone wins. Otherwise, no one wins.
An average value for any characteristic is 3, so anything lower than 3 is less than normal and anything above 3 is above average.
The primary and secondary characteristics control what values will be defaulted to when there isn't any pre-determined combination of characteristics to use. They are also used in combat.
The secondary characteristic is used to track subtype(s) of archetypes. Look at barbarians, there's the wisecracking barbarian (secondary characteristic of Wisecrack), there's the just plain competent barbarian (secondary characteristic of Skill) and so on.
Tale RPG has two resolution mechanisms, depending on the circumstances of the skill check. If there is time pressure or the check is for something that is inherently a sequential process (typical example would be combat, at least combat that isn't peripheral to the story), the process used is iterated resolution. If it's not under time pressure, use the straight roll.
Straight roll resolution is quite simple. First, find the size of the dice pool (each skill has two characteristics coupled to them, add these number, gather that many six-sided dice (D6)), roll them and sum the numbers. If this number is equal or higher to the taregt number (or target roll), the roll is successful. Typical example would be something like this:
Juhani is running across a bridge, with a section missing. The GM ponders a bit and decides that the difficulty is 21. Juhani needs to jump and this is governed by the characteristics deft+skill. Juhani is a very average character and his player rolls a total of 29. Juhani makes it across the missing section, without falling in.
Iterated resolution is a process of opposed rolls, with wearing down of one or both parties. This is mostly used in combat, but is also applicable to lock-picking under adverse conditions, hiding from someone actively searching for one, finding people that are actively hiding and similar activities, where exhaustion plays a definite role.
This works by both parties (usually GM and player) portion up their available dice pool in one to three smaller pools (attack, defence and do-nothing pools).
For an iterated skill roll, simply roll all of the dice pools for the player and the task/opponent, sum the dice an compare the sums. On equal, nothing happens, continue next round. If one is higher than teh other, sort the two dice pools (separately) from high to low and (from high) go down both pools, once die at a time, eliminating the loser's die if it is lower than the winner's. Like this:
Torkild is hiding from Evilbloke. This is determined as being dramatically important. Hiding is governed by clever+deft. Torkild ends up with a dice pool of 9 dice, whereas Evilbloke is a right fiend, with a Spot Hidden (governed by clever+skill) of 10 dice.
In the first round, the rolls are as follows:
Torkild: 6 3 3 2 1 5 1 3 2 (sum 26)
Evilbloke: 3 1 6 6 2 5 4 5 4 4 (sum 40)
This means that Evilbloke is getting closer to spot Torkild. How much closer? We start by getting the dice in sorted order:
| Torkild | 6 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
| Evilbloke | 6 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
Since Evilbloke won, we start going through the sorted dice from left to right. We can see that Evilbloke manages to spot Torkild right in the first round.
Let's look at another example. Sinistre Obf is trying to hide from Autopet, tracking him. Sinistre has a clever+deft of 12, whereas Autopet has a clever+skill of 12. They start with the same number of dice. To make things complicated, Autopet hears a posse chasing him, just as he starts looking for Sinistre. If there's nothing found in three rounds, Autopet must dash onwards and forwards.
Autopet rolls: 5 3 4 2 1 1 2 1 3 3 4 5 (sum 34)
Sinistre rolls: 1 3 4 6 1 6 1 1 2 1 4 2 (sum 32)
We look at the values sorted, to see how much of Sinistre's dice pool Autopet can knock out.
| Sinistre | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Autopet | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
As we can see, the first round there's no dice eliminated.
In the second round, the rolls are as follows:
Autopet: 4 5 2 4 5 2 6 1 4 2 1 1 (sum 37)
Sinistre: 4 5 5 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 1 2 (sum 33)
| Sinistre | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Autopet | 6 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
In the third and last round, the rolls are as follows:
Autopet: 6 1 6 3 3 1 6 3 2 2 1 3 (sum: 37)
Sinistre: 1 4 6 2 6 3 1 2 3 3 1 (sum 32)
| Sinistre | 6 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Autopet | 6 | 6 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
No dice are eliminated. Sinistre managed to keep hidden until Autopet needed to run away, to evade the posse chasing him.
This means, on the face of things, that there's lots of dice roll involved, but for straight resolutions there is a faster way of finding the "average value" for a challenge. Simply multiply 3.5 with the dice rating and round up (this is because dice roll sums form a Gaussian normal distribution (also known as a bell curve) and the peak is right in-between the lowest and highest possible result).
Reference table for difficulty levels, dice and the chance for an average person (that is "one rolling 6D") would have to succeed.
| Difficulty | Dice | Average chance of success |
|---|---|---|
| Trivial | 2D | 99.8% |
| Almost trivial | 3D | 97.5% |
| Very easy | 4D | 88.4% |
| Easy | 5D | 70% |
| Normal | 6D | 46.7% |
| Hard | 7D | 26.0% |
| Difficult | 8D | 12.1% |
| Very difficult | 9D | 4.8% |
| Extremely difficult | 10D | 1.6% |
When hiding oneself, an initial straight roll is needed to see if one succeeds at all (rough estimates of how hard it'd be to hide:
| Place | Challenge rating |
|---|---|
| Open space | 10D |
| Light undergrowth | 6D |
| Heavy undergrowth | 4D |
| Heavy forest | 2D |
Here is a list that shows what skills depend on what combinations of characteristics:
The cost to increase a characteristic is as many advancement points as the number of D you're going to (and it can only be increased by 1 at a time), so to increase (say) brawn from 4D to 5D costs 5 advancement points.
Buying skill increases (tallied separately, like this: "Ride: +1D") and this is added to the two characteristics that the skill is based on. Skill increases are half the cost (rounded up) of buying characteristic increases.
A rough guideline would be to award 2-5 advancement points for each gaming session. Since Tale RPG is a rather heroic and cinematic game, there's no requirement for time off or actual training to advance skills and characteristics rapidly.
The available dice pool (primary+skill, plus possibly secondary) is divided into two portions. One attack portion and one defence portion. The attack portion and defence portion are rolled separately and compared to the correpsonding rolls of the opponent (attack vs. defence).
If the attack roll is higher, we hand out damage (this is done in the same fashion as a normal iterated resolution; if at any point the defence portion is exhausted, roll over onto the attack portion).
If the attack and defence rolls are identical, nothing happens.
If the defence roll is higher, the attacker misses the atatck and gets a 1D penalty in the next round of combat.
Remember that the attacks and defences all happen at the same time. Don't forget what was rolled, it might well be needed later.
After combat is finished, reclaim all "exhaustion" dice (the one- and two-round penalties not yet recovered) and make sure to adjust skill and the primary characteristic so that they sum to what's left after the damage has been taken. THese will be recovered by 1D per day's rest (so the barbarian Autopet, with 2D damage, having spread them one on brawn and one on skill, will be fully recovered after one day of full rest).