Game Design Update

Five by Five is my most played game. I mean that it is the game that I personally get to the table the most often when I want to play one of my games. I'm not sure which games of my design are still being played by the community at large. I have been contacted by various people over the years about certain games. 

Game designer and owner of Grey Gnome Games, Jason Glover once contacted me with kind words about A+ Fantasy. At one time Hi/Lo Heroes had two different fan web pages and Keeton Harrington the owner of 1KM1KT posted it as 1KM1KT's first commercial RPG product. (Sadly, it didn't sell.) Hi/Lo was even translated into French!

Five By Five itself has been reviewed several times. Sadly, it's revision history is a mess. Back in February I decided to go back to the original version of Five By Five and escape the "bloat" of later experimentation with the system. I recreated the OG version of Five By Five with a few minor tweaks in an 8.5" x 5.5" 16 page zine format. It was good, but it wasn't perfect.

One big change to Five By Five that didn't exist in the original version was the removal of "doubles" as part of the roll results matrix. Removing doubles (by making them an exception) cleaned up the array of possible roll results, smoothing out the number ranges and the probability of specific roll results. I have decided to implement that change into the recent "OG Zine" edition of Five By Five.

The OG version of Five By Five now establishes all trait values as even numbers in increments of 2. This makes applying modifiers to the Traits to move probability up or down super easy. That's important as I want the game to be scalable, something that I am leveraging in the Five By Five "Monsters" book that I am currently working on. Other than changing a bit of the math, the game is the same as the original version, which is how I want it.

One major weakness apparent in Five By Five and in probably all of the games that I have worked on is the absence of GM advice. My games are more "Players' Guides" than core rules. It's because I write what I need to write to allow my players to make characters and understand the game mechanics, and I do everything else myself based on experience and instinct. I know what I want, so I have never bothered to write it down.

With that in mind, I plan to make the upcoming Monsters book a sort of GM's guide for Five By Five. It's going to be presented in the same zine format as the current OG core book and both will be available here in my side menu for free. 

I also plan to create a page on itch.io. I'd like to expand my visibility in the free RPG community at large. It's been awhile since I have been active. I think both 10 Cubed and Little Colony are good offerings that might appeal to others out there, but I don't think anyone will ever see them if things remain the way they are now.

  

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