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Freebies: Five By Five

5X5 cover Today I stumbled upon Jeff Moore’s blog Dreams and Dragons and (re)discovered his awesome rules-light RPG Five By Five. I think I have downloaded and leafed through it a while ago, but I forgot about it and failed to recognized its awesomeness.

With the free 22-paged PDF Jeff Moore provides us with a rules-light roleplaying game that can be used to run games in every genre. Characters are described by three player-defined traits, a weakness and health. Traits are ranked from Untrained to Legendary and come in two variants: action traits and intensity traits. The first kind comes into play when a character wants to perform actions related to said trait. The second kind gives bonuses to damage or damage resistance.

Action resolution is done by rolling two d5 (a d6 where the 6 is counted as 0) and multiplying them. The result must be lower than the action value of the trait in question to succeed. Damage rolls are done by a single d5. Weapon intensity modifiers are added to the die result.

The only drawback of the game is that it doesn’t come with any setting and only one example character. It would have great if Jeff had provided us with a few more examples how to use the game, but that’s just a minor quibble. While I am currently taking a break from GMing, this is definitely one of the games I’ll love to run in the future. Now I only need a cool setting!

By the way, Rob Lang has written a review of Five By Five, that you might want to check out.
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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3 comments

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thebabblingbane

I really dig his “HiLo Heroes”. If you like “Five by Five” I would highly recommend the other as well.

The Bane
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    Stargazer

    Thanks for the tip. I’ll check it out.
    Reply
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Rob Lang

Thanks for Linkage. I love that Jeff (who churns out games like crazy) built the 5×5 system as a way of teaching kids multiplication. Great idea and a cool system.
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