If you're already familiar with the hobby of tabletop role-playing, you might wonder what exactly sets Unbound Tales apart from other games. The good news is, a lot of the core mechanics bear a strong resemblance to many popular games that you've likely already played. Characters have ancestries, back-stories and classes, and they have skills and features. Actions are resolved by rolling dice and adding a statistic, then comparing the total to a target number. Characters move on a grid, which is also used to determine ranges between characters. But there are significant differences on how many of these concepts are implemented.

First, Unbound Tales makes some changes to the usual action resolution system. Rather than a d20, we use 2d10, making results closer to average more likely. Most actions have at least some effect on a failure, meaning that you should never feel like your entire turn was wasted. There are neither critical successes nor critical failures; there's already enough random results generated by damage rolls and the like that no further gradients of success need be considered.

Second, Unbound Tales uses a rather different action economy than most other games. When your character takes their turn, you get six seconds worth of actions. Every action you might take requires a certain amount of time to complete. You can select any combination of actions whose time total six seconds.

Finally, Unbound Tales places a greater emphasis on player choice. You choose the areas to concentrate on when going up a level; you can choose to specialize, or to become a generalist, or to split your character's attention widely. Weapons can be selected from a list, but you can also build new weapons to perfectly match your character's style. Even the turn order in combat is subject to player choice: initiative is rolled for your side, but your side decides which person acts on each turn.