Failing, Complications, & Assisting

The Grove System

When attempting something risky or performing a task or Action, players can decide if their character fails at the task in exchange for earning a Token. When a player fails, others may assist them to succeed by giving something up – such as a memory, a macro phase action, an item, or anything else they can think of, though they are not obligated to help. Players who give something up for others to succeed, and those who choose to fail, both gain a Token for those choices. How this works depends on whether you are performing an Action or not when you decide to fail.

Not Enough Tokens to perform an Action

A player may still attempt to succeed at an Action they do not have enough tokens for by spending all their remaining Tokens and describing how they fail. During that description, other players can describe how they give something up to help, each assistancecontributes a single token towards success. For example, if you want to perform an action that costs 4 Tokens, and you only have 2. You can spend the 2 tokens, describe your struggling and imminent failure, and two other players may come to your aid and describe what they give up and how they help. You then succeed in your action. You gain 1 Token for choosing to fail. They gain 1 Token for giving something up to help you succeed.

Failing while not performing an Action

The player takes a Token and describes how they fail at what they’re doing. Others may help them succeed, but there is no token cost to achieve success. _Design Note: _This is the game’s complication system. Since we don’t roll dice, we don’t have probabilities of failure for Actions, we give the power to the players to decide when to add friction or complications into the story, instead.
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