Free Play

Once you have a grasp of how individual and group scenes work in both Into the Grey and Deck Burner, you might begin to feel curious about what the game might be like without the constraints of those play modes. If that’s not you, that’s okay! Keep using the play modes provided; that’s what they’re there for. But if you find yourself chafing at the structured play of those modes, you might feel more at home with Free Play.

In this advanced mode, the guardrails are gone, the training wheels are off, and it’s just you and your group telling stories. What need have we for dice, then? Well, you could just go off and tell stories and never touch the dice, and that’s fine. But if you want to resolve specific beats or moments for individual characters, the basic rules still apply:

1. Choose a skill that’s appropriate to the challenge of the moment.
2. Gather dice according to that skill’s rating.
3. Roll the dice.
4. If you roll a 6, you succeed without consequences. Otherwise, your actions complicate things for yourself or the group.

If the situation you’re trying to resolve has to do with complications facing multiple or all characters in the group, that’s straightforward, too:

1. Assess the complications and set aside one die for each one as the Adversary’s Pool.
2. Everyone chooses a skill that’s appropriate to their character’s actions in this scene.
3. Roll the dice.
4. Everyone works together to describe how their actions resolve the complications once and for all.

   If the high roll came from the Adversary’s Pool, work together to describe how the complications overwhelmed the group, and what they plan to do next.

In this way, you don’t have to keep track of complications during individual scenes; just assess the situation when you get into a group scene and go from there.

This mode of play works best, I think, with the help of a Facilitator, but if your group is comfortable talking through scenes and moments this way, you might not need one.