[Fifth World] Pools Again

[Brennan Taylor]

I am reading the second edition rules for TSoY for the first time (I know, it's been out for months), and I am very impressed and pleased. They match up with my plans for The Fifth World very well, and I had a stray thought in the shower on Monday morning.

I have three pools in The Fifth World: Inside, Outside, and Renown. You can call on each one depending on what kind of action you are taking: community-building, rules-following for Inside, self-aggrandizement for Renown, and antisocial, deviant for Outside. The problem is, using your Outside pool will have some negative consequences. The problem this poses is how to get people to use it.

Reviewing the damage rules in TSoY Revised, I saw that damage is now associated with a pool. This is really cool, because it helps me solve my Outside pool problem. See, the Outside pool is a problem all on its own, and you can't damage it. When in a conflict, your Inside and Renown pools can get restricted by damage, but Outside will never be touched. That means, the more desperately you are losing a conflict, the more incentive there will be to draw on the Outside pool. In-game, this means that the more beat up you are, the more likely it is you will do something nasty in order to win.

These rules will be formalized as I go along, but there's the incentive for this pool.