Game Rules!

There are just over two weeks left until our campaign launches! Thank you everyone for sharing your enthusiasm, questions, and support for Time Without Tide.

Last week’s poll favored more information about the game’s rules. We’re going to dive into mechanics for this update, but first here’s some TWT news.

Questions By Lantern Light, a live TWT Q&A hosted by Chaosium’s Bridgett Jeffries, is now available to watch on the Chaosium YouTube channel. It was a blast getting to talk about the game. Thank you to everybody who sent in questions. Remember, you can keep the conversation going by joining us in the Chaosium Discord. We do our best to share links to any other news or media about the game there.

Onto the Rules
Let’s move onto some mechanics. I want to mention that the best way to get a sense of the game is to download the Time Without Tide: Quickstart and take a look for yourself. It’s freely available for anybody who follows the Backerkit campaign. That said, here’s a quick summary.

The Basics
Time Without Tide is at its heart, a D6 dice pool system. When you’re faced with a challenge, you pair one of your traits (BODY, MIND, & WILL) with one of six skills (Culture, Industry, Navigation, Skulduggery, Survival, & Violence). You roll a number of D6s equal to the sum of your score and trait. Each result of a 5 or 6 counts as a mark towards succeeding. Get enough marks and you’ll succeed the test.

So, you combine 3 traits and 6 skills. Easy right? Well, the complexity comes from  combining your traits and skills in interesting ways. Let’s take Skulduggery as an example. 

Every skill pairs differently with each of the traits to cover any challenge you might encounter. There’s plenty of further refinements to these core rules that are discussed more further in the Time Without Tide: Quickstart, but let’s leave that aside for now and skip  ahead to one of the most exciting parts of Time Without Tide, your records.

Records
Records are the elements that make each character unique. Your items, features, or fog-driven adaptations. As you play, you will slowly amass, refine, and develop a collection of different records. Some records are straightforward bonuses to particular activities and test types. Others make you immune to certain type of damage or unlock new kinds of actions. The most powerful  records fundamentally change the way you play the game. 

Not all records are easy to get. Features for example, are reliable. You earn them naturally as your skills increase. Items, less so. You need to find them on your adventures or trade for them with some of the few remaining merchants. Adaptations are utterly chaotic. When you manifest an adaptation (often by taking too much damage during combat) you roll randomly to determine which one. Whatever result you get, it arrives in its malignant form as an explicit hindrance. If you invest your experience into a malignant adaptation, you will unlock its hidden potential over time.

Combat, Travel, & Downtime

There’s lots to do in Time Without Tide. Although all  gameplay builds on the fundamental rules described above, each area has its own unique mechanics too. We’ll talk about these more in future, but for now, here are some quickfire details about a few fan-favorite gameplay areas.

Our Next Update
We'll be back again later this week to talk more about the rules. Please let us know what mechanics you're most interested in learning more about. Until then, keep the light!