Running On Empty

Adventuring is tiring work, when you think about it. Traveling across wilderness after wasteland, slay beast foul and fantastic, saving the helpless and carting their lazy buts back to civilization, not to mention the loot. How can one forget the loot?! And it's not like it doesn't show up in the fiction either, I mean, dealing with being tired from walking is most of the page count of lord of the rings after all. 

But DnD and its ilk rarely have a good mechanic for this, or rather, not very usable ones. 3e had a pile of conditions, including fatigue and exhaustion that I'd always forget, and 5e has a downward spiral of exhaustion that I'd rather not remember, one that is so punishing that I can't hit the players with it too often or they'll not want to adventure at all. Besides, I usually play Knave, or my co-writers variant Brave, most of the time these days. 

The Differences in Mystara, Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (Part 2)

Picking up where we left off, we'll continue to identify all of the "greatest hits" of the three default campaign settings. We found Mystara, most associated with Basic D&D, to be a realm of exciting locations, potential for immortalized achievement, and waifus (furry and non-furry options available).

Greyhawk

In contrast, let's talk about Greyhawk, the default setting of AD&D and Gary's own creation. Perhaps my favorite official campaign setting, here are the standout qualities to me. I find this one to be the most distinct of the three. It's also, to me, the easiest to envision mechanical structures to reinforce its qualities through gameplay:

1. Sword and Sorcery, full stop. Gotta go hard in this direction. Magic is rare, powerful, and corrupting, morals and grey grey grey, people are selfish, there are no great and grand kingdoms anymore, etc.

• I think a lot of people still picture "sword and sorcery" involving deserts somehow because of Conan the Barbarian fighting desert snake cults and Dark Sun and Barsoom and, to an extend, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. When Lieber described the setting outside Lankhmar itself, he wrote, "think of Saracens, Arabs, Parthians, Assyrians even. They ride the camel and elephant, and use the bow extensively." In any case, while there are deserts in the Flaeness, you would have to be able to pretty extensively envision Sword and Sorcery without it. Which really just means...

Here There Be Dragons

A common misstep I see dungeon masters make, myself especially, is to put off their good ideas. They, or rather I take their craziest, most heroic adventures, monsters, dungeons what have you and plan to run them sometime down the road. For myself at least, there are several reasons for this, working together to make my campaigns somewhat less than they ought to be.

The first is the idea of a campaign progression, the idea that I start with small, mundane challenges before diving into the realm of the fantastic. This makes sense, on both a storytelling and gameplay level- you need to set up the world before the characters see its extremes, and you need appropriate challenges for low level adventurers. The problem is that I often overdue it, I’ve never run a liche, or a rakshasa, never ran an adventure in the lower planes, even though I’ve run more than one campaign that has lasted over a year. I don’t want to throw out my best stuff right away, and often never get to it. Especially since most of my campaigns don’t last more than a year.

The Differences in Mystara, Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (Part 1)

D&D is a chance to share a world with people. So after an adventure, you probably want your players to remember the setting it took place it. The experience of being transported to that world is usually one of the important takeaways DMs want to instill in their audience. But unless your players are completely new to all fantasy fiction entirely (e.g. no real exposure to things like elves, wizards, dragons, orcs, etc.) then the baseline assumptions of D&D’s “implied setting” aren’t going to have that impact you’re looking for. You have to go a step beyond to make them feel the world as an element of the story.

What Kind of Content I'll Actually Buy or Use

I'm writing this just as much for myself as for others. When thinking up whatever it is I want to write and publish, I try very hard to keep in mind the question of what other people would even want. I wonder how close it is to the kinds of things I myself want.

If you don't already watch the YouTube channel Questing Beast, then you should. There are other channels that also review RPG products, even ones that focus on OSR content, but they aren't as good as this one. Same guy (Ben Milton) who wrote Knave, in fact. Anyway, you'll greatly enjoyed perusing his video collection and seeing all the wild and crazy shit that he's reviewed. There's no shortage of fantastic content being made by creative individuals in this hobby. So what factors make the difference whether I'll spend my money or not?

BRAVE 1.0 - My Knave Hack

Here is a link to my custom mod for Ben Milton's minimalist RPG, Knave. [Edit] I've also now included the word document version. You can download this and then edit the text directly. It looks like if you don't have the fonts Ben picked out installed, you'll want those so the formatting is retained (Sebaldus-Gotisch and Crimson Text)
Just like the original, I recommend you print it out. Still just 7 pages, not too many changes. I anticipate editing it even more eventually, but this right here is the result of a fair amount of playtesting and changing what would work better for the folks I've played with.

The beginning lists the major additions, which include an adapted Death and Dismemberment ruleset, Patrick's Starvation rules from Veins of the Earth, my own Advanced Darkness, and then my own system for making leveling up a little bit more interesting. I also based healing rate on current level since every player I've had thought it was weird that you seem to get "worse" at healing the more experienced you are.

To make room for these, I took out all of the designer's notes. They were one of the best parts of the original Knave but if you're reading my version then you're probably already familiar with all of Ben's design choices.

I also changed a number of miscellaneous phrasing matters and small rules that, you may notice, bring the game slightly closer to 5E D&D than it was. Movement speed is 30'/round, an opposed check consists of both parties rolling, an attack roll must be greater than or equal to their Armor, renaming saving throws to Die Checks, etc. These help me and most of my players smooth over the transition between the two RPGs, especially since we usually go back and forth between them. One of the most annoying little hiccups in the game's flow is when someone accidentally makes reference to another game's terminology and then someone at the table who's never played that game says, "wait, what?" When 5E came out I kept accidentally saying "roll a Reflex/Fortitude/Will save" and my brand new players would get confused. It also means that all those passive little details in the rules that I'm really familiar with from 5E aren't wasted when switching to Knave for an evening.

The main reason I named this "Brave" is because, between Death and Dismemberment and my leveling system, this typically makes PCs much more powerful than in regular Knave. I mean, they're still just pathetic murder hobos compared to any D&D character, but it's all relative.


-Dwiz

Accomplishments-as-XP

This article is entirely spitballing based on things I’ve been watching, reading, and thinking about lately. So one of the most common elements in RPGs is the idea of gaining experience, leveling up, and improving at your stats. Where other elements have changed dramatically, this has been consistent in every edition of D&D and is present in almost all other TTRPGs I’ve ever heard of. When videogames took inspiration from D&D, this was the element that earned the moniker “RPG,” and to this day is the main reason we refer to Final Fantasy and similar games as “RPGs” even though they don’t really have many of the characteristics most of us would consider more important to defining the medium of “role playing.”