Pay What You Want: The Take5 RPG system

Jaiden Waterloo’s Take5 RPG system is now available through DriveThruRPG.

You can pay as much, or as little, as you want for these 190 pages of text, which come to you on a black background and white characters, with scare illustrations.

Take5 is a style of RPG that has a detailed and multi-page table of contents and terms like;

• 10ft Action
• Armor Range
• Bleed/Blight Tokens

It was only this week that Take5 listed on DriveThruRPG, but it’s been available on Gumroad for longer, and this is version 3.44. Waterloo has been building the game with playtesters for five years.

Characters are not restricted to any specific build or forced to walk any specific paths like classes, though some abilities are grouped by requirement in case they would like to put all of their eggs in one basket. We’ve had characters in our games as simple as elven archers and as unique as alien blood ritualists with psychic powers or crystalline spiderfolk with magical-mineral threads. The potential is really just… endless, and I’m not saying that as a spoofy marketing point. I’ve seen my players use Take5 to do the most incredible, terrifying, and wonderful things.

Characters have random stats generated from rolling seven d10s, keeping the best six results and tallying them to find a value. The system uses a d100, which, in tests, character stats/values must match for the PC to succeed.

There’s some maths, too, as if the d100 role is half or lower than the character’s skill, then that’s a Greater Success. If it’s a quarter, then that’s a Critical Success. I think the average value of a 6d10 roll would be 33. What’s 25% of 33?

Perhaps I’ve become used to Windows sneaking Night Mode into my PC, but I like Take5’s black background with white and yellow text. It certainly makes the coloured icons the system uses for highlights straightforward to tell apart.

While Take5 uses some modern terms in the game, avoiding some of the slightly cringeworthy tropes from yesteryear, it’s clearly an OSR-style RPG.

Here’s the “social circumstance” Intimidation text;

Asserting yourself over another creature in another way that does not provoke a fight can be a difficult balance of your own confidence and posture. There is no specific skill for intimidation by the intimidator, rather it falls to the one they are attempting to intimidate. A strongman may default to their Athletics when another person attempts to intimidate them, comparing their physiques to see who is more of a threat. A wise man may default to their Observation, gleaning insight from the one who threatens them to judge a legitimate threat from a lie. Swordsmen or gunners may do much the same with their weapon skills. Of course, all creatures will be cautious and calculative if assessing a threat.

Quick Links

• Download: Take5 Core Rulebook.