Stakes for Tabletop Roleplaying SRD

Stakes for Tabletop Roleplaying is a set of optional rules created by Levi Kornelsen. Originally appearing in the Ouroboros Engine rules, Stakes was expanded upon into its own document with guidelines for using with other game systems as well as being utilized as a central rules set in Infected, iterations of the Schema engine, and several other games.

The actual rules are in the public domain thanks to Levi’s generous donation, so we’re free to use these rules to make our own games. The original rules are published in several PDF’s, which can be found in Levi’s storefront. Please peruse his goods and support him; several products are Pay What You Want.

This is an SRD collection of those rules from various places in an editable form to make it easy to cut-and-paste into your own documents and rules. In the tradition of the original, this collection is also in the public domain, so you don’t have to credit me. Just take what you need and fill in the rest. My goal is to make this easier.

Included is the optional character traits from the original Stakes for Tabletop Roleplaying, optimized for these rules.

Why use these rules?
The Stakes rules take what are normally static “yes and no” rolls and add depth and dimension to them. They increase tension by giving you choices as to what dangers you want to avoid and what opportunities you want to take advantage of. This makes for rules where failure is truly an “option” for a GM, where a player’s action can succeed automatically, if desired, but other dangers present themselves (injury, embarrassment, etc).

This makes for a wider range of storytelling options within conflict and more excitement, giving players the options of how their characters fail, succeed, and affect the story.

What’s in this collection?
This is all the rules for using Stakes pulled from various sources. You get a single .zip file with the rules in Word (.doc and .docx), HTML, OpenDocument (.odt), Rich Text Format (.rtf), and plain vanilla text (.txt), for whichever makes it easiest for you.