Who likes their fantasy with a shot of heartbreaker and a dirt-farming sidecar? Maybe with a splash of podcast host bitters? This week we cover Fifth Cycle, a thoroughly confusing game about wizard archaeologists where you hope like crazy to play as a wizard archaeologist and not a farmer.
Let us know what you thought of Fifth Cycle in the comments! Have a book you’d us to cover? Let us know about that too.
System Mastery 
There’s a big silence near the beginning. Did you forget to splice in the music?
Huh, apparently so! Gonna fix it now, thanks!
.. And, isn’t Numenera basically Wizard Archeologists The Game?
We’ll have to read that sometime. It’s too current and well-regarded for what we do here.
A question for Afterthought, inspired by the camping example.
What is your favorite sleepover experience?
Hard mode: the lewder the better.
Great question! Added to the list.
I played in a long-running Pathfinder game with a GM who insisted on critical failure auto-decapitation (roll a 1, followed by a 1, followed by any number that would have been a failure on the original check) and critical success auto-kill (same thing, but with natural 20s followed by a success).
Over the course of eight months, three PCs were auto-killed by enemies, four PCs decapitated themselves in the course of attacking, and one solo monster was auto-killed in the first round.
And then I stopped playing that game, because even for Pathfinder, that is complete shenanigans.
Yeah, that’s basically turning your game into a weird beheading cartoon.
It’s funny how much DMs and books invest in complex crit charts, given how unlikely any given result on them is to turn up during a series of play sessions. It’s practically like planning around which lotto you’ll win (or horribly lose.)
Man, I really want the Collegiate Wizard Archaeologists game now. :<
It’s almost sort of Discworld-y now that I think about it.
Why is a 90% success rate for Stealth considered to be so unreliable that it’s useless? How high would it need to be, in order to be considered useful?