Brave Design Notes 1: Various Rules

Go to the master post

Art credit: Hal Foster

Brave is a hack of Ben Milton's Knave, an old-school adventure game toolkit without classes and a lot more emphasis on equipment. The earliest changes I made were miscellaneous tweaks and houserules I added as I would run Knave, but at this point I've bolted on several advanced play procedures. While Knave is optimized for a DIY "rulings over rules" style of play, I still felt it was valuable to write down many of those rulings that I've made over the years and codify them. One of the best parts of the original Knave were the designer's notes, but I've taken them out because I needed to make room for new stuff and I assume that anyone playing my game would already be familiar with the original version anyway. Instead, you get my blog.

These notes are written for version 1.9, which you can find on the sidebar of this blog or by clicking here. It may also be valuable to see the character sheet, which you can find two copies of here.

Advanced Darkness

Let’s do some more DIY D&D and hack the rules. I’m going to introduce to you my favorite and most important houserule: Advanced Darkness.

Overview

Why do we come up with houserules? Because there’s some kind of problem. Maybe not everyone sees it as a problem, but that’s oftentimes just because people have learned to live with it and be complacent with a deficiency that could be fixed.

How do we come up with houserules? We 1) identify the sources of the problems and 2) identify the results we would like to see instead. Creating a rule is creating the “cause” in a cause-and-effect relationship. In order to know what cause you should aim for, you need to know what effect you’re after.

What do we do with houserules? We test them out and explore their full implications. We look for vulnerabilities that could be exploited. We try to break them. We consider some unintended consequences. We try to think of ways it could interact with other game elements. We playtest it. We adapt it. We eventually figure out the best ruling possible. Maybe it’s a refined version of the houserule, or maybe its the RPG’s original ruling after all.