Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Published at: 2022-09-18

During my solo Untold session, there were times where I felt my actions were basically only dependent on the distribution of the remaining Outcome Cards and my character couldn't really have any agency over the outcomes of his actions.
This is fine for quick games, but if you happen to have a character with stats, wouldn't it be great to have their skills matter in Untold?

I came up with a method that doesn't get rid of the card mechanics, but rather builds on top of it to let your character's expertise play a role in how their Actions turn out.

The method is very simple:
1. Draw an Outcome Card as usual.
   • This will be the baseline modified by your Skill roll.
2. Choose an appropriate Skill to use.
3. Determine the difficulty of the Skill roll.
   • Use the rules and best practices of your RPG system of choice.
   • Feel free to use modifiers to reflect the circumstances.
   • It may be an Opposed roll.
4. Make your Skill roll.
   • Take note of "exceptional" outcomes, if your system supports them.
     Examples
     • Savage Worlds' Critical failures and Raises
     • Dominion Rules' 12 roll on a d12
5. Modify the Outcome card you drew.
   • A regular success or failure increases or decreases the Outcome by one level.
     Examples
     • A success turns a 'No, but' into a 'Yes, but'
     • A failure turns a 'Yes, and' into a 'Yes'
   • Exceptional outcomes modify the Outcome by 2 levels.
     Examples
     • A critical success turns a 'No, and' into a 'No, but'
     • A critical failure turns a 'Yes' into a 'No, but'
   • If your system supports "ties", "unclear" or "ambiguous" results, the Outcome Card is not modified.
6. Tweak and hack this method to your own liking.

There are a set number of cards for each Outcome and Reaction in Untold. However, my method may yield more Outcomes that trigger a ReactionSee Untold rules for more info..
If you run out of Reaction cards, just reshuffle them and keep playing.

I have not changed Untold's Question mechanic on purpose. I like the creative freedom that comes with using Rory's Story Cubes.

You may like John Fiore'sOne of Untold's designer
besides Rory O'Connor own rules for Fate which shouldn't be that hard to adjust to other systems too.

My ideas in this post are licensed under
CC-BY-SA

During the editing phase of this writing, I partly used GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. I have reviewed, edited, and revised the output of GPT-3 to my own liking and take ultimate responsibility for the contents of this post.

Untold: Adventures Await © of Hub Games.

Published at: 2022-09-18