The Beginning

A Guide for New Players

"You don't need to know the rules.
You need to know what your character promised
and what they want badly enough to break that promise." — advice given, advice ignored, advice remembered later

The GameWhat Bound Actually Is

Bound is a game where you sit around a table with friends and tell a story together. One person — the GM — describes the world. Everyone else plays a character in that world. When something happens and the outcome is uncertain, you roll dice. The dice tell you how well it went. Then you keep telling the story.

That is the entire structure. Everything else — the Contracts, the Bindings, the Grey, the Reckonings — is texture on top of that structure. If you understand "we tell a story, and sometimes we roll dice," you understand enough to play.

What You Need Three six-sided dice (the kind from board games — they work fine), something to write on, and a willingness to say things out loud that you haven't planned in advance. That last one is the hardest part, and everyone struggles with it at first. You will get more comfortable. The table will help.

What Makes Bound Different

In most games, your character has a list of things they can do — abilities, spells, skills — and you choose from the list. Bound does not work that way. In Bound, your character has a deal. They made a bargain with something powerful: it gave them a gift, and in exchange, they agreed to a restriction. The game is about what happens when the gift and the restriction collide.

You do not need to memorize rules. You need to know three things about your character:

What can I do? Your Grant. This is the power your patron gave you. "You can make things grow." "You know when someone is lying." "Buildings reveal their secrets to you." When you act within your Grant, you roll 3d6 and take the highest. You are good at this. The power is reliable.

What can't I do? Your Binding. This is the restriction your patron demands. "You shall not speak of what you witness in the deep places." "You shall not let a fire die." "You shall not refuse a collaboration." When you act against your Binding, you roll 1d6. You are working against the deal you signed.

Where is the loophole? Your Grey. This is the ambiguous clause in the deal — the edge where the restriction bends. You wrote it yourself, during character creation. When you exploit it, you roll 2d6, and the GM rolls a die too. If the GM's die is higher than both of yours, the patron noticed, and there are consequences. The Grey is where the most interesting moments happen.

Everything else — the mundane skills, the setting details, the track mechanics — you will learn by playing. These three things are enough to start.

The NewcomerIf You Have Never Played a Tabletop RPG

Welcome. You are not behind. There is no required reading, no prerequisite experience, no secret knowledge the other players have that you don't. The only skill this game requires is one you have been practicing your entire life: imagining what a person would do in a situation that has no easy answer. You do this every time you read a book and think "I wouldn't have opened that door." You do this every time you watch a movie and yell at the screen. Bound just lets you make the choice instead of watching someone else make it.

What You Will Actually Do

The GM will describe a situation. You will say what your character does. Sometimes you will roll dice to see how it goes. Sometimes the GM will just tell you what happens. Then someone else will say what their character does, and the story moves forward. That is a turn. There are no boards, no tokens, no maps (unless your GM likes maps). There is talking, listening, and occasionally picking up dice.

The Secret There is no wrong answer. Not "there are many right answers" — there is literally no wrong thing to say. If your character would run, you say "I run." If your character would lie, you say "I lie." If your character would stand there frozen because they do not know what to do, you say "I stand there. I don't know what to do." That is a valid, interesting, playable choice. You do not need to be clever. You do not need to be strategic. You need to be honest about what your character would do, and the table will meet you there.

Things That Are Normal

Asking questions "What does this room look like?" "Can I see the exit?" "Would my character know about this?" — these are not interruptions. They are how you play. The GM has a world in their head. Your questions are how they share it with you. Ask constantly. No one will mind.

Not knowing what to do This happens to experienced players every session. Saying "I don't know what my character would do here" is an invitation for the table to help — another player might suggest something, the GM might offer options, or someone might ask a question that helps you find the answer. You are not performing. You are collaborating.

Doing the wrong thing Characters in Bound make bad decisions. That is the game. If your character walks into a trap because they did not think to check for one, that is a story. If your character trusts someone they should not have trusted, that is drama. The game does not punish bad choices — it uses them. Your mistakes make the story richer. Lean in.

Feeling awkward You will feel awkward the first time you speak in character. You will feel awkward the first time you describe your character doing something dramatic. This is normal. It passes. The table feels it too — every single person at the table felt this their first time. By the second session, it is gone. By the third, you will not remember it.

Your First Character

Keep it simple. You do not need a detailed backstory, a complicated motivation, or a tragic past. You need:

The Minimum Character A name. It does not need to be clever.
A Grant. Pick one from your patron's list. This is what you can do.
A Binding. Pick one from your patron's list. This is what you cannot do.
A Grey. This is harder — it is the ambiguous clause in your deal. If you are unsure, the GM or another player will help you write it. A good Grey is a sentence that sounds clear until you think about it. "By your hand or will" — simple, until you ask whether letting something happen counts as willing it.
Three mundane skills. Things your character is good at that have nothing to do with their Contract. Cooking. Lockpicking. Lying to authority figures. First aid. Running fast. Telling jokes. These are the parts of your character that are just a person.

Everything else — the backstory, the relationships, the complicated feelings — will develop in play. You do not need to arrive with a fully formed character. You need to arrive with a deal and a person who signed it. The rest will happen.

The Dice

When the GM asks you to roll, here is what you do:

Situation	What to Roll
Acting within your Grant	Roll 3d6, take the highest
Doing something ordinary	Roll 2d6, take the highest
Acting against your Binding	Roll 1d6
Exploiting your Grey	Roll 2d6; the GM also rolls 1d6

Your Highest Die	What Happens
6	Critical — it works better than you planned
5	Success — it works the way you wanted
2 – 4	Partial success — it works, but there is a cost, a complication, or a compromise
1	Failure — only possible on 1d6. If you rolled more than one die, you cannot fail outright

That is the entire resolution system. If you remember nothing else, remember: high is good, low is bad, and the middle is where the interesting things happen.

You will not roll often. Bound uses dramatically fewer dice than most games — three to six rolls in a session is normal. Most of the time, the GM will simply tell you what happens, or you will simply tell the GM what you do, and the story continues. Rolling is for the moments when the outcome is uncertain and interesting. If the GM does not ask for a roll, it is because the result was not in question.

The VeteranIf You Are Used to More Mechanics

You have played games with character sheets that look like tax forms. Games where you know every modifier, every bonus, every interaction between your feat and your class ability and the terrain type. Games where the rules are the architecture and you have memorized the floor plan. Bound is not that game, and the absence of that structure might feel like falling.

This section is for you.

What Is Missing and Why

There is no initiative Bound does not have a turn order. In a tense scene, the GM frames the situation and the players respond. If two things happen at once, the table figures it out. This feels chaotic at first. It is actually faster and more dramatic than counted turns, because it means the GM can cut between characters the way a film cuts between shots — to the person whose choice matters most right now.

There is no hit point system Characters do not have a number representing how alive they are. Damage is fictional — the GM describes what happens, the player describes how their character is affected, and the table tracks consequences through the narrative. A broken arm is a broken arm. It does not have a number. It has a story. If this makes you nervous, remember: the GM is on your side. Bound's philosophy is consequences, not punishment. You will not be randomly killed by a lucky hit.

There is no advancement track No XP. No levels. No ability scores that increase over time. Characters grow by renegotiating their Contracts — a broader Grant in exchange for a harsher Binding, or vice versa — and by forging new Contracts with new patrons. Growth is not vertical (more powerful) but lateral (more complex, more entangled, more dramatically compromised). If you need the feeling of progression, track your Narrowings: each one is a scar on your Contract, proof of a Grey exploit that went wrong. They are your character's history written in amended clauses.

There is no skill list You have three mundane skills that you named yourself. They are not on a menu. They do not have ranks. When you act within one of your mundane skills, you roll 2d6 take highest — the same as any other mundane action. The skills exist to define your character as a person, not to provide mechanical advantage. "Good with animals" and "fast talker" and "knows the backstreets" tell the table who you are when the Contract is not relevant.

Where the Depth Lives

If you are looking for the mechanical depth — the part of the game where mastery matters, where system knowledge pays off — it is not in the dice. It is in the Contract.

The Real System The Grant, the Binding, and the Grey are the character sheet, the skill tree, and the combat system rolled into one. The Grant defines your action space — what you can do reliably. The Binding defines your constraint space — what you must navigate around. The Grey is the exploit, the edge case, the interaction between abilities that experienced players in other games spend hours optimizing. In Bound, the optimization is interpretive. How far can you stretch the Grey before the patron notices? How many situations can you frame as falling within your Grant? How creatively can you obey the letter of the Binding while violating its spirit? This is the crunch. It just lives in language instead of numbers.

The second layer of depth is in the interaction between Contracts. A character with two Contracts is not twice as powerful — they are twice as constrained. The Bindings may contradict each other. The Greys may overlap in dangerous ways. Managing multiple Contracts is the closest thing Bound has to build optimization, and it rewards the same kind of systematic thinking: what are my obligations, where do they conflict, and how do I navigate the gap?

What to Do With Your Hands

In games with more mechanics, you spend downtime reading your character sheet — looking for the right ability, calculating the modifier, planning the optimal move. In Bound, your character sheet is three sentences long. There is nothing to read. Your hands are free and your brain is looking for something to do with itself.

Here is what to do: listen. Listen to the other players' Contracts. Learn their Bindings. Notice when a situation is about to collide with someone else's restriction. The most mechanically engaged player at a Bound table is not the one optimizing their own Grey — it is the one tracking everyone's Contracts and noticing the collisions before they happen. "Wait — doesn't your Binding say you can't do that?" is the Bound equivalent of noticing a tactical combo. It is system mastery. It just sounds like conversation.

The Shift In many games, your turn is the part where you act and everyone else watches. In Bound, your turn is whenever your Contract becomes relevant — and the most interesting moments are when someone else's Contract creates a problem for you. If you are used to optimizing your own character in isolation, Bound will ask you to optimize the table. The best play is often not the one that helps your character — it is the one that puts another player's Binding in the spotlight. You are not building a character. You are building a web of obligations, and the web is the game.

Trusting the Fiction

The hardest part for experienced players is trusting that the fiction will hold. In games with detailed mechanics, the rules are a safety net — you know what your character can do because the numbers say so. In Bound, the numbers are minimal. Your character can do what the Grant says, what the mundane skills suggest, and what makes sense in the fiction. "Makes sense" is not a rule. It is a conversation.

This means you have to talk. Not just on your turn — constantly. "Can I do this?" "Would my Grant cover this?" "Does this count as violating my Binding?" These are not questions about rules. They are negotiations with the GM about the fiction, and those negotiations are the gameplay. If you find yourself wishing for a rulebook to consult, try replacing the impulse with a question to the table. The answer you get will be more interesting than anything a rulebook could provide, because it will be specific to this situation, this character, this moment.

The safety net is not gone. It has moved. It used to live in the rulebook. Now it lives in the people at the table. Trust them. They will catch you.

The TableYour First Session of Bound

Regardless of your experience level, here is what your first session should feel like.

Before You Start

Read your setting's opening Each setting has a section called "The World" that describes what kind of story you are in. Read it. Not the whole document — just the first page or two. You should arrive knowing what the world feels like, even if you do not know all the rules that govern it.

Pick a patron Read the patron entries in your setting. Pick the one that interests you — not the one that seems most powerful, not the one that seems most optimal, the one whose deal makes you curious. "What would it feel like to be bound to this entity?" is the right question. "Which one has the best abilities?" is the wrong one.

Write your Grey with help The Grey is the hardest part of character creation. It is supposed to be. Do not write it alone if you are unsure — bring it to the table and workshop it with the GM and the other players. A good Grey is one that makes at least one other person at the table say "oh, that's going to cause problems." That reaction is the Grey working.

The First Scene

The GM will put your character somewhere and describe what is happening. You will feel the urge to wait for instructions. Resist it. There are no instructions. There is a situation and a character you built. Ask yourself: what does this person do? Then say it out loud. That is the game.

The first scene should be small. Not a crisis, not a battle, not a Binding collision — a moment. Your character in a place, doing something ordinary, being a person. The Contract is not relevant yet. You are just establishing who this human being is when they are not invoking cosmic power. The mundane skills matter here. The person matters here. The deal comes later.

The First Roll

At some point, the GM will ask you to roll. This is the moment the system activates — and it should feel like something. The GM is saying: the outcome is uncertain, and the uncertainty matters. Pick up your dice. Know which pool you are rolling (3d6 for Grant, 2d6 for mundane, 1d6 against Binding). Roll. Read the highest die. The GM will tell you what happens, or ask you to describe it.

If your highest die is a 2 or 3 — a partial success — the GM will present a cost, a complication, or a compromise. This is the most important result in the game because it forces a choice: what are you willing to pay for what you want? The answer to that question is your character. Every partial success is a revelation. And if your highest die is a 6 — a critical — something goes better than planned. The deal you made just paid off in a way that feels like more than luck.

The First Grey Moment

At some point — maybe session one, maybe session two — you will be in a situation where your Binding says you cannot do something, but your Grey suggests a way around it. You will feel the pull. The restriction says no. The loophole says maybe.

This is the game's best moment. Do not rush it. Say what you are thinking out loud: "My Binding says I can't reveal what I saw in the deep places. But my Grey says 'what I witnessed' — and I didn't witness this, I heard it from someone else. Does that count?" The table will engage. The GM will respond. Then you roll, and the GM rolls the Arbiter Die, and for a moment no one knows whether your patron will accept the argument.

That moment — the held breath, the two dice on the table, the question hanging — is the reason the game exists.

The PermissionThings You Are Allowed to Do

New players — both the brand-new and the mechanical veterans — tend to hold back. They wait for permission that is not coming, because the game already gave it. Here it is, explicitly:

You are allowed to fail On purpose. Deliberately. If your character would make a bad choice, make it. If your character would trust the wrong person, trust them. If your character would walk into the obvious trap because their Binding demands it, walk in. Failure in Bound is not losing. It is story fuel. The table will not judge you. The table will lean forward.

You are allowed to argue Not with hostility — with conviction. "I think my Grey covers this." "I don't think that should count as a Binding violation." "I disagree with how that played out." These are not disruptions. They are the game's engine. Bound runs on interpretive disagreement. If you have an opinion about how the fiction should go, say it. The table will engage.

You are allowed to feel things The scene is sad and your eyes are stinging. The betrayal hit harder than you expected. The Reckoning took something your character loved and you are genuinely upset. This is not weakness. This is the game at its best. Bound is designed to make you care, and caring means feeling, and feeling means sometimes the fiction gets under your skin. Let it. That is what the safety tools are for — not to prevent feelings, but to make sure the feelings are the kind you signed up for.

You are allowed to stop At any time. For any reason. "I need a break." "I'm not comfortable with this." "Can we change direction?" These are not failures of play. They are the Zeroth Contract in action — real people come first, always, no exceptions. The fiction is patient. It will be there when you come back.

You are allowed to be bad at this Your first session will not be your best session. Your first character will not be your deepest character. Your first Grey will probably be too wide or too narrow and you will renegotiate it by session three. This is fine. This is how the game works. Bound rewards investment over time, and the investment starts with showing up and trying. That is enough. That is more than enough.

The First Deal You made a deal by sitting down at this table. The Grant: a story that belongs to everyone in the room, built from the collective imagination of people who chose to spend their evening making something together. The Binding: be honest, be kind, be present. The Grey: there isn't one. Show up. Pay attention. Say what your character would do. Roll the dice when the GM asks. Listen when someone else is speaking. Care about the fiction enough to argue about it and care about the people enough to stop when someone needs you to.

That is the game. The rest is details.

Welcome to Bound.

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Bound — The Beginning v0.1
A Guide for New Players