Tricube Tales vs VRBS
Compare Tricube Tales and VRBS side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Tricube Tales | VRBS | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Universal | Universal |
| Tags | Rules-Light, Player-Only Rolls, Narrative, Toolkit, Beginner-Friendly, Family-Friendly, CC-Licensed Rules | Toolkit, Rules-Light, GM-Less, Solo-Friendly, Hackable, CC-Licensed Rules, Classless, Mission-Based, Collaborative, Family-Friendly |
| Core Mechanic | 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. | To try something interesting, roll 1d6 and add the tally marks (up to 3) on the matching verb, or nothing if your sheet lacks that verb. On 1–4 you get what you want with a complication and the team loses one energy. On 5–6 you get what you want. On 7+ you get what you want and the team gains one energy. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d6 |
| Complexity | Low | Very Low |
| Availability | Free core rules | Free core rules |
| Runnability | 4 of 5 book tools | 1 of 5 book tools |
| License | CC BY 3.0 | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 |
| Third-Party Publishing | Not yet researched | Commercial publishing allowed — Open license |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Publisher | Zadmar Games | Amalara Game Studio |
| Year | 2026 | 2022 |
| Languages | English | English |
| Best For | 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. | Groups who want a tiny, open d6 engine to build their own short GM-less game, or who are happy to invent verbs and mission prompts together at the table. |
| Highlights | 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. | The roll sets how much energy an action costs rather than whether it works, so a mission is lost only when the team's shared energy pool runs out. A roll of 1–4 adds a tally to the verb used (up to three) or writes a new verb onto the sheet, so characters improve by attempting what they are bad at. A mission aims for three scenes plus one per player, so the story's length scales with the group. |
| Considerations | 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. | Mission and scene d6 tables are left blank for the group to write, so play needs that content invented beforehand or improvised prompt by prompt. The book has no rules for combat, harm, equipment or opposition beyond the single roll, so the table decides what complications and antagonists do. Rolls have no task-difficulty adjustment, so rolled actions with the same verb bonus use the same outcome odds. |