Knave 2e has 48 hours left on Kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/questingbeast/knave-rpg-second-edition?ref=d7ipc5 The Hazard System doc from Necropraxis: bit.ly/HazardSystem
So, I unfortunately missed your kickstarter for Knave 2e, and while I've only just come in contact with this system, I love it and I want a nice solid book of it. Is there any plans in the future for another print run or something? I would love to buy one.
I've used the Hazard die to run dungeon crawls since Necropraxis started using it in his campaign back in 2013 or so. It is a great way to allow for shorter sessions and retain the risks associated with exploration. The fears I see hear are the ones that always come up and come down to "what if it feels weird". It doesn't, not usually. More important this is a table top RPG mechanic ... meaning: 1) We accept some gamification to save time and mental effort. The hazard die (which works best with abstracted time, zonal movement, a strict encumbrance rules) is a way of simplifying and the mechanics and emphasizing the risk of room by room exploration. It does an efficient job at making exploration turns matter while saving time and referee mental load. Some players will feel a that it costs "realism", but like most complaints rooted in verisimilitude this usually translates to "I can't meta-game this aspect of play anymore". Where it's honest, it's a feeling that often fades quickly, just like the various simplification of RPG combat. 2) RPGs still have referees. If the die result feels especially incoherent you can either justify it in the setting or change it. A second torch result in a row can become a lantern result or a bad batch of torches. Multiple exhaustion events in a row could be bad air or one can start using a 3-events before rest/penalties. Systems like the hazard die can be adapted to your setting and table, either on an ad-hoc or house rule basis.
I think this is exactly the kind of clarification I needed around this mechanic, thank you! Nice to know my assumptions on how this works in practice match up with your real-world experience
I like the concept, but I might limit it to things that are genuinely out of the characters' control. Having torches just randomly go out, or rations suddenly disappear, seems a little unfair. I like the Shadowdark idea of tying expiration to real time, since that's something the players can exercise some control over (i.e. by not dawdling around).
I think the Shadow dark idea is incredibly stupid. Tying your torch light to real time makes absolutely no sense because the game isn't tied to real time. It's a terrible attempt to address an infrequent problem in an awful way.
@@dbretton I actually think that the torch idea is useful. It allows for a very visible pressure to keep moving, while also eliminating an arbitrary 'time' counter to track. I might even double down and use it for rolling encounters every real ten minutes (which lines up nicely with the d6 method here). During combat, the short time averages out with more hectic conditions and the need for some time to recover especially if you consider rounds as several exchanges instead of just one. Ultimately, if it is an infrequent problem, what's the harm in using real time?
@@adamdorris7104 I agree. Shadowdark's style of play is also very much linked to real time, contrary to what dbretton assumes. It's just that kind of game. Now for a game built around more high level tactical decision making, I'd use a different system. For example, I run a dungeon crawl that relies on old school rules of using dungeon turns and having the party relay their actions to me through a single player, the speaker. That kind of gameplay is meant to be more methodical, relying on wits and team cohesion. Shadowdark emulates that style of play but focuses on real-time drama with resource management and dangerous dungeons putting pressure on the real-time decision making. It's just a different kind of game, y'know?
I love how simple this is. Perfect for the already busy DM. It keeps play moving, and the timer clicking, without being another task to keep up with. Genius.
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It seems like a clean system, but it might cause weird results. If characters keep rolling the same number, for instance, a 3 in a Dungeon Turn, their torches go out every turn, or the opposite, if they never roll a 3, their torches last forever.
The obvious answer then, for the DM, is "okay, don't do that". The DM is the final arbitor of what happens. They can decide that if a result coming up repeatedly would just be unlikely, that it just doesn't happen again (at least for a while). No one said you're slave to dice rolls. It's there to enhance the game and provide uncertainty, not to hinder it. On the flipside, a party finding their torches repeatedly go out could be spun into a "plot point" unto itself. _Why_ are the torches going out, despite being freshly lit? Did they get some bad torches, or is there some environmental effect (ex: gusts of air) or malign interference (ex: a ghost or evil wizard) going on?
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@@Bluecho4 I understand your point, but if the DM decides to ignore results, why roll the dice at all? The "plot point" idea is great!
Was immediately thinking of ways around that. One might be to have a card deck system so there's a more even distribution of results (weighted as one likes with certain cards signaling a shuffle), or having repeat results have an alternate result that's more severe, or at least different (storm gets worse, fatigue is a result of an illness, whatever one prefers). I would definitely not do it straight out of the system if it didn't seem to fit, but I like how it encapsulates the major things that can go wrong during an adventuring unit of time
@ Again, rolling dice is a tool. We roll for random encounters to be surprised. If a tool isn't fit for the purpose at hand, it should be put away and a different tool used. There's nothing wrong with rolling the dice, seeing the result doesn't make for a good play experience, and ignoring it. That's your right as DM.
@@Bluecho4 "Again, rolling dice is a tool. " And some tools are better than others, for some or all purposes. Just last night I watched a video critiquing a 'hammer fist' tool, & how in general it was far, far inferior to a good old claw hammer. The promise of hazard dice is it reduces the effort to track stuff... but it fails to do that adequately for tracking finite resources... probably the main thing people want to be easier to track. It is a very legitimate criticism, & just telling people 'well, don't use it then hurr durr' without any actual suggestions on how to fix the problem is singularly unhelpful.
Probably because what he shows has nothing to to with the claim or the title "track everything in DnD with one die". It doesn't track resources, it just has a chance of randomly consuming them.
@@kyotefox I guess every method has a home, but at our table things just unfold naturally with time, Not sure why it would need presets… that said, every table has its go-tos 😊
@@Runehammer1 Problem is they're taking a good core idea - a multi-function encounter die you roll ea. turn; & overloading the crap out of it because they have a hammer & want to use it on every nail, even if it's a screw. Drop the expiration & fatigue outcomes, & the weird combat turn table where you can randomly stub your toe; & it's just a more frequent encounter check with more variety... and ain't nothing wrong with that.
@@kyotefox Not a charitable interpretation. Instead of DM tracking resources directly, the PCs remove a resource under random conditions. PCs track their resources, any or all resources, not the DM. In this way, any and all resources get tracked.
I love the using 2D6 roll in each room on the dungeon and in hexcraw. I use it like the OD&D reaction table: 2 Terrible, disaster 3-5 Poor, worse than expected 6-8 Average, as expected 9-11 Good, better than expected 12 Great, unexpected perks After this roll, I roll an D66 table of descriptors. Each room had a function in the dungeon, mostly minor like storage, but some have a backstory tied to it, like a torture chamber, a prisioners' cell, a forge, a treasure room, etc. So, having a short description will prompt roleplay and backstory, and if there repetition, you change the meaning slightly so it weaves in the overall narrative.
Every once a while, I stumble on something and have a strong sense that it's going to be a huge game-changer for how I run the game. Today, this is that thing. Thanks a ton for sharing this system!
Interesting concept. I can see its utility but I don't find tracking time difficult for issues like torches, spells and food. Having been a soldier and backpacker, I have loads of experience carrying (and running out of) stuff. I encourage my players to pay attention to these details (in the beginning they never do). After running short of food and water a few times (and suffering thereby) players pay much more attention. I also try to get my players out on a hike or backpacking trip so they internalize concepts like encumbrance and water.
The "overloaded encounter die" has been around for years, because it's a really good idea for some play styles. This is a logical expansion of that idea into every situation. I like it!
Meh, it's fine. I think it's too busy. I prefer Angry GM's Tension Pool / Time Pool mechanic. Put a d6 in your time pool each turn (exploration turn). This helps you track time / the number of turns. You create tension by adding dice to the pool because of what happens when you roll the pool. When you get to 6 die in your pool, you roll all the dice. If you roll any 1's, something bad (an encounter) happens. Then clear the pool and start over. If the player characters do anything stupid as you're filling the pool (less than 6 dice in the pool), roll the pool, throw bad thing at players if any 1's are rolled, and return the dice to the pool and resume tracking turns.
Reminds me vaguely of a system the Angry GM came up with a few years back, but it was a pool of dice and it could be rolled early if the players did something stupid. I wouldn't use these because its too random (things like torches, spell effects, and rations have a logic that this violates) but like usage die, which i also don't like, I'm glad they exist for the people that do
I wonder how this could work for a more narrative campaign. Maybe rolling a 6 gets you an encounter with an NPC that can help you with your goal, 5 would be a clue to find that next helpful NPC, 4 would just be something neutral happens and the PCs have to try their best to see how they can spin it in their favor. Maybe the transient resource to expire is leads (in the marketing / clues sense) which they can replenish via finding clues during encounters. We might be able to use that same mechanic for fatigue or we could also tie gold to their ability to keep alive their leads (they have to pay their informants to get info). The setback would be a more hostile encounter that is dangerous but which they may also be able to perhaps gain some more leads or gold if they are very smart and lucky.
What is it, D6 appreciation day? PDM's vid today says D6 endlessly too. No matter, really appreciate the intro to this hazard system. And while I have this preference for something non-D6, seems easy enough to adapt to D8 (Dbyte) or whatever. Thanks.
Yup, I've used this since I read it off of necropraxis blog years ago. Simple, easy to use, and easy to make a short list for everything. Context helps when winging it. Super useful.
Oooo, I could so use this with Mythic or a little off shoot I got called GMER. When rolling for Choas I can roll the hazard die when I roll equal to or less then the Chaos Level!
I like the "Fatigue" result in a combat encounter, reflecting the PCs having their sword arms get tired from swinging them so much, or exhaustion from heat built up from running around in heavy armor. Though I'm inclined to make the "Advantage" result give the PCs actual Advantage in the fight. Like one of their foes trips and falls over, leaving them open to being attacked while prone.
It works but I also like a progressive danger/hazard/event die. Keep rolling bigger and bigger dice until the players do something to make things calm down, something happens on 4, 6,8,10,12,16,24,30,50,60,70,80,90,100 with you rolling 1d4 first and a 1d6 next time and upward (with the events being much worse for the larger #s, the 4 can be as simple as "torches blow out").
I generally like structuring your game around randomness but things like torches having a 1/6 chance of expiring right after you light them is a bit too immersion breaking for me. You could go more granular but imo the opposite is almost better. I like having a luck dice that either the players or the gm can roll whenever they feel like it (within reason) that can make the current situation better or worse proportionally to the result, by whatever means that make the most sense at the time
I love that fate dice idea. I can see players trying to escape an impossible foe with it, but I'm curious about how the GM can invoke it without it feeling petty or bossy on his part. Maybe it's something like rolling it for one of the three chests that the party just found?
doesn't necessarily have to be torches, and nothing really stops you from giving the players a free pass I suppose. I think the general spirit of this is to abstract all resource tracking to a single rolls and keep the game going
@@drillerdev4624 You could combine it with a meta resource, but as a GM it's most useful reactively. If the game slows down too much and you don't know how to improv your way out of it without it feeling completely arbitrary you can let jesus take the wheel and see what the dice say. Works great with a fortune teller aesthetic too. But really rolling straight dice for random stuff in your world is just an age old rpg thing that everyone does to some extent anyway, not really a proper system
Since the laws of probability tend to hate DMs, I predict that I will roll '3' like 5 times in a row, depleting their supply of torches in the first hour and ruining the adventure. It's a neat idea but in practice I feel more comfortable just tracking everything manually. I guess another way would be to have the list printed out, and put a check beside each result rolled. You cannot double up results until you roll a 6 to reset the chart (or until that's the last one left). Though that would make encounters too infrequent. That or maybe break '3' out into a sub-table, which would mean that I would only roll "3, 3" four times in a row instead of 5.
I think if you're running the risk of ruining someone's adventure, you should probably let your better judgement come in over a piece of plastic. Not to say they should always win, but just to let your empathy be your guide where it's appropriate
@@aaronsomerville2124 Yeah, totally fair! I guess my ultimate interpretation is: "The referee should be regularly prompted for mundane but sometimes important stuff to happen at regular intervals, even if they choose not to act on it", which can be fully abstracted to a die roll if you want it to
Same here - I’m not sure of the pacing here. Would be great to see or read a short, sample playthrough of how this activates in a dungeon, wilderness or haven.
To me, systems like this feel too random. For instance, having the same negative effect pop up twice in a row just because that's what you rolled. Sometimes you can come up with an in game reason for what happened but often I think it would seem arbitrary and lack verisimilitude. I see this as more of a board game mechanic than one for RPGs. I'll continue to track things like this personally.
Wouldn’t the main source of food in the wilderness be foraged or hunted? I thought the whole point of rations was for use in a dungeon since you can’t get food any other way
I sorta think this is one of those "bad by design" rules, because I think inspiring referees to creatively make contextual rulings around a die roll for their table is the fun and correct way to interpret it. If you're out in the wilderness and the party wants to spend some of that time to look for game at the expense of travel time, you can factor that decision into your die roll.
"Track everything with one die" Huh, I don't understand how you can track damage, turn order, etc all on one die, but I'm interested! "Roll a d6 to make a random event happen" So...I'm not tracking anything?
It doesn't seem that special to me. More of a standard random encounter table with a result that can have a party eating three days worth of food in 30 minutes (assuming 10 minute dungeon turns). That possibility alone makes this system look very flawed and will have your players calling it out.
A follow up thought. You claim this system is a replacement for tracking resources but by you example it doesn't. It stick making players tick off resources with results like fatigue (consumer 1 Ration). Players will still need to know how many torches and rations they have. All this does is randomise when they are consumed.
@@kyotefox tracking resources in this context means tracking the lifetime of a resource i.e. torch burn time or real time spent in a non-combat turn, which are typically DM activities as per B/X dungeon crawling rules. Though I agree that at first glance it feels too "weighty" in its implications, I'd probably just waive it when appropriate
@@dirigoallagash3464 yt videos usually get more views in the first day than the next two weeks after it drops. yes hes getting bad numbers on this video
Such a beautiful and clean system. Gorgeous design.I am absolutely in love! I am gonna tattoo it on my face, that's how good it is. Jk, not gonna do it, but I am gonna use it from now on! Can't wait for KNAVE.
Certainly depends on game, I could see this doing really well in a rules lite game, just get to the table and slash. I'd caution it against a B/X adherent game as time and resource management is the real meat and potatoes of the game, but I think at that point you're not looking at these kind of clean speed mechanics in the first place. You could allow for some weird "fate" effects that could modify these dice, like maybe allow a reroll as a twist of fate, to represent the "strangeness" of the setting, if GM's are worried about how the randomness could affect the flow. Maybe make that a player option to allow them to have agency on that
Hey sugar, i ran waking of willowby last week. It was amazing even when i let the players use 5e characters and absolutely nuked the poor adventuring party
This was 💯 my first playthrough with my 5e group. They ROFL stomped most things but I had so much fun running it anyways! With a regular Knave 1e/2e or OSE party it's that much more exciting imo. I've run Willowby now like 6 times lol it's so great. I hope to make a module as good as Ben's.
Backed! When I design a campaign, I have an order of events (this npc, this clue, this encounter, then this, etc.) My players can do whatever they want, but whichever way they go, whatever they decide to do, I modify the encounter to happen in their situation. Do they meet the next NPC in a tavern, on a ship, during combat, on the road, etc. This saves me time since I am not creating encounters they never see, nor do I ever run out of what happens next. They have no idea I run it this way, it feels natural to them. This works really well with the Knave creation tables. I can put together a really cool and original chain of encounters in a short time. Much easier than glaring at a blank page while blood droplets pool on my forehead trying to dream up the next encounter!
Hi Ben. Do you have an e-mail address? We have sent you a review copy of a RPG book (should arrive in 2-3 weeks), and I would like to send you a short message. Interestingly it uses the Necropraxis system as well.
@@sneakyalmond Depends on how you do it (E: as to whether it's boring & how much work it is), but basically they're advocating for the GM railroading literally everything, as opposed to the more OSR centric take of the GM being a neutral arbiter running the game systems.
I really feel like these systems are thinking inside the box too much. Computers can do anything with whatever probability you want, instantly. It isn’t clear to me why we need these janky systems.
This is not tracking, but randomizing, and how is this dnd? It makes the game more of a roguelike/survival where things happens "just because". As a DM you will have a very hard time trying to justify half of this events into the reality of your world.
What a great rule! It’s beautiful and clean. I am currently running EZD6 and it’s on brand. Will def be using this when I “turn up the consequences”. For example next session their are entering a swamp to save some kids and I’ll be adapting the rule there. It’s actually quite helpful when your not sure what to do next in a hex crawl.
As others have commented, the system is kind of inferior to traditional tracking methods for achieving consistent & realistic results. If you want resource management ala torches to be a focus at your table, this system works against you. Obviously you can remove those results from the list & management them some other way... but then basically the Hazard die devolves into a more complicated encounter test... and fails to actually deliver on it's promise, which was all about reducing the level of tracking you needed to do. As other suggestions have stated, I think a card based system would probably work better, since you can exploit the finite nature of a stack of cards to ensure realistic bounds on resources. Also, some of the math can be offloaded to the players... they can track their own torches/spells, possibly with counters, & the GM just focuses on announcing the points where numbers should drop. I'm not trying to be mean here, & the system definitely has some interesting aspects... but tools should be critiqued for their purpose & the hazard die just doesn't do what a lot of folks want for resource management. Where it really shines is as a better encounter/event test.
It’s a system that makes players say “We have X turns in the dungeon” where X = max(torches, rations). The people saying “You could make the weird results a plot point,” how many times is “you’re really hungry again!” an interesting plot. And all that really means is “leave and re-supply.” If your resource isn’t so important to the game that you can’t make a single tally on a piece of paper for it once in a while, it isn’t worth tracking.
@John Mickey I would say it's the opposite - players can't reason about the amount of turns they have left, all they can do is make an educated guess. This isn't to say this particular system doesn't have faults, but it's more made to the assumption that no two torches would burn the same rather than it being unimportant.
@@johnmickey5017 "If your resource isn’t so important to the game that you can’t make a single tally on a piece of paper for it once in a while, it isn’t worth tracking." I mean the only folks who would bother tracking stuff at all are those who CARE about tracking... otherwise they just wouldn't use anything. Which just emphasizes that if you're gonna use an alternative means to track resources, it's gotta be good & robust, because it's probably a core part of your at the table experience.
@@ILoveEvadingTax Again though, we have to consider the existing options... usage dice basically do the same thing but with a 'memory' function similar to cards... but are also easier to scale to multiple resources (assign 1 usage die per resource, roll all usage dice ea. turn, done). The problem in my eyes is folks are trying to take a great encounter/event system, & overload it to also be a middling resource tracking system... without actually tracking ANYTHING. I think the idea has way more legs if you de-couple it from depleting resources & keep the rest (1/turn; roll & something negative happens)
@@kgoblin5084 that's definitely a fair point, though i'd only quibble that this is by design not a resource tracking system, it is a resource modeling system, albeit a very simple one.
I like the system! But if you are rolling 6 times in the wilderness, what if someone rolls a few weather changes? How much will the weather actually change? How would you adjudicate that? Or since it says "local change" would you only do weather once and if it happens to come up again, you would maybe change the setting or something i.e. woodsy area to fields? Genuinely curious how you do it in your game.
Intensify the weather. Diminish the weather. You change the system to 2d6 and make weather changes a 5 or a 9. You use this system as a time saving aid to your imagination and common sense.
I like the granularity and the agency characters can have if they track their stuff and act to preserve it. However, I really loved how this system can improve a "downtime", or a for city adventures in general. Even for the Dungeon turn, maybe just taking away the ration part, I can make it really useful too. Thanks for sharing! Can't wait for Knave 2e!