Challenges

In Heroic Tales, the challenges that you face can be grouped into four broad categories:

• Another character or group of characters can be a direct challenge, as in a duel, or an indirect challenge, as in spreading vile rumors about you.
• The environment is often a source of significant challenges. Violent weather, difficult terrain, or ravenous creatures can be as dangerous as other characters.
• You may be your own greatest challenge. Depression, anxiety, self-doubt — every hero has their demons, and they are often hard to conquer. Making a strategic choice in the face of immediate gratification or resisting your natural instincts are other examples of internal conflicts.
• Society presents its own sets of challenges. Navigating societies other than your own can be fraught with peril. Greasing the wheels of bureaucratic institutions requires knowing the right people and processes. Cultural norms can limit your ability to take direct action, requiring you to indirectly accomplish your goals through influence and coercion.

The preceding descriptions are an ideal place to work the specifics of your game into the rules. Mention the types of characters, specific environmental threats, and types of social challenges specific to your game and setting.

The difficulty of a challenge is measured by its inertia. An easy challenge has an inertia of two; normal, four; hard, six; tough, eight; and arduous, ten. Any obstacle more difficult than that is impossible, even for the mightiest hero.

Your ability to overcome a challenge is measured by your momentum. You start each challenge with two points of momentum.

To determine your character’s progress, roll a set of six-sided dice equal to your base dice plus the dice from whichever of your character’s three traits (body, mind, or spirit) is applicable. The description of each challenge will indicate which trait you should use. Some challenges will give you a choice of traits to use — in this case, choose the one with the highest rating. Add two dice if you gain advantage or subtract two dice if you suffer from disadvantage.

The result of your die roll determines the outcome of your choices: how much progress you made in overcoming the inertia of the challenge and how much momentum you spent along the way.

All fours, fives, and sixes count as successes; threes are neutral; ones and twos count as failures. The result of your roll equals the total number of successes minus the total number of failures. You reduce the inertia of the challenge by the net number of successes that you generate.

If you end up with more failures than successes, though, you lose one point of momentum. Despite your best efforts, you made things worse, not better.

Challenges are divided into rounds that represent a unit of effort from your character. Each round begins with your character observing the scene, continues with you determining your character’s approach to overcoming the challenge, and ends when you roll the dice. Your character’s actions may take as long as needed to serve the story — neither a round nor a challenge has a fixed duration.

If, at the end of a round, you reduce the inertia of the challenge to zero or you lose your last point of momentum, then the challenge is over. Otherwise, begin another round. If you reduce a challenge’s inertia to zero as part of the same roll that exhausts your character’s momentum, then you are considered successful.

I’ve found that adapting the charts and figures above to fit the styling of your game helps them blend in quite well. Even something as small as swapping the fonts and colors makes a big difference. They also help to break up what could otherwise be a very long block of fairly dry text.

Advantage and disadvantage

Occasionally, your character will benefit from a condition favorable to them. The description of the challenge will alert you to this possibility. If you meet the conditions, then you gain advantage on your roll, adding two dice to your pool.

If, instead, your character suffers from some sort of impairment, then you suffer disadvantage on your roll — you subtract two from your pool. You always get to roll at least one die, even if suffering from disadvantage would reduce your pool to zero.

If your character is subject to multiple conditions that grant advantage or disadvantage, they do not combine. Advantage and disadvantage do cancel each other out, so if your character has two conditions causing advantage but one condition causing disadvantage, you still get advantage on your roll.

Status effects

The world is filled with obstacles and wonders both great and small. Sometimes, interacting with those obstacles and wonders can cause status effects, which can positively or negatively affect your ability to overcome challenges by modifying one or more of your three traits: body, mind, and spirit. Positive status effects are called buffs, and grant you advantage when using the affected trait in a challenge. Negative conditions are called debuffs and confer disadvantage instead.

This is a good place to provide a list of status effects that characters might encounter in your game.

Debuffs come in three varieties: minor, which resolve themselves after one challenge; major, which require specific remedies or a visit to a haven to remove; and epic, which require tackling a challenge chain to resolve.

Your game may not have different levels of debuffs. If so, feel free to omit them.

Hazardous environments

While some hazardous environments are simply too dangerous to interact with in any form, other environments are merely harmful to creatures who are not specifically adapted or equipped to deal with them. Unless you have special equipment or abilities designed to withstand a hazardous environment, you suffer disadvantage on all rolls while present there.

Different game worlds are likely to have different types of hazardous environments. List the types of environments that a character might encounter as well as the type of equipment or abilities needed to protect against them.

Havens

In contrast to hazardous environments, certain locations are considered safe havens.

When you reach a haven, you can rid yourself of any negative status effects.

If your game doesn’t use status effects, hazardous environments, and havens, feel free to leave them out. I’ve included them here instead of the optional rules chapter because I feel that they’re likely to be relevant to more games than not.

Challenge chains

In addition to individual challenges, which represent distinct obstacles, Heroic Tales also features challenge chains, which tie challenges together to create complex narrative arcs. In a challenge chain, your successes and failures in individual challenges build on each other to eliminate a threat or capture an opportunity.

Every challenge chain has a trigger and an objective. Challenge chains can be triggered by your actions, by the actions of other characters, by environmental factors, or simply by being in the right place at the right time.

When you trigger a challenge chain, select one d6 to represent your character’s progress. Begin with the 6 facing up — this is the chain die. Each time you successfully complete a challenge related to the chain, increase the count on the chain die by 1, to a maximum of 6. Each time you fail a challenge related to the challenge chain, decrease the chain die by 1.

If you complete the objective before the chain die reaches 1, then you successfully neutralize the threat or gain rewards from the opportunity. If the chain die reaches 1 before you complete the challenge chain’s objective, however, then you either lose the opportunity or suffer consequences from the threat.

In Wendigo, the entire game is a challenge chain. Your character’s progress feeling the titular monster is measured using an “escape die.” Depending on your game, changing the name of “challenge chain” to something genre-specific can really help to set the mood.