How To Play Tales From The Loop
How to play Tales From The Loop. 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.
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.
