Savage Worlds vs Tricube Tales
Compare Savage Worlds and Tricube Tales side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Savage Worlds | Tricube Tales | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Universal |
| Play Style | Cinematic, Fast-Paced, Tactical, Pulp Action, Heroic, Miniatures | Rules-Light, Player-Only Rolls, Narrative, Toolkit, Beginner-Friendly, Family, Open Source |
| Core Mechanic | Roll trait die + wild die (d6), keep the highest. Target number 4. Raises every +4. | Players roll one to three six-sided dice against a difficulty of 4 to 6 and succeed if any single die meets or beats it. The pool comes from the archetype: 3d6 when the character's trait fits the challenge, 2d6 when it does not, and one die fewer when the task falls outside their concept. Succeeding on two or three dice is an exceptional success, and rolling all ones is a critical failure. Players make every roll, including defense, so the GM never rolls dice. Karma tokens lower a difficulty by 1 or fuel a perk, while declaring a quirk raises it by 1 to earn karma back. |
| Dice | d4–d12 | d6 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Low |
| Accessibility | High | Very High |
| Runnability | Very High | Medium |
| License | Savage Worlds Adventurer's Guild | CC BY 3.0 |
| Cost | $$ | Free / $ |
| Publisher | Pinnacle Entertainment | Zadmar Games |
| Year | 2018 | 2026 |
| Best For | Fast-paced pulp action across any genre. Great for large groups and mass combat. | Tables that switch settings often and want one ruleset to cover all of them, or groups introducing children and first-time players who need rules with no arithmetic. |
| Highlights | Fast resolution, genre-flexible, handles large groups well | Players roll to attack and to defend while the GM never touches the dice, which keeps the GM focused on describing the world rather than resolving it. Declaring a quirk raises a challenge's difficulty but refunds a karma token, giving players a mechanical reason to drag their own flaws into a scene. Eleven optional genre modules cover magic, superpowers, vehicles, and mass battles, so one ruleset stretches across settings without a second book. |
| Considerations | Exploding dice can produce extreme variance in outcomes, setting books vary in depth: some provide minimal mechanical content beyond a genre frame | The GM assigns every difficulty and adjudicates what each perk can do, so outcomes rest on one person's consistency rather than on written rules. Characters are built from a single archetype, perk, and quirk, which leaves little mechanical distinction between two PCs who share a trait. Gear grants no bonuses and exists only to justify what a character can attempt, so equipment choices never change the dice. |