Tidebreaker review

By Tom Hart

It’s no secret that we’re experiencing a boom in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), especially in the indie scene. The trend in indie gaming is to develop a game around an existing open system, like Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark. Nick Butler and his team have bucked that trend by writing a new system, inviting players to create their own settings. 

This goal puts Tidebreaker in the company of Fate, Cypher, Genesys, GURPS, and similar generic systems, and it has been described by one member of its community as “the awesome unholy child between old Feng Shui and Fate.”

How does Tidebreaker stack up against these heavyweights? Let’s find out!

How does it work?

Tidebreaker’s core mechanic is rolling a dice pool of six-sided dice (d6’s) against a set difficulty rating (DR), with DRs typically ranging from 1-5. You build your dice pool by combining one of your six stats, which range from 1-5, any bonuses from training or equipment, and stunt bonuses your GM can award for descriptive flair. Any roll of 4 or higher on a single dice is a success, giving you a 50% chance of a success for each die you roll. So if your dice pool is 5d6, you’ve got about an 81% chance of succeeding on a task that is DR2, and a 50% chance at DR3.

Further mechanics and meta-currencies let players improve their chances. If you have Ignite N, for each roll of (7-N) or higher, you can re-roll a failed dice, but if you have Botch N, each roll of N or lower removes a success from your pool. Another resource, Hope, can give +1 to a single die roll (or to all die rolls, if you are pursuing one of your character’s goals), among other effects. The GM can use Doom, an analogous resource, to impose negative effects. Another resource, Excellence, can give a character temporary invulnerability and allow them to regenerate Hope more quickly.

In combat, a character can be Up, Down, or Taken Out. If you take damage while you’re Taken Out, you’re Dying or just plain Dead. To recover, you need to take explicit actions. As a player, I like this abstraction: neither player characters nor opponents become bullet sponges with piles of HP, and damage immediately affects the fictional positioning. Members of the Tidebreaker community also enjoy this abstraction, with one member of the Tidebreaker Discord saying it is “very unique for a supers/anime feel.”

Character creation is extremely flexible in Tidebreaker. A character has several Goals, including one Main Goal, and receives mechanical rewards when pursuing them. This is a nice marriage of narrative and mechanical play, which reminds me of how well games using the Powered by the Apocalypse framework leverage questions during character creation to give the GM narrative ammunition. Characters have six primary stats: Might, Endurance, Agility, Wits, Intuition, and Focus. Your character gets three Quirks and one Stand Out Feature, each of which is an ability chosen from a pick list. 

Each character has a job, which mechanically is one or more tasks and one speciality that your character gets a bonus while rolling. Additionally, your character gets three Abilities, which are combat-related powers you build by combining different finer-grained features. The ability to combine features means that Tidebreaker characters have a huge range of possible abilities.

Compared to the playbooks that have been popularized by Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, or even the classes of Dungeons and Dragons and similar systems, character generation in Tidebreaker is a breath of fresh air in terms of flexibility, but also intimidating in its complexity.

Beyond the core mechanics, Tidebreaker has subsystems for setting generation, social conflict, crafting, subterfuge, and even vehicles and mecha.

My favourite of Tidebreaker’s mechanics is Showstoppers. To trigger a Showstopper, your description of your character’s actions has to make another player laugh or applaud, at which point they can suggest the Showstopper, which another player must second. When a Showstopper is triggered, you get Ignite 1 and trigger Explosions. Explosions give you a bonus die each time Ignite triggers on a die.

I love that the Showstopper rule encourages players to describe their actions as more than just dice rolls but rather over-the-top displays of awesomeness. In other systems, I’ve taken great pains to describe the badassery my characters attempt, thinking, “Surely this must give me some bonus?“ I love that Tidebreaker’s answer is, “Yes. Yes, it does.”

What are its strengths?

If you follow Tidebreaker’s creator, Nick Butler, he always presents as a humble, down-to-Earth, and positive guy. These qualities come through in the game’s writing. The X-Card, for instance, has been re-skinned as Keep it Heroic, similar to No Thank You Evil! ‘s titular phrase. Though the phrase isn’t always genre-appropriate (I can’t imagine saying it in a game of Vampire: The Masquerade), this phrase sets the mood of the game and makes me smile whenever I read it. Butler’s enthusiasm drips through on every page.

The book signals in many ways that everyone is welcome in the Tidebreaker community. Take the book’s face character from its Kickstarter campaign:

That dude with the amazing hair and electrical powers? A truck — flying the thin blue line and Confederate flags — was headed towards a group of protesters, and he saved the crowd by slicing it in half.

Like a boss.

The full-colour artwork throughout the book is beautiful and dynamic and shows heroes from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. This art is only one way Tidebreaker shows its commitment to diversity. I’m a strong proponent of giving NPCs names from different backgrounds in any modern setting, and Tidebreaker goes beyond just telling people to use diverse names, by providing random name tables that include names from different cultures. Beauty!

Mechanically, there is a lot to like here. Character creation is flexible, a variety of meta-currencies give players a feeling of agency, and rules like Showstoppers, Ignite, and Excellence make over-the-top action beats possible.

Tidebreaker’s early adopters seem excited by these mechanics. “Unlike other systems that insist you play the way they want before you’re able to have fun,” says one member of the Tidebreaker Discord, “Tidebreaker goes out of its way to ensure that you’re able to have fun your way. It revels in your joy, [and] the system wants you to feel like the biggest badass that has ever graced the scene.”

What does it need?

Tidebreaker is a relatively crunchy system, and its complexity comes at the reader like a speeding locomotive. Subsystems like Goals, Momentum, and Hope interact with one another yet are described in different chapters, making the game’s core rulebook full of forward references. I had to give it a second read before I felt like I was beginning to understand the system.

While the game’s systems look cool in isolation, Tidebreaker’s on-ramp looks steep. Systems like Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark have set the complexity bar for TTRPGs at a point where I want to be able to give the players a 1-2 page description of the game’s rules when running it for the first time, with the option to bring in other subsystems incrementally as they fit our game. I’ve spoken with Nick Butler, and there is a shorter quickstart available, but I hope he and his team do more to make it easy to onboard new players.

Though Tidebreaker has setting creation advice for multiple action settings, the art and the ability rules both make it feel like it’s designed with supers or shonen anime as its primary use case. Tidebreaker is crying out for a flagship setting in one of these genres, with the rules and abilities streamlined so that players can get started quickly, with optional complexity coming in later. 

Obligatory setting creation gives Tidebreaker a high barrier to entry: it would be like if Monte Cook Games and Evil Hat had released the Cypher System Rulebook and Fate Core before Numenera and Spirit of the Century, respectively. I hope Butler and his team follow Tidebreaker’s release with a rich flagship setting, as Tidebreaker feels like a great rules system for action-focused superheroic roleplaying.

Tidebreaker would also benefit greatly from a system for community content, as another way to give players an easy way to try the game. Tidebreaker’s section on Grooves gives advice on hacking the game’s framework, and encourages the community to publish content for the system, but the licensing terms aren’t in place yet. 

I’ve spoken with Nick Butler, and confirmed that releasing these terms is still planned. As a player who enjoys making settings and adventures for existing systems, the thought of porting some of my content to this new system is exciting to me.

The Bottom Line

Tidebreaker is a new action-focused TTRPG system with an appealing mix of rules and a lot of potential — but it’s also highly complex, and requires you and your friends to design your own setting and content. Groups who enjoy homebrewing with Fate, Genesys, GURPs, Cypher, or other generic systems will enjoy Tidebreaker, while those who prefer to play with an established setting or adventure will want to wait for more content for this game to be released.

The Powered by the Apocalypse system has eased the design of narrative and character-focused indie TTRPGs, and Tidebreaker has the potential to do the same for action genres. Its success will likely depend on the content that is developed for it, and I’m eager to see what Butler, his team, and the larger community come up with.

Keep it heroic, y’all.

About Tom Hart

A father and software developer by day, Tom Hart moonlights in the TTRPG world, where he enjoys trying different genres and systems. He is the creator of the Paranormal Affairs Canada Fate setting and is preparing to release his first Cypher adventure, Cyber Terror on Callisto! He was not involved in the creation of Tidebreaker but is interested in porting his content to the system.