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Designing with Frontiers¶

Frontiers is a set of rules you can use, and also a set of rules with its reasoning written down, so that using it teaches you something about designing systems of your own.

That is the job this documentation does. Nine documents, nearly all built the same way: here is a problem every tabletop game has to solve, here is how other designers have solved it, here is what Frontiers does, and here is which parts of that you can change without breaking anything.

You can start here

You do not need to have read a Ruleset, played Frontiers, or decided to build on it. The first two documents, Scope and Genre and Conflict, ask what your game is before any dice come into it, where the other seven ask how a rule works. The problems they raise are the same whichever engine you end up using.

Three ways in¶

Starting a game from nothing. Read Scope and Genre, then Conflict. Neither needs any rules knowledge.
Changing something in Frontiers. Go straight to the document for that subsystem, and read its Variants and Alternatives before you touch anything.
Learning how the engine thinks. Read the d18 Ruleset first, since every document from The Resolution System onward assumes you know how a check resolves. Rulesets has all three.

It informs, it does not instruct¶

None of it tells you the right answer. Where the engine leaves a choice open, the text names the recommended option and the alternatives worth weighing, so that any change you make is one you meant to make.

The nine documents¶

Read them in order the first time. The first two set what the game is, and the seven after them lean on the one before, walking from a single die roll out to a whole character.

Scope & Genre Start here How large the game is and what it looks like. Where power starts, how far it travels, and why naming a genre narrows far less than it seems to. No rule attached, because the answer is yours alone.

Conflict What the game is about What counts as conflict once a scene turns tense, and what the players are trying to do about it. Why the core never assumes the answer is a fight.

The Resolution System The core roll Targets, the roll, and the Gradient that says how far past the line you landed. Everything else in the engine eventually resolves through here.

Flow of Play Time and tempo Actions, Activities, Encounters, and the shape of a session. How a game decides when time matters and when it does not.

Attributes & Derivatives The foundation The four Attributes, what they feed, and the difference between a value that recalculates and one that is written down once.

Skills Trained capability Why Frontiers makes Skills binary, why they grant Favor instead of numbers, and how to build a list that fits your genre.

Abilities The ϟ Energy economy Card anatomy, the Demand and Capacity rule, and the problem nobody has solved outright: balancing what a character gets for free.

Equipment Gear and carry The four item states, Slots, held ϟ Energy drain, and why all item handling collapses into one Free Action.

Characters Building and growing Origin and Archetype, the order you build in, and the two-track advancement split between Marks and Levels.

How to use them¶

Read the subsystem you intend to change before you change it. Most design mistakes come from moving a decision other rules depend on without noticing it.

Every document after Scope and Genre closes by separating two kinds of change:

Variants¶

Numbers and thresholds you can turn freely. Tuning. The engine behaves the same afterwards, just harder or softer.

Alternatives¶

Changes that alter what the engine is. Replacing binary Skills with graded ones, or Favor with flat modifiers, is allowed and sometimes the right call, though it does leave you building a different game, which is worth knowing going in.

Every system referenced across this documentation is collected on the 1.0 release page, with links.