The Fifth World began with an excited discussion Mike & I had about the OGL a few years back, where we speculated how much further we could go not only with open source rules, but an open source setting to go with them. Inspired by Michael Green’s Afterculture, and mechanically by Ben Lehman’s Polaris and Matthijs Holter’s Archipelago, this playtest features me, Willem Larsen (of the College of Mythic Cartography) and Cory.
If you plan to attend Dreamation this weekend in Morristown, NJ, let me know. I’ll run four playtests of The Fifth World there, and a few slots still remain open.
Not all roleplaying games have game masters (GM’s). The very fact that GM-less games exist—and that they produce fun, memorable play—forces us to ask whether or not we really need GM’s. In this episode, we talk about GM-less games and the social dynamic produced by games that put a GM at the table.
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What do we want the mechanics in a roleplaying game to accomplish? Do we really want them to tell us if an action succeeds or fails, or do we want them to show us a better story than we might have come up with on our own? Does the fact that nearly all D&D players see charisma as a dump stat tell us something important? Does the charge of ROLLplaying instead of ROLEplaying tell us something about how roleplaying and game relate?
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We play table-top roleplaying games. Why? We start off our first session with GNS theory, sockets, drama therapy, and escapism. Does it really answer the question to just say “fun” and leave it at that, or do we get something from a tabletop roleplaying game that we just can’t get anywhere else?
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