Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Published at: 2022-02-03

Tricube Tales is an elegant rules lite system. Your stats are boiled down to the archetypical rpg traits of strength, agility and wits, called Brawny, Agile and Crafty in the game.
You won't have (nor need) niche and heavily specialized skills, like Prehistoric Arcane Lore or Dwarven Heavy ArtilleryLol?
I just made that up. 🤣. That's not the focus. The focus is on narrative.

I loved how the rulebook put emphasis on narrating Challenge outcomes, even if they fail. How do they fail exactly? This was a great reminder. I tried my best to include narrative elements (even if just a sentence) for the mechanical rolls I made.

Character and bestiary creation is a breeze, you just need a few words for that…literally. And despite being just a couple of words, they have the potential to hold a lot of details and subtle nuances.

The hack & slash option is a lot of fun, it lays nicely over the core rules and adds that delicious extra oomph to combat.
A word of caution though: Bestiary creation is a breeze, it is also deceptively easy to drop a Rank 2 Brawny Agile Crafty Boss onto the battlefield and watch your party die on the spot. Ok, I got carried away with the example, but if you are new to the system and haven't yet developed a sense to how powerful monsters can be, I'd suggest you start small and experiment with different configurations until you get a feel for it. 🤘

#TRUSTME #BEENTHERE #DONETHAT
😅

The Solo Rules give the adventure a clear structure and a timely conclusion. I feel that this lends itself perfectly for one-shots or to solo players who appreciate a more defined game format.
Regarding pacing: you are never forced to draw the next card, as the rules say Only draw a card when you want the story to progress toward its conclusion. And I did just like that. I had scenes that literally consisted of a single Scene Challenge and then I moved on, while at other occasions I had the freedom to remain in the scene for a bit longer even after I completed the Challenge.

One interesting aspect that I realized during gameplay is how randomly drawing the next scene's challenge type helps avert player expectations. To me, drawing from the deck brings in randomness in a novel way that I am not used to, but quite enjoyed. One could argue that you could use Meaning Tables in Mythic in a similar fashion, but in TT Solo Rules this is an integral part of the framework.

The Solo Rules give you a ton of tables to roll on, each page covers one topic, like urban, wilderness or dungeon regions. The majority of the tables are d66 tables, giving you 36 different results.
The Twist Tables at the end have a literal twist to themselves, for they are image tables, not text. I believe image oracles can give you different kinds of ideas and associations than written text, and me being a big Rory's Story Cubes fan for solo games, I appreciate including picture-based random tables in the pdf as well!
Unfortunately though, I didn't get to roll on them too often for I had my physical story dice with me.

Finally, Tricube Tales Solo Rules make a lovely addition to anyone's solo toolkit.
While the Solo Rules are written for TT#NOSHITSHERLOCK, I found that they can not only enhance your TT adventures, but any games really.
And speaking of solo toolkit, I could effortlessly mix the TT Solo tables with my own oracles, they blended nicely. 🤘

Stuff I could have done better
One thing I feel I should pay more attention to next time is incorporating PC Quirks more frequently during game.
Another thing I completely forgot about is resetting KarmaI also didn't reset Resolve,
but I feel it added to the grittiness
and deadliness of the setting., lol. 😄 Just checked the book and it says that Players begin each session with three karma tokens. Whoopsie, that didn't happpen. 😅

Longer running campaigns?
While I can see that Tricube Tales works very well with one-shots or shorter adventures, I wonder how it would scale to longer running campaigns. If you, yes you, the readerBtw…
ain't it awkward to address your readers?
It sure is for me. 😅 run full-fledged campaigns with Tricube Tales, I'd love to hear about your experiences! 💪

Introducing obstacles?
Another thing I was pondering on is how I could introduce more complex scene structures that require not just one roll to succeed, but rather a series of rolls/actions. I'm not necessarily thinking of Dramatic Tasks from Savage Worlds, but something remotely along those lines.
One approach might be to look at scenes as fractals ⇾ you can always zoom into them. A Scene Challenge might be a Brawny challenge, but to get there, you need to overcome a few other obstacles first.

Using this optional tweak:
• An Easy Challenge might have 1 or 0 obstacles
• A Standard Challenge 1 or 2
• A Hard Challenge 1, 2 or 3

These obstacles would narratively lead you closer the the scene's final challenge, kind of building up to the finale. On the mechanics side, you'd need to successfully overcome at least half of themrounded up to get a shot at the Scene Challenge.
You would draw a card for each obstacle as usual to see if they are Brawny, Agile or Crafty obstacles.

I'll be the first one to say: this thing definitely needs finetuning. In it's current state it is kinda messing with the deck probabilities.
I am mostly concerned with:

• Burning through Face cards while drawing for obstacles.
  Well, one could use a separate deck for obstacles or shuffle the face cards back.
      ⇾ I'm not a fan of shuffling back unused cards.
      ⇾ Using a separate deck wouldn't be too much of a pain.
  On this note, should face cards have custom meanings for obstacles?
• Drawing a harder difficulty obstacle than the final challenge.
  Ofc it depends on your setting, and a lot of other factors, but in general I don't think obstacles should have higher difficulties than their corresponding Scene Challenges.
  Should obstacle difficulties be capped by their Scene Challenges' difficulty? ⇾ Yes, methinks.

Now, let's ask the Oracle:
Would this tweak go against the design principles of Tricube Tales? Most likely yes.
Would it complicate a rules lite system? Most likely yes.
Would I enjoy fiddling with it? Most likely yes. 😅😂🤣

Anywhoo, I should just stop at this point.
Cheers. 🙌

Published at: 2022-02-03