Tactical Dice Gaming System

The Tactical Dice Game System (TDGS) is designed from the ground up to serve three audiences equally: humans at tables rolling physical dice, computers and software running deterministic simulations, and artificial intelligence that can learn, run, and assist with games. Every mechanic is transparent, every formula is explicit, and every document has an AI-optimized companion. 

TDGS is an open-source RPG engine with the core released under the MIT license. It's not a complete game: it's the mechanical foundation for building them. TDGS provides mathematically transparent rules designed for computational verification, making it ideal for indie developers, AI-powered tools, and anyone who wants to build on tested mathematics rather than reinvent probability.

The Tale of the Table That Would Not Behave

Pull up a chair, mind the scorch marks, and don't trust anything written in ale. What follows is copied from a recorded tale discovered etched into the back of a tavern menu, authored by a drunk who should not have been allowed near a quill.

It began, as most catastrophes do, with Flamey Eight-ball being asked by three separate people to please not cast fireballs indoors.

He did anyway.

The tavern known as The Good Luck Charm blossomed into flame in a single spectacular heartbeat. Glass vaporized. Patrons fled. Somewhere inside the expanding inferno, Sir Critsalot rolled a critical one so profoundly unfortunate that the fireball itself ejected him through a window and into the street. He landed smoking, triumphant, and loudly insisting this was part of his plan.

Back inside, Decimancer attempted to calculate survival odds while asking everyone if they had seen his staff, which he was actively using as a pointer. His Rolliness the Sixth, very drunk and very royal, slurred proclamations about courage, rerolls, and destiny while wobbling atop a stool. When a flaming support beam he was leaning against finally gave way and dropped the barkeep in a heap behind the bar, His Rolliness applauded the beam for its outstanding commitment to failure.

From beneath the wreckage emerged Tetrahex the Obscure, who had been embedded in the tavern floor for longer than the liquor license had existed. He crawled out point-first, unimpressed, muttering about how destiny was never meant to be load-bearing.

Desperate, the tavern owner attempted to summon a ferocious bloodthirsty guardian beast. The spell almost worked. A vast pinkish horror began clawing its way into reality, all wobbling flesh, too many teeth, and an expression that suggested it had just woken up in the wrong universe… and then Flippity Cent landed on its edge.

Reality made a noise it had no word for.

The creature became Plushmaw the Unrollable, no longer ferocious, just overwhelmingly wrong in a soft, unsettling way. It lunged toward Nyxara Tidelight, mistook her potion-scented robes for food, was immediately healed by accident, and developed an intense emotional attachment instead. From that moment on, Plushmaw followed her everywhere, whether she wanted it to or not.

By the time the flames died down, the tavern was gone, the barkeep was still unconscious, probability was leaking out of the walls, and the survivors were staring at one another in mutual horror.

Thus were they bound, not by destiny, but by collective culpability. And so began the saga of the crew who did not mean to exist, but very clearly could not be allowed to separate.

TDGS gives you the engine: resolution mechanics, nine attributes, unified progression, and combat rules with consistent lethality across all power tiers. It doesn't give you setting, monsters, or adventures. You build the game.

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This has been a project of a lifetime 30 years of notes and plans were manually scanned and with the help of computers we were finally able to distill the piles of papers into a functional system.    Our companion site has discord plugins https://tacticaldice.com/