[Fifth World] Revised Power 19

Looking for playtesters now that it's gotten close enough to do such things, I realized that The Fifth World had evolved a bit as I'd worked on it, and the Power 19 I answered before no longer entirely held. So, with a round of revisions beginning in response to playtesting, I thought this seemed like a good time to do this exercise one more time.

1. What is your game about?<2. What do the characters do?
In The Fifth World, only relationships matter. Nothing else even exists. Characters must tend to the various relationships that define them. Some relationships require more energy. Some will demand things that might damage other relationships. So characters must carefully choose which relationships to nurture and which to neglect, and how to budget their time and effort.

3. What do the players do?
The players alternate between playing the roles of their individual characters and that of the Genius loci, or spirit of the place, who fills in all the NPC's. Players receive rewards in the three different acts for introducing story elements, layering images, or resolving story elements, which drives all players towards the collaborative weaving of a coherent story.

4. How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The Fifth World happens after the collapse of civilization; that turning to the new world reinforces the regular cycles of nature, like the turning of seasons or years. By the same token, the feral humans of The Fifth World live amongst the legacies of a world that lived without a focus on trust or relationship. The world has mostly healed itself, though. Like extant animists, the feral humans of The Fifth World experience creation as an ongoing process, the world as a process they must renew each day. Thus, the setting underlines the dynamics of trust and relationship that the game centers on.

5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Characters go through a series of initiations. These initiations build up the relationships that define a character, by putting them into an encounter where they must choose to trust or not. These initiations at the same time build up a map of the region where the story takes place, rooting the character and the story in a definite spirit of place.

6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
The basic mechanic of the game derives from the Prisoner's Dilemma. Axelrod (1984) argues that the Prisoner's Dilemma can help explain the evolution of cooperative behavior. In computer simulations, "tit-for-tat" almost always emerges, ultimately, as the winning strategy, thanks to characteristics like its "niceness" (it opens with trusting), vengeance (it retaliates when defected against) and forgiveness (it only retaliates once). So the basic mechanic should push players in that direction, with cooperation ultimately emerging as the most stable behavior.

On a larger level, the scene economy breaks the story into three acts: in the first act, players receive rewards for introducing new story elements; in the second, for layering those elements on each other; and in the third, for bringing those elements to resolution. These should help drive these relationships and encounters towards a coherent story, relying on Scheub's (1998) concept of a story as a rhythmic layering of images.

7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?<8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
By relationship. Every scene happens at one of the places on the map created along with the characters. Whoever had the strongest relationship with that place plays the GM for that scene, or in this game, the Genius loci (spirit of the place).

9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)<The Fifth World has an immediacy, rhyming with the stories of your own life and your own world, about the world your descendants might enjoy living on the same land.

10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
Tense. An encounter puts two players in doubt, trying to guess what the other might do. Between choosing to trust or not and revealing that choice, players can enter a gifting cycle, offering beads. A player can accept those beads at the cost of flipping his or her choice to "trust," which could leave the gifting player with the opportunity for an encounter of mutual trust, or just provide the opening needed to exploit. Counter-gifting allows players to escalate gifts. This also provides a narrative tool for the back-and-forth of the encounter. Then, the players reveal their choices, and interpret what happened with their Hopes and Fears.

11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
The Prisoner's Dilemma challenges players with precisely the dilemma of living in a world based on trust.

12. Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Characters can advance by gaining more relationships, with more beads in those relationships, more blessings attached to those relationships, and more beads in their will pool. But this doesn't offer a clear-cut advancement, either, since relationships bring responsibilities and expectations with them, as well. It would seem more accurate to say that characters' lives become more complicated, or perhaps deeper, rather than simply advancing.

13. How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
Advancement occurs as a matter of relationship, rather than individual traits or attributes. It comes from many encounters of mutual trust. But "advancement" doesn't mean accumulated power, so much as deeper relationships and a life more deeply rooted in relationships with place and the persons who live there.

14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
After playing The Fifth World, I hope players can appreciate the animist perspective as a viable and worthwhile one. I hope that at least some players will take inspiration from the future The Fifth World depicts, serving for deep ecology and bioregional animists just as Star Trek did for humanists.

15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
Most of us have a preconceived notion of primitive cultures as lacking in cultural refinement, knowledge, medicine, technology, and so forth. Trying to play The Fifth World with this misconception will lead to disaster. The Fifth World derives a good deal of its content from real-world anthropology and ethnography, so it won't work with the Hobbesian misconceptions most of us harbor about primitive peoples. Dispelling those myths without falling into preaching requires a delicate balance, one that requires a lot of attention.

16. Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
The "cool" factor. The jungle tribes of Texas that hunt giant beetles to turn their exoskeletons into armor or shields; the biker gangs that turned their hogs in for horses and now hunt elephants across the fields of South Dakota; the tribes exploring the heart of the verdant evergreen forests nestled amidst the razor-sharp peaks of an ice-free Antarctica. That element fires the imagination. It banishes the idea of life beyond civilization as "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and excites people with the adventure of creating a new, tribal future.

17. Where does your game take the players that other games can't, don't, or won't?
To their own human nature, beyond their domestication. Other games take the stereotypes of primitive life for granted, which means that we keep looking outside ourselves for something to come along and "fix" us. The Fifth World<18. What are your publishing goals for your game?
Make it an open-source game, using an online wiki. We'll publish some books, mainly as a convenience for players at the table, particularly a series of books focusing on individual lands (since the game's bioregional focus requires some significant changes for each land). I'd like to publish the rules as a podcast and as a CD. But ultimately, the game will primarily exist online, in wiki format, as an open source game where players can help improve the rules, and the stories they play become "official canon" for the world. I think that should make The Fifth World the first truly massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game!

19. Who is your target audience?
We might reach some traditional gamers and some independent/story gamers, but we'd rather pull in non-gamers. I hope to sell the game to intentional and planned communities as an outlet for collaborative, communal art that could help build social cohesion. We hope to attract people with an interest in anthropology or ecology.

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.
Scheub, H. (1998). Story. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.