Navigation Games

Dungeons & Dragons began as a game about exploring mazes, trying not to get lost as you navigate spaces with complicated layouts. At some point, these conventions fell to the wayside. The focus of dungeoncrawling shifted to other forms of engagement. Even key luminaries of the dungeoncrawl tradition, like my good friend Josh, openly advocate for removing this once-foundational cornerstone of the genre from your gameplay, encouraging you to simply give your players the map so they never have to experience what was once the main challenge of dungeoncrawling!

Similarly, other designers advocate dungeoncrawls where there's nothing to navigate in the first place. Sometimes that means strictly linear layouts, like a Five Room Dungeon. Other times it means abstracting the layout into a skill challenge, depthcrawl, or other mechanical contrivances. This isn't an invalid option, but it does sacrifice the dungeoncrawl experience in favor of merely evoking the aesthetics of dungeoncrawling.

Not all forms of gameplay appeal to all gamers, and that's perfectly fine. But dungeon-mapping gameplay has become so widely misunderstood and maligned that countless gamers have never even had a chance to experience it for themselves.

I'm here to explain the appeal of this playstyle, why almost everyone gets it wrong, and how to actually do it correctly.

Broken Hearted

"Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot."

You have likely seen or been recommended the newest episode of Quinns Quest, in which Quintin Smith finally makes his long-awaited foray into the OSR by reviewing Mythic Bastionland, the latest game by Chris McDowall.

(Despite the fact that one of his first reviews was of Mothership, which is also an OSR game, but I guess people just forget that? Discourse is dumb)

His review is very positive, and reception to the review has likewise been very positive. Yay! But also, he's gotten a bit of shit for this snippet near the beginning:

I'm not here to dunk on Quinns. But this moment inspired me to write about something that's been percolating in my mind for the last year or so, as I feel like I've heard similar sentiments more and more frequently. He's just the unlucky voice in the chorus who's easiest to direct these feelings at.

(But seriously, Quinns. Expensive? That's one of your complaints about the OSR? Cairn is literally free)

Defeat, Not Death

Here's a course-correction that I wish had happened a decade ago. It's an idea surrounding the OSR that I wouldn't call a misconception, exactly, but is definitely missing out on the good stuff.

In short, I think there's an over-emphasis on deadly consequences, both in the eyes of the OSR's supporters and its detractors. The two ideas are treated as nearly synonymous, which creates bad expectations. Tons of folks who would enjoy this playstyle are turned off by it because everyone tells them how deadly it is. Meanwhile, other folks who seek it out specifically in search of grisly blood-and-guts might be disappointed.

I want us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture here. There's more to life than not being alive.

My dumb labels are better than your dumb labels

Even though the OSR as a living movement is largely stagnant, there's more folks being attracted to it than ever before. A consequence of that has been a shift in how people discuss and label things. I'm not trying to talk trash about Johnny-come-latelies or anything. It's exciting to have so much interest in this playstyle. But I think it's fair to say that they bring a bit of an outsider perspective that's lacking the context of where and how this play culture was born and developed.

I think that, even to this day, the first thing you learn about the OSR is that nobody knows what "OSR" means. But honestly, there arose a pretty solid framework relatively early on that I think made discussion a lot easier.

The early OSR was dominated by the "Revivalists," folks mostly just playing TSR editions of D&D or perhaps retroclones (and sometimes paraclones) of those editions. OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, etc. These folks were a lot more devoted to the TSR adventures like Keep on the Borderlands and are the most likely to put up a spirited defense of THAC0.

At some point there was a shift towards the "Renaissance," folks applying iterative design to old-school ideas to create new and innovative games. Largely the same playstyle, but oftentimes more slick and smooth and maybe easier to read and teach. GLOG, The Black Hack, Maze Rats, Into the Odd, ICRPG, etc.

There's arguably a third interpretation, the OSR as "Revolution." Rather than describing an abstract philosophy towards gaming, this refers to OSR as a social phenomenon. Get a movement going, write everything down for posterity, get a name, brand your products with the term (and maybe a cool OSR logo?), actively campaign for ENnie awards, try to influence name-brand D&D. With this came some embarrassing drama, cults of personality, and a splintering into countless subfactions. In truth, the "Revolution" isn't really a third interpretation, but rather a separate axis that those involved in the OSR had widely varying levels of interest in.

All of that seems to still make perfect sense to me. If anything, I seem to recall a general feeling that the Renaissance crowd was definitely where the OSR's momentum was found, whereas the Revivalists were being retroactively characterized as merely a continuation of something that had already long existed (what would now be called "Classical").

Skip ahead 10+ years and now I see a bunch of AD&D fanboys hijacking the term, claiming that the Revivalists are the only true OSR, while others instead retroactively apply terms like "NSR" onto everything that came out of the Renaissance crowd (despite them predating it by many years). I can't imagine how incomprehensible a lot of the old blogosphere must be to anyone coming into the conversation now, especially when they keep seeing the term "new school" frequently being used to refer to games like D&D 4E and Pathfinder.

It would almost be like if I coined a new term to refer to a new movement of games, "Powered by the Armageddon" or just "PbtA" for short, completely unrelated to Powered by the Apocalypse, and it somehow caught on, and started even being retroactively applied to games made 5+ years ago. Wouldn't that make talking about RPGs and reading old threads super annoying?

Maybe I'm just old and cranky.

-Dwiz

Slush Pile

All the cool bloggers are into slushposting. I think it was started by Dan over at Throne of Salt? He occasionally does this thing where he takes all the unfinished posts in his drafts folder and just throws them together into a big messy post as a way of cleaning up. Personally, I hate admitting defeat. Some of my most-viewed posts of all time spent 6+ months in my drafts folder, slowly cultivating a rich and nutritious wordcount like a fine cheese.

But my drafts folder has 70+ unfinished posts in it right now and even I have to admit that a lot of this is garbage. So I'm gritting my teeth and dumping some of those un-ripened thoughts here for the curious to read. Think of it as a low-quality follow-up to my Potpourri post. I doubt many people will be interested in this, but maybe it'll give me peace of mind.

Here are five abandoned ideas that I have deemed unworthy of a blog post, but still worth sharing for my true fans. I'm going to mimic the format recently used by Prismatic Wasteland, where I moreso describe the post rather than actually write some brief version of it. Where I have some text worth salvaging, I'll also quote it.

Brave, Final Edition

Here is a link to my hack of Ben Milton's minimalist RPG, Knave 1E. Here is the word document version. You can download this and then edit the text directly. This game was made using two free fonts (Sebaldus-Gotisch and Crimson Text). You'll want to install those so the formatting is retained in the document version. Just like the original, I recommend you print it out. Finally, here is a character sheet for it. If you want the original diagrams.net file to tinker with, you can copy it from this.

I started working on this in early 2019. It began, more or less, as just the houserules I found myself adding to Knave as I played it. Like many folks, I basically never run any game completely by the book. In time, I added more and more of my own content. It grew ambitious. And clunky. And generally kinda bad. I haven't touched Brave since mid 2021. What started as a break from the project turned into a terrible realization that I was out of my depth and had been making bad mistakes built upon worse mistakes.

But Brave still gets linked to a lot online. In nearly any conversation about Knave hacks, it gets brought up. So as long as people out there are looking for a version of this game that has my special touch on it, I still want to offer this. This has been streamlined to just the simplest, cleanest, and best modifications I've made to the game. Steal as much or as little from it as you like. I expect most folks have moved on to Knave 2E anyway. I'd also recommend Cairn or Errant. And keep an eye out for His Majesty the Worm when it releases.

As for the rest of my work... I'll revisit it at some point down the road. There's some interesting design that happened along the way. It would be a shame to let the good bits go to waste. I'll sift through the wreckage at some point, pick out the stuff worth salvaging, and figure out what I can do with it later. I'll keep everything up on my blog for posterity, but I don't recommend anyone bother with it.

Here is a list of differences between Brave and Knave 1E:

The Genres the OSR Can't Do

If you only ever listened to annoying AD&D fanboys, you might think that the OSR is strictly about crawling through big megadungeons as sword and sorcery murderhobos. But no community should be defined by its worst gatekeepers. The very fact that they suggest the OSR to be anything other than a manufactured revisionist narrative is reason enough for them to be suspect. To me, the OSR is an enduring illusion in large part because it's a very flexible culture of play. And I feel that despite its reputation for being notoriously difficult to define, "old school play" is still pretty cohesive and compelling.

I usually find myself on the side arguing for an expansive definition. "Renaissance," not "revival." The most important non-D&D game in the OSR lineage is Traveller and its relatives, and indeed, moderately-hard sci fi is a cornerstone genre in this space. So too are noir / investigation games and horror games. The genres often get blended together (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Mothership, Electric Bastionland, Esoteric Enterprises, and Liminal Horror come to mind) but they just as often remain separate! Perhaps these four genres are simply the cornerstones of all RPGs. The most robust and reliable ones you can emulate in nearly any play culture. Remember, Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness have historically been the biggest serious competitors to D&D globally.

Despite this, I've recently been thinking about some things that have got me feeling out the borders of what can count as "OSR." This is a rare occasion when I'll be the one standing guard at the gate. But more interesting than that, I aim to discuss why these outsider genres can still be very exciting anyway for someone with OSR-inclinations like myself, even if they're "incompatible" with my default preferences.

The Forgotten Fire Bird of Castle Greyhawk

I haven't blogged in awhile, but I've still been spending a lot of my time on D&D-related things. I recently had an experience I simply have to share. I got a hold of some obscure and fascinating records from early TSR, honest-to-goodness RPG buried treasure.

Behold, the Alicanto, AKA Gary Gygax's "Dresden Bird":

Allow me to elaborate.

Not All Balance is the Same

Artist Credit: Wayne Reynolds

This is a spiritual sequel to a previous post about crunch. Everyone uses the word "balance" in reference to something in RPGs but they frequently use it to refer to different things. Sometimes completely unrelated things. And yet it's become intensely emotionally-charged despite being, essentially, a non-word.

So while you very likely have strong opinions about this word, it might be useful to take a closer look. In this article, I'm going to examine six ways that the word "balance" commonly comes up when discussing RPGs, and why it's important to recognize that they are indeed distinct.

As usual, I will mostly be making reference to ol' D&D as my primary example, but don't mistake that for meaning that this only carries relevance to D&D alone. All kinds of gaming philosophies might benefit from a little bit of thought about these six different meanings for the word "balance," even if there are some that you can safely dismiss. So yeah, balance matters to other crunchy games like GURPS and Lancer and Genesys-system stuff of course, but it can also come up in your rules-lite games, story games, FKR games, lyric games, and so on. If you want to design a Star Wars game and you aren't sure about how to handle the Force, or if you're going to be running a Call and/or Trail of Cthulhu and are crafting a mystery for your investigators, or you're making a random mutation table for a Mothership adventure you're writing, then there's likely something in this post that you should be thinking about. It just might never have occurred to you before because you're only ever thinking of one possible definition out of many.

Traits of the Mythic Underworld

The "Mythic Underworld" is a term popular in the OSR that was (probably) coined by Trent Smith and then popularized through an essay by Jason Cone in Philotomy's Musings. Cone argued that the rules of OD&D can be interpreted to suggest that the "dungeons" that adventurers delve into aren't really to be understood as real, logical spaces created by normal people or natural processes. Rather, they're more like a surreal, dreamlike, and hostile realm that runs on its own twisted logic, which might be inconsistent. It gives the referee some leeway to make a contrived, game-y, "funhouse" dungeon instead of stressing about accuracy or rationality.

Much of what Cone describes are just traits of megadungeons, or even simply dungeons in general. Things like, "non-linear pathways" and "lots of connections between levels" aren't really mythic, they're just good level design. So, extracting from his original writings on the matter, here are the traits he identifies that are actually mythic (in my view):

1. It's so large it might have infinite levels.
2. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it is.
3. Its layout may change over time.
4. Doors are locked/stuck for PCs by default, but automatically swing open for monsters.
5. Related, it is shrouded in darkness, but all monsters have infravision.
• It should be noted that when a monster is persuaded to join the party, they lose these two privileges! This strongly suggests that the space itself is intentionally rewriting its own rules to oppose the players.
6. Torches and whatnot might be randomly blown out by a strong gust of wind, despite the fact that you're deep underground in, like, a tomb or something.

And... that's it. I always thought this idea was much cooler in theory than in reality. I agree with Cone that this is really the only reasonable way to interpret the rules, but I always wanted there to be more. So I've compiled some:

1. Party incurs fatigue/stress the longer they spend in the dungeon (taken from Basic D&D).
2. Rations spoil once you enter the dungeon (BECMI D&D, thanks to ktrey from d4caltrops.com)
3. When the players open treasure, monsters might pop out of the walls, generated from thin air (taken from the board game HeroQuest).
4. Monsters don't exist until the players first observe them. Thus, exploration should be slow and methodical or else the players will too quickly surround themselves in monsters (also taken from HeroQuest).
5. The monsters cannot set off traps (HeroQuest again but I wonder if this might be encoded in D&D somewhere in its history).
6. The scenery and room features attack you (countless haunted house media, but in this case I was inspired by the 2006 movie Monster House).
7. Stairs turn into ramps, doors start randomizing where they lead to, hallways become endless, secret doors appear and then disappear (no, I don't mean they become hidden again. I mean they stop existing), etc. (more haunted house shenanigans).
8. Weird M.C. Escher gravity rules.
9. Advanced Darkness.
10. Every hall keeps leading back into the same room no matter what, and it's full of horrible doppelgangers (the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks).
11. Doors to rooms that would overlap each other, doors into rather thin walls, windows to the outside world in an interior room, doors/windows/entrances moving which side of the room they’re on, etc. (the Overlook Hotel from The Shining).

It's a start. Now of course, I don't necessarily advocate only using the Mythic Underworld. I quite enjoy "reasonable," well thought-out dungeons. But if you're going to make a Lynchian funhouse, then you should commit. In the Mythic Underworld, the dungeon is a living organism and the PCs are an infection. It has its own natural immune system that wants to drive them out. For the PCs to feel as though they're fighting the environment itself, I think it needs to put up a better fight.

-Dwiz

Stranger Things and "Puzzle Monsters"

[This post will contain spoilers for Stranger Things up through season 4]

The best monsters are not merely a big sack of hit points you hack-n-slash your way through because of a random encounter table. No, they're something more. They have qualities possible only through the conceits of fantasy. They challenge your brain just as much as your stats and dice. They stick in the mind. They're not just a one-and-done encounter. They're grounded in the world and its rules, and can't be understood merely with numbers. And maybe most of all, they're robust enough that reckoning with them is the whole adventure, or at least could be the whole adventure.

A very popular piece of advice in the OSR is "Just Use Bears." The basic argument is that, "monsters which don't have elaborate special abilities could probably be represented sufficiently with the stat block of a bear, since the minutiae of individual stats rarely has a significant enough impact on a fight to be worth the trouble of always having a custom stat block prepared."

As practical advice, this is good. But in spirit, I feel like it's a concession. A failure. If you're using a monster that could be substituted with a bear, then maybe you shouldn't even have that monster at all. Monsters should be special. You could be running a better game where you never use that advice. Not because it's bad, but because you've made monsters good enough that the advice isn't applicable.

To illustrate what I'm calling "puzzle monsters," we're going to go through the monsters used in the Netflix show Stranger Things as well as some examples I've created for my own adventure scenarios. After that, I'll walk you through the steps I take to create a puzzle monster, and other considerations that help a lot in the creative process.

Potpourri

Artist Credit: Kieran Yanner

My blog output has been slow this year. Partially this is because I've started several very long posts that are each taking a while to finish, but mostly it's because I spend most of my time working now and have very little time left each day to do anything. I wanted to come up with something a bit smaller that could work as a good blog post to get out before the end of the month that isn't one of those huge posts, but I struggled. Everything I came up with was too small. So why not just offer all of them at once?

In this post you'll find seven really small RPG-related things I'd like to share which are all completely unrelated to one another. I hope the comments are chaos. They include:

1. An idea I had for a particular take on the "Grit vs Flesh" mechanic
2. A weird experimental PC I recently tried
3. Possibly the most famous example of the power of tactical infinity in RPGs
4. A world map I've slowly been working on
5. An idea I have for a new monster type to fit into the traditional D&D schema
6. How I would run a sandbox in a superhero game
7. Doppelgängers

Gritty Realism: Adventuring in Weeks, Not Days

Because apparently this is a 5E blog now, I'm going to talk about the Gritty Realism variant rule suggested in the DMG on page 267. But wait! Don't go! You know me better than that. Of course I'll find a way to make it relevant to you and your rules-lite artpunk post apocalyptic furry heartbreaker as well, since I know you don't play D&D 5E.

So there's a type of adventure scenario I like to call a "Die Hard plot." It's not a good name, but it's what I always think of. In the movie Die Hard, the whole ordeal takes place within a single evening. The movie almost happens in real time! It's a really jam-packed day. See also:

1. The Warriors
2. The Avengers (well, like 90% of it)
3. Night of the Living Dead
4. Clue
5. Dredd
6. The Goonies
7. Escape From New York
8. 24 (the TV show)

...and plenty of others. Now of course, lots of movies take place entirely within 1 day. But these ones here are specifically all movies that are a great model for D&D ADVENTURE! Sure, My Dinner With Andre takes place in one day, but that's because it's just a dinner conversation. These movies are set within a single day in spite of how much crazy shit happens within them.

Every movie on that list is great (and 24 is okay I guess), and you should steal from them occasionally. But the main appeal of Gritty Realism is that it affirms a simple truth: you can't run an entire campaign of just Die Hard plots. Or rather, I think you probably shouldn't.

I'd like to talk about this at length and help us all to appreciate this better.

Model United Nations: the Most Popular FKR Game

We don't actually have the numbers of how popular Model UN (MUN) is but we can reasonably guess there's as many as 180,000 people who participate in it just in the United States alone. It's played all around the world by students ranging from middle school up through university and has been around for many decades. And even if it turns out I'm totally wrong and the number of people playing Matrix Games actually outnumbers the people playing Model UN ten to one, the point is that Model UN has a Parks & Rec episode.

And yet I bet you don't know much about it. I bet you didn't know that it's an FKR game. And yes, it really is. Not in like a "you know, if you really think about it, it kinda fits the definition!" way or something cheeky like that. It's very straightforwardly an FKR game, and if more was known about its history (it's a bit murky tbh) then I strongly suspect we could probably trace its lineage back to the original Prussian kriegspiel games.

I have not written much about my experience with FKR games before. I've mentioned them here or there, and at least once have pissed off some of its fans. But I have actually spent many years using the FKR philosophy of play! Just not in the form I think that most people would imagine.

I've written about Model UN before so if you've read that post, you can skip this. But I decided to write all of this again for 2 reasons: 1) I think it needs another pass and I've written it better this time, and 2) I think it deserves a post of its own, independent of the context in which I wrote about it in that series. And I promise that if, after this article, it is clear that no one in the RPG community gives a shit about this then I'll shut up about it forever.

But if Model United Nations is one of those things you've always been vaguely aware of from pop culture or the club fair at your high school but you never really gave it much thought, then let me tell you all about it and how cool it is.

A rough outline of this post (with each of these containing some sub-sections):

1. What is Model United Nations?
2. The "mechanics" of how it works
3. What to take away from this for RPG stuff
4. Some fun stories where I gush indulgently

Iterative Design

If you work in any form of engineering then this is probably a familiar idea. I just want to talk about how valuable I find it to be when it comes to RPG design. I've always really liked that the standard in RPGs is to have new "editions", rather than straight-up sequels. And because it is, to greatly generalize, a fairly scrappy and accessible hobby, we get to do lots of communal collaboration. We build on each others' work. We actively encourage the theft of good ideas (within the bounds of intellectual property rights). Most RPGs list their "Rule 0" as being something along the lines of "the GM can and should ignore or change any part of the game they want to if they judge it best for their group." It's like you have a game designer at every table.

The problem is that a lot of folks are pretty amateur as game designers. The single biggest failing, I think, comes from this very gap: not enough would-be designers are engaging with iterative design.

You look at what's come before and you use it as a basis for what you'll create anew. You examine the previous version to understand its design, paying attention to the context which created it and asking yourself whether or not those same factors remain relevant. And at the very least, the common corollary to that rule 0 is this: "a good GM will first make an effort to understand the original rule's purpose before deciding to change it." All-too-often ignored wisdom.

I especially find this to be common in two cases: 1) people complaining about design they don't understand, and 2) people making poorly thought-out houserules. Let's talk about some examples.

The New School, the Old School, and 5th Edition D&D

This was easily the funniest picture I found for "Edition Wars"

People have short memories.

Actually, that's only part of it. People also need tribalism, and tribalism needs enemies. Also, lots of people are new to the hobby, so maybe they genuinely don't know.

I frequent a lot of OSR spaces online, and while it's far from a consensus, one of the most pervasive sentiments among this community is that 5E D&D is the devil. It's representative of all things we old schoolers hate in gaming, and is the ultimate metric to contrast one's own game against if you want to appeal to this crowd. At this point, "5E" has literally become shorthand for "new school" in, seemingly, most old schoolers' vocabularies.

Which is funny, because I was there when 5E came out in 2014, and at the time it was being called "old school." It was a "return to form" for the franchise. "The legacy edition." A victory for the OSR, who had finally conquered the mainstream. It pulled back many of the trends of 3rd and 4th edition D&D and abandoned the way of the new school in favor of trends that had been started by the grognards years before. It openly embraced many of the specific Zen moments from Matt Finch's A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. Zak S, who got credited in the book as a consultant, went parading around GenCon with his entourage wearing shirts saying "Zak S saved D&D."

Don't believe me? Behold, some archaeology:

The Only Two Enemies You'll Ever Need

I have two types of enemies that I fall back on if I don't have something interesting or appropriate prepared:

A. Powerful but dumb

B. Weak but cunning

Between those two types, you can create nearly every type of OSR creature challenge you'll ever need. The key is that both types tell you about how the enemy thinks, which is the main thing the PCs must interact with. When you look at a big fancy statblock for some monster from a new school "Combat as Sport" game, you don't have any idea how it thinks. Well, pick one of these two.

Type A Enemy: Powerful But Dumb

I had a party of six different level 1 knaves all on a quest to go hunt down a troll. They were terrified, and the further they got into this quest, the more reasons they discovered to be terrified. The troll has a ton of HP and decent AC, does a lot of damage with a basic attack, but most importantly, is really fucking strong. A player tried chasing it down alone and got a tree thrown at him, shattering his arm. When the party tracked the troll down to its lair, they watched it being awoken by a damn fool NPC knave, whose spine was then compressed like an accordion.

But the players killed the troll with not a single tree thrown at them this time. Why's that? Because they talked to it, and they lied, and they made it angry, and they kept distracting it, and so on. They did everything they could to play on how dumb it was. My rule of thumb for a Type A enemy is this: any type of trickery the players attempt against it will succeed by default.

Type B Enemy: Weak But Cunning

The most frequent candidate I use for this type are NPC knaves, because I like to show the players a dark reflection of themselves. Other common choices are any kind of monstrous humanoid, such as frog folk or hobgoblins. The key is that each individual member is either roughly as powerful as a PC, or less.

In this example, I had three different level 1 knaves enter a dungeon that had been set up as the HQ of a band of brigands. Long story short, they had worked their way into the center of the dungeon and had either killed or scared off each NPC they'd come across, funneling all of them towards one corner of the dungeon where their leader tried to coordinate a counterattack. There ended up being a standoff in two dungeon chambers with a closed door in between them. The players were desperately holding the door shut on their side, as were the NPCs. Neither realized that the other was not trying to barge in. But that gave both sides the chance to prepare a surprise attack.

The players lost. They were simply not as clever as the NPCs. When the door swung open, they saw a brigand training a musket towards the ground, and a gunpowder horn rolled to their feet. The gun shot and hit the horn while the door was simultaneously slammed shut. One of the PCs died in the explosion.

My rule of thumb for a Type B enemy is this: they play like an experienced, skilled player would in their position. Retreat, ambush, strength in numbers, leverage resources, and NEVER FIND THEMSELVES IN A FAIR FIGHT.

-Dwiz

Princess Mononoke and "DM-Prepared Plots" in Old School Games

Alternatively titled, "How to Have Your Cake and Eat it Too."

There is a commonly recognized dichotomy of gamers who like linear, "scene-based" games where the DM is a storyteller and has an epic and enchanting plot prepared in advance they're trying to deliver, versus games where the DM is a referee who impartially simulates an active world and hands the reigns off to the players to do whatever the hell they want. In the latter game, to the extent that there's a "story" or "plot" at all, it's usually one that emerges naturally and unplanned out of the consequences of the PCs' actions and how the world responds to them, but the point is that "player agency" is maintained above all else. In the former game, there's usually a much-needed Session 0 conversation where the DM convinces their players to try to "play ball" as often as possible so as not to "ruin the game," and typically as long as you're playing with reasonable people then you'll have a great time.

It's not actually as though all gamers fall strictly into one of these two types, but boy do these two types fight a lot and get very defensive.

There are essentially three main ways to think of this situation:

• Broke: DMs are/aren't storytellers and that's the only correct way to play
• (most sensible people recognize this is a childish take)
• Woke: There are many different playstyles that are all equally valid, and you should try to just figure out the one you prefer and then go find players who agree
• (this is what most sensible people settle on)
• Bespoke: A good DM can achieve a game that both keeps player agency perfectly intact and features a good amount of "emergent story" from the simulated world and has a DM-prepared plot that unfolds and wows the players with their storytelling prowess.

I am here to explain how. 

Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Brave 1.9: Tales of Sword and Sorcery

Hey! If you were linked here from elsewhere, this version is outdated. Please see here for the finished version of Brave

Click here to view version 1.9 of my RPG Brave. Here is the accompanying character sheet (it actually has 2 sheets on it since they're small), here is the dungeon control panel, here is the settlement sheet, here is the player version, and here is the village sheet. The total document is 19 pages including the cover art, which I recommend you print out (put the intro+table of contents on the inside front cover, facing the page that says "The Basics" as the header). This game uses the free fonts Garamond, Hamlet Tertia 18, and Black Castle MF. The cover illustration was done by me.

If you'd like the Word document to edit directly, you can find that here. You'll want to download those free fonts or else the formatting will be completely annihilated.

I have periodically updated the link on the side of this blog whenever several changes/additions accumulate, but I'm making a whole post about it this time because 1) this is the biggest single update to the game so far, and 2) it is (hopefully) the second-to-last update before the final version of the first core rulebook.

Why am I not waiting to post until the final update? Why isn't the title of this post "Brave 2.0: Electric Boogaloo"? At the end of this post, you'll see what content I haven't finished yet and I think you'll understand why that's going to take me a good amount of time. So no, my game isn't finished yet to my satisfaction, but it's finished enough to be a full game (more full than most old-school RPGs, even) and I just wanted to finally put it out there.

The rules probably speak for themselves just fine, but if you're interested in designer's notes then strap in. This whole week I'll be posting articles of design notes on each topic in the game, each pretty in-depth on my thinking and the intent behind each rule. Here's a list of what those posts will be covering, updated with links as they come out.

1. Various Rules (mostly stuff you find in the "Rules for Adventure" pages)
2. Items and Shopping
3. Alignment + Combat (they're both short)
4. Cohorts (sort of the "mass combat" rules)
5. Dungeons
6. Settlements

The rest of this post will explain the miscellaneous minor tweaks I made to Knave and then a list of the topics that are missing from this draft of the game (but are coming soon!).

Brave Class Hack Beta (again)

Picture is also a link to content

One of my most popular posts was the first Brave Class Hack, where I shared with the world my weird class system as well as the Knave, Warrior, Thief, and Cleric classes. I've made a lot of changes since then, including the addition of 3 more classes, so I figured it would be a fine time to update the world.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know, Brave is my personal hack of Ben Milton's Knave, which you can find the latest draft of linked on the sidebar of this blog as well as right here. If that link ever dies, it's because I forgot to return to this blog post to replace it. But the sidebar one should always be up to date.

Here is a link to the latest copy of the Brave: Enchiridion of Fates and Fortunes with some designer notes included. I also thought I might provide a preview below on each of the classes currently included, if you read below: