Hey Colton! Thanks for stopping by and re-sharing <3
> I'd be curious what a dolmenwood breakdown would look like
I think it'll be ~2 years minimum, but i'll do it eventually. I'm playtesting my system as I wait for the physical dolmenwood books to ship. After it ships, I'll run a campaign, and *then* I'll do a review. In the meantime, I wrote about OSE in depth: https://rancourt.substack.com/p/review-old-school-essentials and most of what's there should apply.
Also, someone else in these comments was asking about dolmenwood, and I replied with some impressions:
- I like the standardization on roll higher is better
- I like the revamped thief skills
- I find the hexes hard to run off the page
- the saving throw renames are good
- listing three options for encumbrance is kludge
- the explicit callout for narrative interaction is really nice
- the new undead turning rules are elegant
- the jump rules are weird
- i'm not in love with the overland travel rules
- optionality on what happens when there's an initiative tie is awkward. pick one!
- redefining engaged to require that one side has already made an attack is a *big* change that i don't see anyone talking about. means you can run right past someone
- the rules introduce ambiguity into the action sequence. it's now unclear whether all actors of a side need to move before any can missile, or if the sequence just applies to individual (ie, do alice and bob both need to move before either can shoot, or can alice move then shoot and then bob moves?)
- making it so that you don't need to declare fighting withdrawals is a big change that i don't see people talk about (only retreats need to be declared)
- no guidance on situational modifiers to morale is weird
- attacking with two weapons being a whole extra attack (at -2/-4) is very big
- introduction of "charge" with only a -1 AC penalty is a big increase to melee characters
- the getting lost rules are (as always) suspect
- random wilderness encounter charts look good
- survival rules don't feel interesting to me / worth spending time on to me
- the hex and city content is inspired
- they leylines and overall hexcrawl design is fantastic
- splitting up the treasure types into coins, riches, and magic seems dumb (now i'm creating generators for 3 treasure types intead of 1 <_<)
- the new spell list is good
- pricing the magic items is so helpful
- not having any guidance on equipment / magic item availability is annoying
- having actually defined sages with already-established areas of research is so nice. no one seems to do this by the book but dolmenwood does
- i love the huge list of rumors
- love the index
- love the pronunciation guide
----
this is just highlights and doesn't go fully in to the mechanism design or talk about references, layout, editing mistakes, etc but I think it's a good overview
Hello Beau. I've just discovered your blog, read the excellent Black Wyrm analysis, review is too weak to describe that epic. Now I'm working my way through this one. I assume there will be a test. Anyway, for Knave 2e Relic Magic, my understanding is that the PCs accumulate relics by completing missions for divine or demonic patrons. Once they have these relics they can have as many active blessings as they have relics, up to their CHA, as long as they remain in good standing with the issuing patrons. They can choose which blessings are active each morning.
For example. Brother Thomas visits the shrine of St Agnes the Truthful. Agnes visits him in a vision and commands him to carry her image, an icon pendant, and tell no lies for a month. Thomas successfully completes this mission and returns to the shrine to be judged and presents the icon pendant for blessing. Agnes blesses his pendant with the power to detect lies and it becomes a relic. This blessing is similar in power to Spell 91, Truth Sense, but always usable while active. As long as Brother Thomas continues to bear the relic pendant, and remains truthful himself, he retains the active blessing to detect lies when he hears them. For a year Thomas bears the pendant relic and tells no lies. He reveals many falsehoods in others and donates a pair of fine silver candlesticks to the shrine. St Agnes shows her pleasure in her trusted servant by extending his blessing. The relic now additionally gives him the power to understand all words spoken in his presence. Some time later Thomas is forced to tell a lie, losing his good standing with St Agnes, and his blessings no longer function. He returns to St Agnes' shrine and asks forgiveness. Agness demands that he find and bring to justice a thief who has stolen from one of her worshipers. Thomas investigates the crime, finds the thief and hands them over to the magistrate for punishment. The saint then forgives Thomas his former transgression and restores the blessings to his relic pendant as long as remains truthful.
I quite like the way this works. There isn't much in the way of mechanical guidance, but it could be used to create a very specific set of tailored powers, and responsibilities, for cleric or paladin style characters.
Only partway through the post (lots of words!) but I love the worked out example of how bananas the Hazard Die mechanic actually is at the table. Like many things in the "rules light" corner of the OSR, it seems fun and exciting at first glance but often ends up not being all that well thought out.
> Only partway through the post (lots of words!) but I love the worked out example of how bananas the Hazard Die mechanic actually is at the table.
Thanks! I think worked examples are *very powerful* and that you can frequently save yourself tons of work/grief by demonstrating an idea completely rather than liking it's rough shape. The same thing happens in the finance world - you might have a great idea for a trade, and it's *directionally sound* but when you do the napkin math it doesn't have legs.
Test stuff! Even if it's just by yourself! Science!
> Like many things in the "rules light" corner of the OSR, it seems fun and exciting at first glance but often ends up not being all that well thought out.
Totally. It runs into a common problem where the audience *isn't GMs or players* it's collectors and many of the authors are *also not players*. So you have non-players writing TTRPG-shaped materials for other non-players. It *looks* like a TTRPG, but would have a very hard time being actually played as one.
I've also run into the exact same problem on the very-crunchy (GURPS) side of things, where you have this whole community of people that are interested in accuracy/detail at any cost, and you end up with a totally unplayable "game". See the "Journey" section of https://rancourt.substack.com/p/review-hall-of-judgment for an example.
After decades in the hobby, my views and interests about where the next fertile field of RPG design center around scenario design, not game or system design. If a new RPG doesn't include a sample scenario, I assume the author doesn't understand their design well enough to publish it at all. This goes double for RPGs that have GM advice sections rather than a published scenario. It goes *triple* for RPGs that publish advice on how to design or present scenarios whose subsequent, published scenarios don't hew to that advice.
> If a new RPG doesn't include a sample scenario, I assume the author doesn't understand their design well enough to publish it at all. This goes double for RPGs that have GM advice sections rather than a published scenario. It goes *triple* for RPGs that publish advice on how to design or present scenarios whose subsequent, published scenarios don't hew to that advice.
I think that's a big part of what's so compelling about mothership, OSE, and Into the Odd. The in-house adventures are very-well done and keep very close to their proposed structures.
On the other hand! Something I find endlessly entertaining about Knave is that, while Willowby Hall is a great adventure, check out Elias Fenwick's stat block (p14 of Willowby Hall v1.3).
For spells, the text lists: Read Languages, Read Magic, Phantasmal Force, Mirror Image, Fly.
Read Languages, Read Magic, Phantasmal Force, and Fly are not defined in either Knave 1e or Knave 2e. Mirror Image is defined, but just says "INT illusory copies of you, under your control, appear." Additionally, Knave spells are based on the caster's INT, yet Elias does not have an INT listed in his stat block.
So like, what are we doing here? How did this happen?
I had Mothership in mind in the triple denunciation, when I decried lapses in both design and presentation. Tuesday Knight garners a lot of praise for publishing scenarios that jettisons the taxonomy and structures of the core book.
Steps 5-8 of "Prepare Your First Session" in Mothership's core book (pgs. 8-17, essentially) unfold a very handy scaffolding for structuring and *presenting* information: the TOMBS cycle, "Survive, Solve, or Save", Questions/Puzzles/Answers, and the three questions that define NPCs. In the first-party scenarios I've looked at, none of these structures are plainly presented. As a new Mothership GM, I'd be looking for these structures and heuristics to anchor me when I begin to prep a new scenario. The corebook tells me that the best Mothership scenarios have TOMBS, the most interesting NPCs have answers for three specific questions, that I will be faced with sacrificing Survive, Solve, or Save. Why aren't TKG's own scenarios relying on their core book's frameworks? Why aren't I literally seeing a TOMBS section (or the scenario divided into the five TOMBS acts), NPC stat blocks with the three questions and their answers, or obstacles or challenges encapsulated by a Questions/Puzzles/Answers format?
As for that Willowy Hall tidbit, that's hilarious and exactly what reinforces your point about "RPG-shaped objects." (I refuse to use "TTRPG" as the acronym. We were here first! Let the CRPGs use the distorted acronym!)
I went through and checked the mothership advice again. The bit on creating NPCs is good!
* What do they think with? (their brain? their wallet? their fists?)
* What do they want? (smart[1] goals are more game-ready)
* How do the players interact with them? Are the powerful or powerless? Are they helpful or unhelpful?
Then, I went through some examples of their NPC writeups. Here's Indyl:
> Runs The Ecstasy. Tall and graceful. Staunchly protective of their workers. Covered in esoteric motion-tattoos. Indyl’s personal bodyguards, the Seraphs of Virtue, are highly skilled assassins with an 85% clearance rate and can be hired for 2mcr/target.
It's totally unclear what the answers to those questions are! At best we get "what do they want?" but instead of being specific it's vague.
> I had Mothership in mind in the triple denunciation, when I decried lapses in both design and presentation. Tuesday Knight garners a lot of praise for publishing scenarios that jettisons the taxonomy and structures of the core book.
> Steps 5-8 of "Prepare Your First Session" in Mothership's core book (pgs. 8-17, essentially) unfold a very handy scaffolding for structuring and *presenting* information: the TOMBS cycle, "Survive, Solve, or Save", Questions/Puzzles/Answers, and the three questions that define NPCs. In the first-party scenarios I've looked at, none of these structures are plainly presented. As a new Mothership GM, I'd be looking for these structures and heuristics to anchor me when I begin to prep a new scenario. The corebook tells me that the best Mothership scenarios have TOMBS, the most interesting NPCs have answers for three specific questions, that I will be faced with sacrificing Survive, Solve, or Save. Why aren't TKG's own scenarios relying on their core book's frameworks? Why aren't I literally seeing a TOMBS section (or the scenario divided into the five TOMBS acts), NPC stat blocks with the three questions and their answers, or obstacles or challenges encapsulated by a Questions/Puzzles/Answers format?
Woah! I take it back! This is what I get for commenting on a system/module from a first pass, rather than from prepping/running it :D
> I refuse to use "TTRPG" as the acronym. We were here first! Let the CRPGs use the distorted acronym!
Mothership's scenarios (among others) helped to precipitate my current stance on this stuff. Published scenarios afford less space for RPG designers to hide. Can the designer practice what they preach? If the system is designed to produce a certain experience, can the designer instruct someone on how to actually produce the intended effect? Scenario design is where an RPG designer demonstrates that they've played their game enough to know what a stranger will need to make their game run smoothly. I contend that RPG scenario designers would be better served studying board game instruction booklets instead of fiction or other published scenarios.
I resonated so strongly with your blog because it demonstrates the sort of follow-through that should be apparent in system and scenario design. RPGs and their scenarios should read like they've been written by someone who plays the game (or has played the scenario). Sadly, too many RPG authors think of themselves as authors or "narrative designers" when they should be thinking of themselves as instructors. But you can't teach what you don't know!
Reading this, I'm shocked we don't see more analysis of the basic math behind ttrpg design. It seems like such a small task to run a few sims to make sure your game holds up numerically. A lucid critique, I must say
It sounds like a small task, but a lot of designers are only iterating on a few mechanics that thoroughly playtested. The rest of the mechanics are pulled from other sources. Very few games are built "from the ground up."
Also it sounds simple and it is in smaller doses, the issue is in aggrigate. Doing this kind of analysis isn't easy. And it doesn't always offer an easy fix.
> a lot of designers are only iterating on a few mechanics that thoroughly playtested.
For sure! How I'm choosing to interpret benton's comment is:
When a designer is creating a change or new mechanic for their game, it seems like it would be worth the time to do something akin to what I did for knave 2e's travel system. None of what I did there requires math or programming expertise, just a willingness to confront tedium. I'd love to be corrected, but it *really feels* like this didn't happen for the wilderness hazard dice, as doing what I did should have exposed how absurd it was immediately.
But yeah - totally agree that the interaction effects start to become really hard. When you make a bunch of changes to an interconnected system and have to start thinking about how they can be combined (like how power attack combines with sneak attack in knave), it gets out of hand
Yeah, I wasn't intending to be dismissive of his comment, just explanitory. For instance I'm working on a classless hack of WWN by Kevin Crawford.
I straight up do not have time to do this kind of analysis for every mechanic. Most of WWN does what I want. Its just the skills and magic systems that I want to adjust to fit my needs. Even with those, I'm likely to settle for "well it does what I want, and this probably won't make any money, so..."
A lot of design is like that. Now, Ben Milton is probably a little different since he (I dont think) is teaching as his day job anymore. I think he is a full time designer, and this kind of analysis will actually benefit his products. However for most TTRPG designers it's more of a "I ran this out of my garage while working two jobs" operation.
I was eyeing Knave as a system to get into and run a couple of generic OSR modules, but it seems I'll have to look somewhere else (LotFP? WWN? We'll see).
What a great piece, love me some detailed mechanistic analysis.
A point on getting lost during hex crawls: 5e had a procedure for this in Tomb of Annihilation's Chult hex crawl section. I thought it was quite good!
– GM makes a hidden DC15 (modified by weather, terrain, travel speed etc.) navigation/survival check for the party's navigator when the PCs start travelling in the morning.
– When they fail, GM rolls 1d6 to determine the destination hex and tells the PC at the end of the day that they did, in fact, not end up where they expected and got lost during the day
– They repeat the navigation check every morning. When they continue failing, they continue moving in a random direction, when they succeed, the GM reveals on which hex they ended up.
With a PC trained in survival, getting lost happened occasionally but not too often and the fact that you would re-orient yourself after a few days helped reduce frustration as you usually didn't actually backtrack but go towards a PoI anway.
Hey Jasper! Thanks for reading and I'm glad you enjoyed the post :D
re: 5e's hexcrawl procedure
That's very clear! As far as I can tell, it's unambiguous and seems like a thing that you could actually play out at the table in a non-confusing way. Thanks a ton for bringing that up ❤️
Thank you for this review. It was a very interesting read. You put a massively greater amount of thought into these design choices than I have when I was reading through it.
Can I ask what your TTRPG of preference is? Also, do you know of a rules lite system that does a good job of streamlining things and is still good for running older modules?
Hey Mylon, glad you enjoyed and thanks for stopping by!
I'll write a Dolmenwood review eventually (I'd estimate ~2 years from now); looking forward to receiving the physical product and then playing it. After my group wraps up our campaign there, I'll give it a complete review. I currently have a review for incandescent grottoes on the backlog, and we're wrapping up winter's daughter today, so i'll write reviews for both of those, as well as the other modules we play during our Sovereign playtest.
For impressions:
- I like the standardization on roll higher is better
- I like the revamped thief skills
- I find the hexes hard to run off the page
- the saving throw renames are good
- listing three options for encumbrance is kludge
- the explicit callout for narrative interaction is really nice
- the new undead turning rules are elegant
- the jump rules are weird
- i'm not in love with the overland travel rules
- optionality on what happens when there's an initiative tie is awkward. pick one!
- redefining engaged to require that one side has already made an attack is a *big* change that i don't see anyone talking about. means you can run right past someone
- the rules introduce ambiguity into the action sequence. it's now unclear whether all actors of a side need to move before any can missile, or if the sequence just applies to individual (ie, do alice and bob both need to move before either can shoot, or can alice move then shoot and then bob moves?)
- making it so that you don't need to declare fighting withdrawals is a big change that i don't see people talk about (only retreats need to be declared)
- no guidance on situational modifiers to morale is weird
- attacking with two weapons being a whole extra attack (at -2/-4) is very big
- introduction of "charge" with only a -1 AC penalty is a big increase to melee characters
- the getting lost rules are (as always) suspect
- random wilderness encounter charts look good
- survival rules don't feel interesting to me / worth spending time on to me
- the hex and city content is inspired
- they leylines and overall hexcrawl design is fantastic
- splitting up the treasure types into coins, riches, and magic seems dumb (now i'm creating generators for 3 treasure types intead of 1 <_<)
- the new spell list is good
- pricing the magic items is so helpful
- not having any guidance on equipment / magic item availability is annoying
- having actually defined sages with already-established areas of research is so nice. no one seems to do this by the book but dolmenwood does
- i love the huge list of rumors
- love the index
- love the pronunciation guide
--------------------------
All in all, i think dolmenwood is great. Gavin put in a huge amount of legwork that people aren't willing to do, and the content is polished, inspired, and gameable.
I love that your impressions are more detailed than many reviews!!! LoL
I always love seeing you review stuff and I'll read it even if I never have any intentions of playing the game just because it's such a great look at the mechanics. I can almost read your review and know what I want to steal from that system.
I just wanted to say I love this thorough perusal of Knave’s mechanics. It doesn’t look like Ben smoke-tested his material very well, and I imagine that that may have had something to do with a seeming lack of design focus. I kickstarted this, and even upon a cursory read-through of the system, found that it’d probably be a fun way to kill an evening as a one-off session from a campaign, rather than a game suited for long-form campaign play. I do appreciate, however, that the core of the game is simple enough to jury-rig it into something more usable. And at the very least, your review allows someone like myself to sit down and analyze the game for what it is rather than the clout surrounding it. Moreover, thanks to your number crunching, I could probably develop some house rules on my own that enable the game to run much more smoothly.
Really, really impressive analysis though. I would love to know your thoughts on Pathfinder 2e’s math: it seems consistent and usable, but I haven’t sat down to really review it as in-depth as this.
Howdy Will, thanks for stopping by and I'm glad you found the analysis helpful! At the end of the day, systems generate probabilities that things happen and create incentives that nudge player behavior. I think Knave's probabilities and nudging are close enough to correct that folks probably won't have a bad time, especially if they're *polite* players (ie, people who don't lug around carts full of clubs to power attack with).
Re: Pathfinder 2e
I've played *a lot* of pf2e, and I think the game is good at what it's trying to do (set up tactical combat-as-sport situations).
There's a few weird parts of the design - namely that the balance is so tight that fighting monsters outside of your power range is a blow out on either side and that is tends to be a very bad idea to use consumables instead of selling them to buy your expected upgrades (weapon/armor runes mostly).
There's no good morale rules, and due to the aforementioned tight balancing, if monsters ever gang up and merge two medium encounters into an extreme encounter, it's over.
A lot of the spell and feat options are huge traps, but I think that'll happen in any game with that many much build choice bloat.
On the other side, the modules are *not good*. Paizo is open that they create modules to be read, not to be actually run, and a huge percentage of the people buying their modules are buying them like an adventure book. As such, they're *written* to be fun to read as an adventure book. They'll foreshadow bad guys and then surprisingly reveal them in later installations (a reader being in suspense is fun, a GM being in suspense is a nightmare). The read-aloud commits all of the sins (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/48312/roleplaying-games/gm-dont-list-13-boxed-text-pitfalls) the game system runs on killing-stuff-for-xp, which means that it becomes optimal to try to clear every room of every monster. The game's healing system makes it so that everyone is at full health all the time, which means that every encounter has to challenge a party at full health or it's pointless, which means attrition is hard. The modules tend to not include wandering monsters, so the dungeons feel very lifeless.
That said, it's a great system if you're interested in build optimization - lots of fun to be had there
This is a cracking analysis. I share your dismay about Knave not being a complete and self-contained game; in the first edition, since it was seven pages long, I guess there was MAYBE some excuse for that, in theory, but in this new edition it seems completely indefensible on every level.
I saw Knave 1e as a sort of accessory to BX. It doesn't even try to be a full game, rather, it serves as a sort of user-facing front end for BX's backend systems. It certainly *felt* like Knave 2e was trying to grow from this but had a hard time doing so.
This is a fine article, rich, savoury, and I too have noticed hazard dice and their inherent wretchedness. It is great to see someone go through the proofs. Keep it up!
In one of your previous posts (sometime in August last year, something about wealth and choice?), you seemed to have a more positive view on some of Knave 2e's design than you do in this analysis. What led to the change, if there was one? Have you played more Knave 2e since August? Something else?
* I still appreciate Knave's grouping of items on a design level, just ended up disagreeing with the size of the buckets and what goes in the buckets. 5g per arrow feels really punishing and 100g per 2h sword feels really punishing; you're effectively paying 5g per attack (since melee weapons last ~20 swings).
* On a personal level, I did a lot more reading into TTRPG design, and a lot more in-depth reading of the Knave mechanics. I tested out, at the table, the hazard dice and simulated out the math for the rest of the stuff (which I had only thought about superficially).
You did a superb job analyzing Knave's design. Your methods and style are miles ahead of almost everyone else writing about RPG design. After reading this Knave entry, I spent the rest of the night reading the rest of your stuff. Your analysis of Hole In The Oak and Black Wyrm are equally impressive.
I hope you'll keep writing about RPGs because you're extremely good at it. ;)
I really like this break down. Well done! I'd be curious what a dolmenwood breakdown would look like, though I imagine that it would be a ton of work.
Hey Colton! Thanks for stopping by and re-sharing <3
> I'd be curious what a dolmenwood breakdown would look like
I think it'll be ~2 years minimum, but i'll do it eventually. I'm playtesting my system as I wait for the physical dolmenwood books to ship. After it ships, I'll run a campaign, and *then* I'll do a review. In the meantime, I wrote about OSE in depth: https://rancourt.substack.com/p/review-old-school-essentials and most of what's there should apply.
Also, someone else in these comments was asking about dolmenwood, and I replied with some impressions:
- I like the standardization on roll higher is better
- I like the revamped thief skills
- I find the hexes hard to run off the page
- the saving throw renames are good
- listing three options for encumbrance is kludge
- the explicit callout for narrative interaction is really nice
- the new undead turning rules are elegant
- the jump rules are weird
- i'm not in love with the overland travel rules
- optionality on what happens when there's an initiative tie is awkward. pick one!
- redefining engaged to require that one side has already made an attack is a *big* change that i don't see anyone talking about. means you can run right past someone
- the rules introduce ambiguity into the action sequence. it's now unclear whether all actors of a side need to move before any can missile, or if the sequence just applies to individual (ie, do alice and bob both need to move before either can shoot, or can alice move then shoot and then bob moves?)
- making it so that you don't need to declare fighting withdrawals is a big change that i don't see people talk about (only retreats need to be declared)
- no guidance on situational modifiers to morale is weird
- attacking with two weapons being a whole extra attack (at -2/-4) is very big
- introduction of "charge" with only a -1 AC penalty is a big increase to melee characters
- the getting lost rules are (as always) suspect
- random wilderness encounter charts look good
- survival rules don't feel interesting to me / worth spending time on to me
- the hex and city content is inspired
- they leylines and overall hexcrawl design is fantastic
- splitting up the treasure types into coins, riches, and magic seems dumb (now i'm creating generators for 3 treasure types intead of 1 <_<)
- the new spell list is good
- pricing the magic items is so helpful
- not having any guidance on equipment / magic item availability is annoying
- having actually defined sages with already-established areas of research is so nice. no one seems to do this by the book but dolmenwood does
- i love the huge list of rumors
- love the index
- love the pronunciation guide
----
this is just highlights and doesn't go fully in to the mechanism design or talk about references, layout, editing mistakes, etc but I think it's a good overview
Hello Beau. I've just discovered your blog, read the excellent Black Wyrm analysis, review is too weak to describe that epic. Now I'm working my way through this one. I assume there will be a test. Anyway, for Knave 2e Relic Magic, my understanding is that the PCs accumulate relics by completing missions for divine or demonic patrons. Once they have these relics they can have as many active blessings as they have relics, up to their CHA, as long as they remain in good standing with the issuing patrons. They can choose which blessings are active each morning.
For example. Brother Thomas visits the shrine of St Agnes the Truthful. Agnes visits him in a vision and commands him to carry her image, an icon pendant, and tell no lies for a month. Thomas successfully completes this mission and returns to the shrine to be judged and presents the icon pendant for blessing. Agnes blesses his pendant with the power to detect lies and it becomes a relic. This blessing is similar in power to Spell 91, Truth Sense, but always usable while active. As long as Brother Thomas continues to bear the relic pendant, and remains truthful himself, he retains the active blessing to detect lies when he hears them. For a year Thomas bears the pendant relic and tells no lies. He reveals many falsehoods in others and donates a pair of fine silver candlesticks to the shrine. St Agnes shows her pleasure in her trusted servant by extending his blessing. The relic now additionally gives him the power to understand all words spoken in his presence. Some time later Thomas is forced to tell a lie, losing his good standing with St Agnes, and his blessings no longer function. He returns to St Agnes' shrine and asks forgiveness. Agness demands that he find and bring to justice a thief who has stolen from one of her worshipers. Thomas investigates the crime, finds the thief and hands them over to the magistrate for punishment. The saint then forgives Thomas his former transgression and restores the blessings to his relic pendant as long as remains truthful.
I quite like the way this works. There isn't much in the way of mechanical guidance, but it could be used to create a very specific set of tailored powers, and responsibilities, for cleric or paladin style characters.
Howdy Trev! Thanks for stopping by and I'm happy to hear you're enjoying the content :D
> I've just discovered your blog, read the excellent Black Wyrm analysis, review is too weak to describe that epic.
I get a good private chuckle out of the intentional understatement in the post titles :D. It's like the opposite of youtube clickbait
> Anyway, for Knave 2e Relic Magic
Okay, reading your example alongside the rules makes it make way more sense. I'll edit the post to include your example. Thanks!
Great, I approve of your deliberate understatement. I'm also glad my example helped.
Only partway through the post (lots of words!) but I love the worked out example of how bananas the Hazard Die mechanic actually is at the table. Like many things in the "rules light" corner of the OSR, it seems fun and exciting at first glance but often ends up not being all that well thought out.
> Only partway through the post (lots of words!) but I love the worked out example of how bananas the Hazard Die mechanic actually is at the table.
Thanks! I think worked examples are *very powerful* and that you can frequently save yourself tons of work/grief by demonstrating an idea completely rather than liking it's rough shape. The same thing happens in the finance world - you might have a great idea for a trade, and it's *directionally sound* but when you do the napkin math it doesn't have legs.
Test stuff! Even if it's just by yourself! Science!
> Like many things in the "rules light" corner of the OSR, it seems fun and exciting at first glance but often ends up not being all that well thought out.
Totally. It runs into a common problem where the audience *isn't GMs or players* it's collectors and many of the authors are *also not players*. So you have non-players writing TTRPG-shaped materials for other non-players. It *looks* like a TTRPG, but would have a very hard time being actually played as one.
I've also run into the exact same problem on the very-crunchy (GURPS) side of things, where you have this whole community of people that are interested in accuracy/detail at any cost, and you end up with a totally unplayable "game". See the "Journey" section of https://rancourt.substack.com/p/review-hall-of-judgment for an example.
After decades in the hobby, my views and interests about where the next fertile field of RPG design center around scenario design, not game or system design. If a new RPG doesn't include a sample scenario, I assume the author doesn't understand their design well enough to publish it at all. This goes double for RPGs that have GM advice sections rather than a published scenario. It goes *triple* for RPGs that publish advice on how to design or present scenarios whose subsequent, published scenarios don't hew to that advice.
> If a new RPG doesn't include a sample scenario, I assume the author doesn't understand their design well enough to publish it at all. This goes double for RPGs that have GM advice sections rather than a published scenario. It goes *triple* for RPGs that publish advice on how to design or present scenarios whose subsequent, published scenarios don't hew to that advice.
I think that's a big part of what's so compelling about mothership, OSE, and Into the Odd. The in-house adventures are very-well done and keep very close to their proposed structures.
On the other hand! Something I find endlessly entertaining about Knave is that, while Willowby Hall is a great adventure, check out Elias Fenwick's stat block (p14 of Willowby Hall v1.3).
For spells, the text lists: Read Languages, Read Magic, Phantasmal Force, Mirror Image, Fly.
Read Languages, Read Magic, Phantasmal Force, and Fly are not defined in either Knave 1e or Knave 2e. Mirror Image is defined, but just says "INT illusory copies of you, under your control, appear." Additionally, Knave spells are based on the caster's INT, yet Elias does not have an INT listed in his stat block.
So like, what are we doing here? How did this happen?
I had Mothership in mind in the triple denunciation, when I decried lapses in both design and presentation. Tuesday Knight garners a lot of praise for publishing scenarios that jettisons the taxonomy and structures of the core book.
Steps 5-8 of "Prepare Your First Session" in Mothership's core book (pgs. 8-17, essentially) unfold a very handy scaffolding for structuring and *presenting* information: the TOMBS cycle, "Survive, Solve, or Save", Questions/Puzzles/Answers, and the three questions that define NPCs. In the first-party scenarios I've looked at, none of these structures are plainly presented. As a new Mothership GM, I'd be looking for these structures and heuristics to anchor me when I begin to prep a new scenario. The corebook tells me that the best Mothership scenarios have TOMBS, the most interesting NPCs have answers for three specific questions, that I will be faced with sacrificing Survive, Solve, or Save. Why aren't TKG's own scenarios relying on their core book's frameworks? Why aren't I literally seeing a TOMBS section (or the scenario divided into the five TOMBS acts), NPC stat blocks with the three questions and their answers, or obstacles or challenges encapsulated by a Questions/Puzzles/Answers format?
As for that Willowy Hall tidbit, that's hilarious and exactly what reinforces your point about "RPG-shaped objects." (I refuse to use "TTRPG" as the acronym. We were here first! Let the CRPGs use the distorted acronym!)
I went through and checked the mothership advice again. The bit on creating NPCs is good!
* What do they think with? (their brain? their wallet? their fists?)
* What do they want? (smart[1] goals are more game-ready)
* How do the players interact with them? Are the powerful or powerless? Are they helpful or unhelpful?
Then, I went through some examples of their NPC writeups. Here's Indyl:
> Runs The Ecstasy. Tall and graceful. Staunchly protective of their workers. Covered in esoteric motion-tattoos. Indyl’s personal bodyguards, the Seraphs of Virtue, are highly skilled assassins with an 85% clearance rate and can be hired for 2mcr/target.
It's totally unclear what the answers to those questions are! At best we get "what do they want?" but instead of being specific it's vague.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria
> I had Mothership in mind in the triple denunciation, when I decried lapses in both design and presentation. Tuesday Knight garners a lot of praise for publishing scenarios that jettisons the taxonomy and structures of the core book.
> Steps 5-8 of "Prepare Your First Session" in Mothership's core book (pgs. 8-17, essentially) unfold a very handy scaffolding for structuring and *presenting* information: the TOMBS cycle, "Survive, Solve, or Save", Questions/Puzzles/Answers, and the three questions that define NPCs. In the first-party scenarios I've looked at, none of these structures are plainly presented. As a new Mothership GM, I'd be looking for these structures and heuristics to anchor me when I begin to prep a new scenario. The corebook tells me that the best Mothership scenarios have TOMBS, the most interesting NPCs have answers for three specific questions, that I will be faced with sacrificing Survive, Solve, or Save. Why aren't TKG's own scenarios relying on their core book's frameworks? Why aren't I literally seeing a TOMBS section (or the scenario divided into the five TOMBS acts), NPC stat blocks with the three questions and their answers, or obstacles or challenges encapsulated by a Questions/Puzzles/Answers format?
Woah! I take it back! This is what I get for commenting on a system/module from a first pass, rather than from prepping/running it :D
> I refuse to use "TTRPG" as the acronym. We were here first! Let the CRPGs use the distorted acronym!
Yeah! Tell em!
Mothership's scenarios (among others) helped to precipitate my current stance on this stuff. Published scenarios afford less space for RPG designers to hide. Can the designer practice what they preach? If the system is designed to produce a certain experience, can the designer instruct someone on how to actually produce the intended effect? Scenario design is where an RPG designer demonstrates that they've played their game enough to know what a stranger will need to make their game run smoothly. I contend that RPG scenario designers would be better served studying board game instruction booklets instead of fiction or other published scenarios.
I resonated so strongly with your blog because it demonstrates the sort of follow-through that should be apparent in system and scenario design. RPGs and their scenarios should read like they've been written by someone who plays the game (or has played the scenario). Sadly, too many RPG authors think of themselves as authors or "narrative designers" when they should be thinking of themselves as instructors. But you can't teach what you don't know!
Reading this, I'm shocked we don't see more analysis of the basic math behind ttrpg design. It seems like such a small task to run a few sims to make sure your game holds up numerically. A lucid critique, I must say
It sounds like a small task, but a lot of designers are only iterating on a few mechanics that thoroughly playtested. The rest of the mechanics are pulled from other sources. Very few games are built "from the ground up."
Also it sounds simple and it is in smaller doses, the issue is in aggrigate. Doing this kind of analysis isn't easy. And it doesn't always offer an easy fix.
> a lot of designers are only iterating on a few mechanics that thoroughly playtested.
For sure! How I'm choosing to interpret benton's comment is:
When a designer is creating a change or new mechanic for their game, it seems like it would be worth the time to do something akin to what I did for knave 2e's travel system. None of what I did there requires math or programming expertise, just a willingness to confront tedium. I'd love to be corrected, but it *really feels* like this didn't happen for the wilderness hazard dice, as doing what I did should have exposed how absurd it was immediately.
But yeah - totally agree that the interaction effects start to become really hard. When you make a bunch of changes to an interconnected system and have to start thinking about how they can be combined (like how power attack combines with sneak attack in knave), it gets out of hand
Yeah, I wasn't intending to be dismissive of his comment, just explanitory. For instance I'm working on a classless hack of WWN by Kevin Crawford.
I straight up do not have time to do this kind of analysis for every mechanic. Most of WWN does what I want. Its just the skills and magic systems that I want to adjust to fit my needs. Even with those, I'm likely to settle for "well it does what I want, and this probably won't make any money, so..."
A lot of design is like that. Now, Ben Milton is probably a little different since he (I dont think) is teaching as his day job anymore. I think he is a full time designer, and this kind of analysis will actually benefit his products. However for most TTRPG designers it's more of a "I ran this out of my garage while working two jobs" operation.
I was eyeing Knave as a system to get into and run a couple of generic OSR modules, but it seems I'll have to look somewhere else (LotFP? WWN? We'll see).
What a great piece, love me some detailed mechanistic analysis.
A point on getting lost during hex crawls: 5e had a procedure for this in Tomb of Annihilation's Chult hex crawl section. I thought it was quite good!
– GM makes a hidden DC15 (modified by weather, terrain, travel speed etc.) navigation/survival check for the party's navigator when the PCs start travelling in the morning.
– When they fail, GM rolls 1d6 to determine the destination hex and tells the PC at the end of the day that they did, in fact, not end up where they expected and got lost during the day
– They repeat the navigation check every morning. When they continue failing, they continue moving in a random direction, when they succeed, the GM reveals on which hex they ended up.
With a PC trained in survival, getting lost happened occasionally but not too often and the fact that you would re-orient yourself after a few days helped reduce frustration as you usually didn't actually backtrack but go towards a PoI anway.
Hey Jasper! Thanks for reading and I'm glad you enjoyed the post :D
re: 5e's hexcrawl procedure
That's very clear! As far as I can tell, it's unambiguous and seems like a thing that you could actually play out at the table in a non-confusing way. Thanks a ton for bringing that up ❤️
Thank you for this review. It was a very interesting read. You put a massively greater amount of thought into these design choices than I have when I was reading through it.
Can I ask what your TTRPG of preference is? Also, do you know of a rules lite system that does a good job of streamlining things and is still good for running older modules?
Thanks again.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
> Can I ask what your TTRPG of preference is?
I play with homebrewed BX, pulling in a lot of rules/procedures from ACKS. I wrote about my platonic ideal here: https://rancourt.substack.com/p/yet-another-retroclone and wrote about my home rules here: https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/1bn42ol/what_homebrew_rules_do_you_use_for_ose/kwi72vd/
> Also, do you know of a rules lite system that does a good job of streamlining things and is still good for running older modules?
If you want rules lite, I'd go with either cairn (https://cairnrpg.com/cairn-srd/) or into the odd; both run really well at the table.
Incredible stuff!!!
Any chance you're looking at doing a review of Dilmenwood?
Hey Mylon, glad you enjoyed and thanks for stopping by!
I'll write a Dolmenwood review eventually (I'd estimate ~2 years from now); looking forward to receiving the physical product and then playing it. After my group wraps up our campaign there, I'll give it a complete review. I currently have a review for incandescent grottoes on the backlog, and we're wrapping up winter's daughter today, so i'll write reviews for both of those, as well as the other modules we play during our Sovereign playtest.
For impressions:
- I like the standardization on roll higher is better
- I like the revamped thief skills
- I find the hexes hard to run off the page
- the saving throw renames are good
- listing three options for encumbrance is kludge
- the explicit callout for narrative interaction is really nice
- the new undead turning rules are elegant
- the jump rules are weird
- i'm not in love with the overland travel rules
- optionality on what happens when there's an initiative tie is awkward. pick one!
- redefining engaged to require that one side has already made an attack is a *big* change that i don't see anyone talking about. means you can run right past someone
- the rules introduce ambiguity into the action sequence. it's now unclear whether all actors of a side need to move before any can missile, or if the sequence just applies to individual (ie, do alice and bob both need to move before either can shoot, or can alice move then shoot and then bob moves?)
- making it so that you don't need to declare fighting withdrawals is a big change that i don't see people talk about (only retreats need to be declared)
- no guidance on situational modifiers to morale is weird
- attacking with two weapons being a whole extra attack (at -2/-4) is very big
- introduction of "charge" with only a -1 AC penalty is a big increase to melee characters
- the getting lost rules are (as always) suspect
- random wilderness encounter charts look good
- survival rules don't feel interesting to me / worth spending time on to me
- the hex and city content is inspired
- they leylines and overall hexcrawl design is fantastic
- splitting up the treasure types into coins, riches, and magic seems dumb (now i'm creating generators for 3 treasure types intead of 1 <_<)
- the new spell list is good
- pricing the magic items is so helpful
- not having any guidance on equipment / magic item availability is annoying
- having actually defined sages with already-established areas of research is so nice. no one seems to do this by the book but dolmenwood does
- i love the huge list of rumors
- love the index
- love the pronunciation guide
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All in all, i think dolmenwood is great. Gavin put in a huge amount of legwork that people aren't willing to do, and the content is polished, inspired, and gameable.
I love that your impressions are more detailed than many reviews!!! LoL
I always love seeing you review stuff and I'll read it even if I never have any intentions of playing the game just because it's such a great look at the mechanics. I can almost read your review and know what I want to steal from that system.
Hi Beau!
I just wanted to say I love this thorough perusal of Knave’s mechanics. It doesn’t look like Ben smoke-tested his material very well, and I imagine that that may have had something to do with a seeming lack of design focus. I kickstarted this, and even upon a cursory read-through of the system, found that it’d probably be a fun way to kill an evening as a one-off session from a campaign, rather than a game suited for long-form campaign play. I do appreciate, however, that the core of the game is simple enough to jury-rig it into something more usable. And at the very least, your review allows someone like myself to sit down and analyze the game for what it is rather than the clout surrounding it. Moreover, thanks to your number crunching, I could probably develop some house rules on my own that enable the game to run much more smoothly.
Really, really impressive analysis though. I would love to know your thoughts on Pathfinder 2e’s math: it seems consistent and usable, but I haven’t sat down to really review it as in-depth as this.
Take care!
Howdy Will, thanks for stopping by and I'm glad you found the analysis helpful! At the end of the day, systems generate probabilities that things happen and create incentives that nudge player behavior. I think Knave's probabilities and nudging are close enough to correct that folks probably won't have a bad time, especially if they're *polite* players (ie, people who don't lug around carts full of clubs to power attack with).
Re: Pathfinder 2e
I've played *a lot* of pf2e, and I think the game is good at what it's trying to do (set up tactical combat-as-sport situations).
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/skya36/how_does_pf2e_feel/hvppwok/
There's a few weird parts of the design - namely that the balance is so tight that fighting monsters outside of your power range is a blow out on either side and that is tends to be a very bad idea to use consumables instead of selling them to buy your expected upgrades (weapon/armor runes mostly).
There's no good morale rules, and due to the aforementioned tight balancing, if monsters ever gang up and merge two medium encounters into an extreme encounter, it's over.
A lot of the spell and feat options are huge traps, but I think that'll happen in any game with that many much build choice bloat.
On the other side, the modules are *not good*. Paizo is open that they create modules to be read, not to be actually run, and a huge percentage of the people buying their modules are buying them like an adventure book. As such, they're *written* to be fun to read as an adventure book. They'll foreshadow bad guys and then surprisingly reveal them in later installations (a reader being in suspense is fun, a GM being in suspense is a nightmare). The read-aloud commits all of the sins (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/48312/roleplaying-games/gm-dont-list-13-boxed-text-pitfalls) the game system runs on killing-stuff-for-xp, which means that it becomes optimal to try to clear every room of every monster. The game's healing system makes it so that everyone is at full health all the time, which means that every encounter has to challenge a party at full health or it's pointless, which means attrition is hard. The modules tend to not include wandering monsters, so the dungeons feel very lifeless.
That said, it's a great system if you're interested in build optimization - lots of fun to be had there
This is a cracking analysis. I share your dismay about Knave not being a complete and self-contained game; in the first edition, since it was seven pages long, I guess there was MAYBE some excuse for that, in theory, but in this new edition it seems completely indefensible on every level.
I saw Knave 1e as a sort of accessory to BX. It doesn't even try to be a full game, rather, it serves as a sort of user-facing front end for BX's backend systems. It certainly *felt* like Knave 2e was trying to grow from this but had a hard time doing so.
This is a fine article, rich, savoury, and I too have noticed hazard dice and their inherent wretchedness. It is great to see someone go through the proofs. Keep it up!
Hi, Beau,
In one of your previous posts (sometime in August last year, something about wealth and choice?), you seemed to have a more positive view on some of Knave 2e's design than you do in this analysis. What led to the change, if there was one? Have you played more Knave 2e since August? Something else?
Hey Dave, great question!
I can elaborate more if you'd like but the short version:
* I edited the economy section of the this post just now to reflect more of what I like about it, in line with the previous post (https://rancourt.substack.com/p/wealth-and-the-disintegration-of).
* I still appreciate Knave's grouping of items on a design level, just ended up disagreeing with the size of the buckets and what goes in the buckets. 5g per arrow feels really punishing and 100g per 2h sword feels really punishing; you're effectively paying 5g per attack (since melee weapons last ~20 swings).
* On a personal level, I did a lot more reading into TTRPG design, and a lot more in-depth reading of the Knave mechanics. I tested out, at the table, the hazard dice and simulated out the math for the rest of the stuff (which I had only thought about superficially).
Thanks for the reply. That all makes sense to me.
You did a superb job analyzing Knave's design. Your methods and style are miles ahead of almost everyone else writing about RPG design. After reading this Knave entry, I spent the rest of the night reading the rest of your stuff. Your analysis of Hole In The Oak and Black Wyrm are equally impressive.
I hope you'll keep writing about RPGs because you're extremely good at it. ;)
Wow, that's extremely high praise! Thanks so much, and hopefully you continue to enjoy my work ❤️