In this tabletop roleplaying game, you will be adopting the role of a character. This character can be anything, from a battle hardened warrior to an elegant dancer, or both!

The idea of the game is to tell a story, and make it up as you go. You could play as yourself, make up your own character, or even find inspiration from another character you love. As a player, it’s up to you to decide how your character looks, talks, and acts.

Players & the GM

The game can be played with any number of players, with you and your fellow players’ characters making up your party. You will set off into the world with this party, facing many challenges along your journey. Embrace acting as your character, and let your imagination run wild as your GM tailors your story for you, telling you what your characters see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.

The GM, or Game Master, will be one designated player among you, but won’t have a player character of their own. Instead, they guide your characters through their narrative, preparing all the encounters you’ll be faced with as you and your party members decide how to approach them. Any characters they end up controlling will be the non-player characters, or NPC’s, you’ll confront along your travels.

Preparing to Play

To play Symphony of Glory, your GM will organize the game and prepare each session. Sessions can go as long as you’re willing and be as often as you’d like, but it’s a good idea to talk with your GM and find a time that works best for everyone. What happens in each session of play is up for the players to decide, and the GM to determine if they’ve even planned for the shenanigans you all find yourselves in. However, there’s no problem with improvisation! Just have fun and play how you want to play, this game can be quite flexible.

Before you start any sessions however, you will have to fill out a character sheet. This sheet entails all of your character’s abilities and attributes. Depending on how you build your character to be, you may have a vast variety of skills among the characters in your party, so be sure to think outside the box when tackling each encounter! This system encourages creativity, so just because your character sheet doesn’t explicitly state something you want to do, you don’t have to limit yourself. You can always negotiate with your GM if you think your character could pull something off.

Rolling the Dice

Like with most tabletop games, you’re going to find yourself rolling lots of dice. For Symphony of Glory, you’re going to want to be prepared with a polyhedral dice set, featuring at least one d4 die, one d6 die, one d8 die, two d10 dice (for percentile rolls), one d12 die, and one d20 die.

Your dice rolls are typically used to determine the outcome of things your character tries to accomplish, like starting a fire or attacking with a weapon.

Say a thief pulls a knife out on you, so you unsheathe your sword and prepare to defend yourself. You say you’d like to attack, so your GM will ask you to roll a d20 to determine the outcome.

If you roll low, you might falter in some way and the GM may describe how:

“You swing your sword, but this thief got the jump on you, your nerves making you loosen your grip and cut through nothing but air.”

Similarly, rolling high may lead to greater success:

“You grip the cold iron, and the adrenaline pumping through you heightens your senses, leading your attack to find its mark.”

Difficulty Class

Difficulty class, or DC, represents a value used to help determine whether a roll succeeds or fails. DC’s will be referenced throughout the handbook, and depending on the circumstances, a DC could be a low or high number. It functions as a tool for the GM to determine how difficult it will be for a character to succeed at whatever they are choosing to do.

Modifiers to Rolls

There are many influencing factors that affect the results of a roll. 

As detailed in every players’ character sheet, your character may come with flat bonuses and penalties to certain rolls. Such as a charming musician having a generous bonus to all their Charisma rolls. 

When making your character, you’ll be able to assign points to improve upon these effects and decide what attributes define your character the best.

Additionally, certain situations will call for advantage or disadvantage on a roll due to a circumstance or a character’s capabilities; a GM may even impose such a situation for narrative reasons.

With advantage, a character will roll their dice twice and take the highest of the two results.

With disadvantage, a character will roll their dice twice and take the lowest of the two results.

Turn-Based Gameplay

In Symphony of Glory, the actions your characters take may sometimes be on a turn-based system.

Each player will roll at the start of any turn-based situation to determine the order players will take their turns, with higher rolls going first. This roll is known as rolling for initiative. 

Every character has a number of action points, or AP, which are used to perform any action you intend to perform. They are used to quantify how strenuous a task would be to accomplish. You may utilize them on your turn to take actions, or save them for use as reactions during other characters’ turns.

Think of these action points as the energy you have to perform a task on any given turn. You can’t perform actions you don’t have the energy for.

Always Round Up!

When calculating stats or damage numbers, you may end up with decimals. In any case you find yourself dealing with that, be sure to always round up to the nearest whole number.