How to Play Tales From The Loop

How to play Tales From The Loop

 

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Tales From The Loop. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Tales From The Loop game.

 

I’ll organize this how to play guide into five sections.

1. Game category

2. Combat rules

3. The “broken” condition

4. Attributes and skills

5. Building an example character

 

Game category. Tales From The Loop is a game where the players role play as ten to fifteen year old kids solving a mystery in an alternative history version of the late 1980’s. The town you live in has an advanced science facility whose adult employee researchers are investigating a powerful phenomenon. What the scientists have learned is out of reach from the kids, and the parents don’t talk about their work with their children. Effects from the artifact they are working on have spilled out into the town, though, including escaped robots, gravity distortions, and time loops. You and your friends seek to escape the never ending homework and nagging parents of your dull everyday life to take part in something meaningful, magical, and possibly a little bit dangerous. You risk being injured, imprisoned, broken-hearted, or changed by the troubles you overcome to solve the mysteries that have captured your fascination. But in general, although the land of the loop is dangerous, kids cannot die in this game.

 

Combat in Tales From The Loop involves describing your what you’re trying to do and then rolling multiple six sided dice, also called d6, to see if any of the rolled numbers were a six. If one or more of the dice show a six, that’s a success at normal difficulty. You rolled a six, so you accomplished what you were trying to do. If none of the dice show a six, that’s a failure. If you fail, you don’t accomplish what you were trying to do and you might get hurt or scared. The more dice you roll, the better your odds of getting a six. For example, you are more likely to succeed when rolling five dice than when rolling only two dice.

 

Troubles can be normal difficulty, which requires one six to succeed, or extreme difficulty, which require rolling two sixes to succeed, or almost impossible difficulty, which require getting three sixes to succeed. Your game master will tell you the trouble difficulty during your roll.

 

If you roll more than the needed number of sixes, your character sheet’s skills section might list a few special effects that you can spend the extra successes on, to buy. Spending an extra success to buy an effect is a way to get even more than you asked for from a situation, on top of succeeding you also get a fun in-game bonus.

 

Are you unsure your roll will succeed? A friend can help your dice roll if they narrate how their character is helping in the scene. To help, describe what you do, and your friend gets an extra dice. Only one person can help per roll. The person who helps is bound to the outcome of the roll. If the roll fails, then you both suffer the same consequences from it failing.

 

If you don’t roll enough sixes and fail a particularly important roll, it’s not the end. You can choose to spend a single luck point after seeing that your roll failed. The luck point lets you reroll a single failed dice. You can only spend one luck per roll. After each game session, your luck refreshes back to full.

 

Sometimes getting help from a friend or rerolling a single failed dice by spending a luck point isn’t enough. What option do you have when you’ve failed a roll that you really wanted to succeed at? You can push. Pushing is when you gather up all the dice that failed and try rolling them again. You can only push once per roll, and you have to do it right away before the consequences are narrated. The cost of pushing is that you gain a condition first, and then try to push second. Conditions include being scared, being injured, etc. Your future rolls will be at negative one success for each condition you gain. If your push fails, you can’t push again that roll.

 

Let’s do an example of a combat roll. Your character is being chased by an escaped robot. You have cleverly run up to the top of a hill. You say that you want to turn and shove the robot so that they fall down the hill. The game master says it’s a normal difficulty. That means you need one six to succeed. You roll your body ability number of dice, 2, and your force skill number of dice, 1, for 3 dice total. You get a 2, a 4, and a 6. There’s a six, so that’s a success. You shove the robot down the hill. What if you had rolled a 2, a 4, and a 5? Your friend could help you, by distracting the robot by yelling, “Hey!” When a friend helps you, add a dice. That’s now a 2, a 4, a 5, and a 6, success. Or, if your friend helping you didn’t work, you could gain a condition to push. To push, first gain the condition of your choice, then reroll the failed dice. You choose to injure your leg by kicking the robot down the hill. Now, because you’re injured, future rolls need two sixes to succeed on normal difficulty. But you get to reroll your failed dice, and get a 1, a 3, and a 6. The robot tumbles down the hill.

 

If everything goes wrong and you still fail a roll, your action fails and the situation changes for the worse. For example, the robot catches up to you, and lifts you into the air. Your game master might also tell you that you’ve suffered a condition. If you had pushed, it’s possible to gain two conditions from one failed action.

 

What happens when a character has zero hit points in Tales From The Loop? There aren’t really hit points in Tales From The Loop. The characters, who the rule book calls kids, can’t die. But they can gain a negative condition, such as being upset, scared, exhausted, or injured, which subtracts one of your rolled sixes from your dice rolls. For example if you roll five dice and one of them was a six, with a condition, none of them are. That normally successful roll has turned into a failure. But if you had rolled two sixes, you still could have succeeded. Each new condition you accumulate is another negative one, another six removed from your dice rolls. That means negative one for the first condition, negative two for the second condition, etc. Having three or four conditions means it’s pretty unlikely you’ll succeed at anything you do, so, consider pausing the adventure to heal. If you ignore that and keep going and gain a fifth condition, that one is special. The fifth condition you gain is called being broken. Broken characters automatically fail on all rolls and need to go get healed. You can heal by going and seeing your anchor person, and by role playing a scene with your anchor person of how they help you.

 

Attributes and skills. Every Tales From The Loop character has four attributes and three skills per attribute. You can think of attributes as general categories, and you can think of skills as specific ways to apply that general category. When you try to do something in the game, success or failure will be determined by rolling the number of dice you have in the best matching attribute and skill, and seeing if any of the dice rolled a six.

 

Attributes are like general categories of things you’re good at, and skills are specific ways to apply what you’re good at what you’re trying to do. There are four attributes: body, tech, heart, and mind. Body is how good your character is at jumping, running, sneaking, and climbing. Tech is how well your character understands machines, robots, digital locks, and programming. Heart is your character’s willingness to make friends, trust the right people, persuade others, and be believed when lying. Mind is your character’s ability to find weak points, understand situations and creatures, solve riddles, and have the right background knowledge at the right time. So body, tech, heart and mind are the four attributes.

 

Each attribute has three specializations, called skills. For the body attribute, the skills are sneak, force, and move. You can use your body to be stealthy, or to be strong, or to run fast. They’re different ways to apply your body attribute. For tech the skills are tinker, program, and calculate. Tinkering is building a mechanical item, programming is writing computer code, and calculating is understanding technical systems. For heart the skills are contact, charm, and lead. Contacts are who you know and can network to. Charm is whether you can persuade or befried or manipulate people. Lead is your ability to make scared or sad or confused people follow your advice. For mind the skills are investigate, comprehend, and empathize. Investigation can uncover hidden clues, comprehending means you have the right piece of information at your fingertips, and empathizing is the ability to understand what makes someone tick and what their strengths and weak spots might be.

 

Each point you have in the attribute and skill that best match what you’re attempting to do will give you one dice to roll. Add up your points in the general attribute and specific skill, and that’s how many dice you roll. For example, if you want to investigate to find a hidden clue, you would roll the number of dice you have in your mind attribute, and the number of dice in your investigate skill. If any of them show a six, you found the hidden clue. If you want to charm a non player character, you would roll the number of dice you have in your heart attribute, and the number of dice you have in your charm skill. If any dice show a six, you charmed them well. If you want to adjust a robot’s exoskeleton, you would roll your tech attribute’s number of dice and also your tinker skill’s number of dice. See a six on a dice? Success, you adjusted that robot’s exoskeleton. If you want to sprint away from a growing sinkhole, you would roll your body attribute points number of dice, and your move skill’s number of dice. If any of your dice are a six, you accomplish your goal of what you were trying to do.

 

When you build a character in Tales From The Loop, you will be building the ten to fifteen year old version of your character. This is explained because this game features time loops, so, if your character is normally older, imagine you’ve gone back in time to a younger version of yourself. There are fourteen choices to make when making a character. You will choose your type, age, attributes, luck, skills, iconic item, problem, drive, pride, relationships, anchor, name, description, and favorite song.

 

Type is similar to class in other games, and includes bookworm, computer geek, hick, jock, popular kid, rocker, troublemaker, and weirdo. Each type has its own page in the rule book, and it lists options for all the other choices. Let’s build a computer geek type character.

 

We’ll pick their age to be twelve years old. We will distrubute a number of points equal to our age in the four attributes, with a minimum of 1 point and a maximum of 5 points in each. There are four attributes: body, tech, heart, and mind. Body is how good your character is at jumping, running, sneaking, and climbing. Tech is how well your character understands machines, robots, digital locks, and programming. Heart is your character’s willingness to make friends, trust the right people, persuade others, and be believed when lying. Mind is your character’s ability to find weak points, understand situations and creatures, solve riddles, and have the right background knowledge at the right time. Let’s distribute 5 points in tech, because our computer geek has a lot of experience programming computers. Twelve minus 5 is 7, so we have 7 points left to distribute. This computer geek’s minimum stat should probably be body, because they sit at their computer desk all day instead of exercising, so let’s put only one point in body. Six points left. Let’s put three each in heart and mind. Distributing attribute points is complete. We’ve got 5 in tech, 1 in body, 3 in heart, and 3 in mind, for a total of 12, which equals our age.

 

After attributes are luck. You start with 15 minus your age number of luck points. For our 12 year old, that means 15 minus 12 equals 3 luck points. The older your character is, ranging from 10 to 15 years old, the more attribute points they have, but the less luck they have.

 

After luck is skills. Every character starts with 10 points that you can distribute as you’d like among your skills. You can raise a skill to a maximum of 3 in your type’s key skills, or a maximum of 1 in any non-key skill. For example, the computer geek type’s key skills are calculate, program, and comprehend, so you are allowed to put 3 points in each of those if you’d like. All other skills have a maximum of 1 point. You have 10 points total to spend. Let’s spend our points like this: 3 points in calculate, 3 points in program, 3 points in comprehend, and 1 point in tinker.

 

After skills, we pick our iconic item. Computer geeks can choose between a computer, a pocket calculator, and a toy lightsaber. Let’s pick a pocket calculator. Remember that you’ve got your iconic item in the game, because if you can role play a way to use it while tackling your problem, you can add two bonus dice to your roll. For example with the pocket calculator, it’s reasonable to add the two bonus dice when you’re using math for your calculate skill to understand a machine. The applications of when you can use an iconic item are pretty specific, and only work in situations where using that item makes sense. If the iconic item was a skateboard, you could add two bonus dice when using your move skill on the ground, but not when using your move skill to climb a tree. Skateboards aren’t helpful when climbing trees.

 

After iconic item, we pick a problem. For a computer geek type character, the rule book suggests a few problems to pick from. Maybe the tough kids hit you, or your parents are always arguing, or the person you like doesn’t know you exist. You would pick one of those three or make up your own problem. Let’s make one up, for example that the quiz bowl placement competition is coming up and our character wants to do well enough to earn a spot on the quiz bowl team. Pick a problem that you want to explore during the upcoming mystery. When you pick your problem, you’re telling your game master to put your character into this kind of trouble.

 

After picking a problem, we pick a drive. For a computer geek, the rule book suggests that maybe they’re driven by loving to solve puzzles.

 

After picking a drive, we pick a pride. For a computer geek, one of the listed prides is that this type of character is proud of how smart they are and their grades in school. You can use your pride once per mystery to automatically succeed. You can wait until after you see the results of the dice to decide if you’re going to use your pride. You don’t have to say it before you roll.

 

After picking a pride, we define our relationships. For people in my upcoming Firebreathing Kittens game, you’ve already got some non player characters you know. For people playing Tales From The Loop at home, there are some suggests NPCs, like a friend Lina who told you that strange creatures have moved into the cooling towers. She thinks they’re aliens. Or a friend Elisabeth, who has built a computer program that cracks codes. Together, you used the computer program to listen to a scrambled radio communication. Some guys, who called each other fish names, were talking about her mother as, quote, “one of the targets.”

 

After defining our relationships, we pick an anchor. For computer geek type characters, the rule book suggests an anchor of one of your parents, or your science or math teacher, or the owner of a local comic shop. If things go poorly during the mystery and your character is suffering from a condition, you can go role play a scene with your anchor person. By allowing them to take care of you, and relying on them for support, comfort, and care, that scene can heal all conditions affecting your character.

 

After picking an anchor, we name and describe our character. For people in my upcoming Firebreathing Kittens game, you are building the version of your character that fits this game, so you already know their name and description. For people playing Tales From The Loop at home, there’s a helpful section here that recommends names like Monika, Martin, Shannon, and Daniel. They might even get a nickname.

 

After naming and describing our character, we pick their favorite song. I think it’s gotta be Simple Minds, Don't You (Forget About Me).

 

That’s everything! By picking the fourteen things: type, age, attributes, luck, skills, iconic item, problem, drive, pride, relationships, anchor, name, description, and favorite song, we have created a character.

 

For players in the upcoming game session I will be GMing, please follow the standard rules of character creation. No changes, no modifications, no additional experience. It’s early in our season, so your characters are low level.

 

Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Tales From The Loop in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of the mechanics in action. We encourage you to find the Tales From The Loop rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.