The Tide is a storytelling podcast that uses a tabletop roleplaying game system as its format.

The game system we've used is called Cortex Prime: a highly customisable and story oriented system that encourages player agency, taking risks and seeing characters grow from experiences, whether they be victories or failures.

Cortex is essentially a dice pool game: The Game Moderator (GM - in our case, Riley) rolls some dice, gives you a number to beat and then you roll your dice, combine the highest two and see if you succeed.

Your character has a number of traits to use, each of which has a die rating depending on how good they are at that trait (eg. a four sided dice (d4) for weaker ones and then d6, d8, d10 and d12 for your strongest traits). Every time you come up against a challenge, the GM will roll their dice pool and present you with a number to beat. You then roll with the traits that you think apply to the situation and combine the highest 2 numbers to see if you beat the challenge.The more traits apply to a situation, the more dice you roll and the more likely you are to succeed!

However, if you have any complications (eg. in Episode 1, Russell gets "Spotted d8" when he is caught being nosy) these dice can be used by your GM in their dice pool.

If you roll a one, this is called a hitch and the GM can give you a Plot Point token that you can use to boost a later roll.

Its also possible to step your dice up or down to a different dice rating over the course of the story, for instance if you manage to overcome a complication it could be stepped down from a d6 to a d4... or if you make the problem worse, it could become a d8! If any of your complications get worse than a d12, you're in real trouble; your character is “taken out” and loses all influence in the way the rest of the scene goes.

You can read about the rules of Cortex in more detail on the official Cortex Prime website.