How do I play a roleplaying game?
If you’ve played other roleplaying games before and have no interest in reading yet another introduction to the hobby, you might want to skip ahead to the next section on how this game compares to other tabletop roleplaying games. If you haven’t played many roleplaying games before (or even none at all), then you might find this part useful. Rather than try to provide a description of how roleplaying games work, though, let’s just play one.
We play roleplaying games with our friends. Gather two or three of your friends and get comfortable. This game will take 15-20 minutes.
They let us explore interesting scenarios. Tell your friends that you’ll take on the roles of a band of hunters in the Fifth World, a neotribal, ecotopian future four hundred years after the collapse of civilization. Your story takes place right here, where you find yourself sitting right now, but 144,000 days from today (395 years from now). Runaway climate change has melted the ice caps, raised the seas, and turned earth into a jungle planet, from the equator to the poles.
They give us a chance to put ourselves in someone else’s life. Take turns asking each other three questions about your hunters. Which of you has the most experience? Which of you has the most to prove? Which of you has the most to learn?
They thrive on sticky situations. Start things off as you catch sight of a small family of deer in the jungle. The stag looks at you. He sees you, but he doesn’t run. You see the recognition in his eyes, inviting you to a dance of death older than humanity itself. He’s accepted the distinct possibility that he’ll die today, that his flesh will become yours and your kin’s. But that doesn’t mean he intends to make it easy for you.
They unfold as collaborative, waking dreams. Pick one player to take the focus. She can only tell us what her hunter thinks, says, and does. The others can say what their own hunters say and do, as well as what happens in the rest of the world (like what the stag does).
They give us opportunities to express our own sense of drama. When the player in focus says that she does something that sounds difficult (perhaps “I shoot the stag with an arrow right in the heart”), say, “That sounds difficult.” If she describes something that sounds dangerous (perhaps “I leap over the chasm in pursuit of the stag”), say, “That sounds dangerous.” She might even say something that sounds both difficult and dangerous (perhaps “I take to the trees to get above the stag, then jump down on its back”), in which case one of you should say, “That sounds difficult” and someone else should immediately say, “That sounds dangerous.”
They give us more interesting stories than we could tell on our own. If the player in focus says that she did something difficult, a third player describes what she’ll need to do to succeed. If she did something dangerous, a third player describes who gets hurt and how badly.
They loop from building up tension to releasing it. When you get out of one situation, pick another player to take the focus and set up a new situation. Keep playing until your hunters return home. If you want to keep going after that, continue on — you’ll find this game has some things in common with the simple game you just played, plus some more that you’ll find will bring you more deeply into the Fifth World.