[Fifth World] Local playtesters needed, Pittsburgh, PA area

[jefgodesky]

Introducing The Fifth World in Forge parlance (admittedly, a little out of date, but still mostly true).

• Previous threads: Core mechanic, Practical concerns about my character sheet, How might you model tracking with beads and a mancala board?
• Links: Official Website; Design Diary

Goal

I've long had a difficult time sharing my vision of the future with others.  Talking about hunting and gathering makes most people think of "nasty, brutish and short."  I can make a solid argument, but that doesn't change the feeling that people have about it; after all, tightly-knit communities rooted in a spirit of place is the opposite of so much of the humanist dream that so many of us have grown up with.  I want to do for deep ecology, ecopsychology and animism what Star Trek did for humanism.  I want to take Michael Green's Afterculture further.  I want a game that gives players a chance and an invitation to step into a world like that and see how it feels for just a few hours.  Hopefully, after that, they'll at least understand what makes my vision of the future so optimistic.

Setting

In 2012, the Maya calendar ends. The Sun will climb the axis mundi and open the door of Cynosure—and the Fourth World will end. But the shamans have always known that time moves in cycles, and the end of the Fourth World heralds the beginning of the Fifth...

According to North America's Emergence mythology, several worlds preceded our current one; different cultures count them differently, but they all chart a progression of worlds, each one destroyed in a cataclysm brought on when humans forgot their place as part of the living world, and tried to set themselves up as masters or guardians or stewards of it. Then, destruction followed like floods after a storm.

According to some versions, the passing of each world seemed like the passing of years or seasons, simply on a grander level. The Maya calendar marked out seasons on an historical scale, in b'ak'tuns and in worlds. They charted 21 December 2012 as the end of the Fourth World. Just as the winter solstice rarely marks any sudden change in the weather from fall to winter, neither did 21 December 2012 seem like such a pivotal date. But just as winter bears its own distinct character, quite different from fall, so has the Fifth World changed greatly from the Fourth World.

The ice caps have melted away entirely, carving out new coastlines.  The world's climate has stabilized with the formation of a new cloud regime, one that means much more rain and more storms than before.  The world has grown hotter and wetter.  Jungles stretch north into Texas.  Escaped elephants from zoos and the private ranches of eccentric billionaires quickly exploded into the Pleistocene niche of the mammoths, while tigers and lions competed for the old niche of the saber-toothed cat.  Feral cats out-competed raccoons and other small mammalian predators.  Ice-free Antarctica and Greenland are now home to vast forests where humans now live, while the great equatorial belt has become too hot for most humans--but there, the first chimpanzee cultures have begun to emerge.

Civilization has left many relics to clean up, true; nuclear power plants leak out and form sacred lands where humans must not enter, where wildlife flourishes like modern Chernobyl.  Pharmaceuticals in the water have begun to pool, creating mad valleys where the water drives people and animals insane.  But the Fifth World is mostly a time of healing.  Plants, and bacteria and fungi even faster than them, conspire to heal the old wounds, and even to profit from them.  Plastic breaks into sand in only a few years, and bacteria evolve to eat that plastic sand away.  After a century of cutting down the biological wealth of the forests to build sprawling suburbs, that biological wealth quickly broke down to create lush new forests--albeit forests now pocked with strange debris like refrigerators, washers, driers, pipes and cars that have long outlived the walls and roofs that once surrounded them.  Streets break up and become unnoticeable in just a few years.  By the end of the first b'ak'tun of the Fifth World some 400 years from now, the world has mostly healed itself, and humans have mostly rejoined the living world.

But life in that world relies on trust and cooperation.  Living those is harder than they might seem as platitudes.  Trust means living with nerve-wracking doubt.  Relationships require constant tending.  Humans, like everything else in the world, does not have a place.  It must constantly redefine and renegotiate its place.  In the Fourth World, people speculated about creation; in the Fifth, creation happens every day, and that means that every day, new heroes are needed to repeat the cycle once more, to renew the world.

Mechanics

Certainly, plenty of games have depicted "primitive" societies before.  But they do so, sometimes even sympathetically, with mechanics rooted in the assumptions of our own culture.  I've relied on the work of David Abram, Graham Harvey and Tim Ingold to help me try to create mechanics that reflect animist cultures instead.  For instance, the usual gameplay mechanics of overcoming a challenge reflect the "domination" mindset Ingold identified at the heart of domestication (1994). Any mechanic that comes down to counting successes means that you must succeed by domination, by overcoming challenges by force. Even if the game fiction maintains the typical beliefs of, say, a Cree hunter that deer offer themselves and that no violence occurs in the act of hunting, the fact that the hunter took the deer by gaining more successes than the deer says otherwise. It pats our fictional animist on the head condescendingly, while affirming that whatever he might believe, we know how it really happens. That doesn't relate us to an animist lifeworld, that just reinforces our cultural chauvanism.

But Ingold introduces much more nuance than the contrast of "domination vs. trust" might seem to infer. It does not simply demarcate "trust good, domination bad." Trust brings with it a nerve-wracking dependence. The hunter must trust that the deer will offer himself. To trust means making yourself vulnerable, and the fear and trepidation that comes with that. The Other might not reciprocate your trust; they may take advantage of you, or leave you helpless. The game mechanic should follow the challenges that appear in that life: the challenge of approaching the Other, each track drawing you closer, the building tension, and then, finally, the revelation.

We already have a game just like that, ready-made to become a resolution mechanic. Other games have already used it. We call it the prisoner's dilemma.  In fact, the prisoner's dilemma has been offered as a model for the evolution of cooperation (Axelrod, 1984).

Another point of oral people make that literate people like us often have a hard time with involves the "verbiness" of the universe.  Literacy trains us, thanks to the "thing-ness" of written words, to appreciate the universe as a collection of things, while the essentially social nature of the spoken word means that orality trains listeners to appreciate the universe as a process, and individuals as nodes of relationship (Ong, 2002).

By "dividual" I mean that networks of social relationships are intrinsic to the Aborigines' sense of self and composite identities, rather than extrinsic (as in an "individiualistic" notion of a person).  In other words, these relationships are an integral part of an Aborigine's raison d'être and way of being-in-the-world; they are embodied.  ... in a dividual mode, an action is always an interaction, a subjectivity (or agency) is always conceived as intersubjectivity (or interagency) between the different constituents of the world. (Poirier, 2005:13)

Most roleplaying games present an individual model, expressed in the form of a character sheet.  This actually makes for a powerful, if often unconsidered, philosophical statement about the nature of a person (in this case, as a collection of traits and attributes).  The Fifth World tries to depict a dividual character.  You have relationships--relationships have scores, and can have blessings or curses associated with them.

These relationships come into play with a competitive gifting mechanic.  Between making your choice in the prisoner's dilemma and revealing it, players can offer gifts to one another.  You can decline a gift or make a larger counter-gift, but if one player accepts a gift, he or she must flip his or her choice to "open," the vulnerable option.  Gifts can take the narrative form of direct offerings to bribe another, time and energy devoted to watching, studying or observing the other, or even the efforts of a furious combatant to find a good opening.  Relationships emerge from the history of these encounters; encounters of trust build them up, while exploiting trust breaks them down.  They offer bonuses to the gifting cycle; while even the hunter with the strongest relationship to deer must put forward some effort to find her, it takes him much less effort, because of his past experience with deer.  If the hunter has six beads in his relationship with deer, a single bead offered as a gift counts as a seven-bead gift.  Blessings and curses offer special powers, particular strengths, and specific skills bound to those relationships.

These take place inside of a scene economy inspired by Harold Scheub's study of oral storytelling (1998).  After a series of initiations that both create the characters and the region where the story takes place, the story itself unfolds in three acts.  The story has no set GM; the GM role shifts from player to player according to where the scene takes place, and who has the strongest relationship to that place.  In the first act, players receive beads for speaking riddles.  Riddles encode images and plot elements, so this rewards players for introducing plot elements.  In the second act, players receive beads for repeating riddles, by bringing up the plot elements introduced in the first act.  This begins the layering of images that makes the meat of any story.  In the third act, players receive beads for solving riddles, or bringing plot elements introduced in the first act to a successful resolution.

What I Need

I've begun the alpha playtesting for The Fifth World.  I'm looking for players in the Pittsburgh, PA area able and willing to help me playtest this game.  Beta playtesting begins in November, after the first public game at GASPcon, Nov. 1-2, Pittsburgh.

Works Cited

• Axelrod, R. (1984).  The evolution of cooperation.  New York: Basic Books.
• Ingold, T. (1994). From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations. In Animals and human society: changing perspectives, eds. A Manning and J Serpell. London: Routledge, pp 1-22.
• Ong, W. (2002).  Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, 2nd edition.  New York: Routledge.
• Poirier, S. (2005).  A world of relationships: itineraries, dreams, and events in the Australian western desert.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Scheub, H. (1998).  Story.  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

[jefgodesky]

I did a bit of an update on the first link above: Introducing the Fifth World in Forge Parlance, Revised