Premise
5e is the only system I have practical experience with, since I've been DMing it for a good two years now. But I have been following the OSR and its philosophy for at least half that time and when my group showed interest in Knave, I used it to run "The Sky-Blind Spire" by Michael Prescott. Ben Milton's actual play of this one page dungeon on his channel "Questing Beast" was the epiphany that made me fully understand the OSR, so it seemed rather fitting.
The System
Knave is a toolbox, written to cover character generation and the basic mechanics of play. This makes it the lightest of the rules-light, in the best way possible. It doesn't tell you how to handle maritime travel, potion crafting or inter-planar stronghold management. It tells you how to hit things, how to carry stuff, how much stuff costs if you want to buy more stuff, how to cast a spell, how to heal your wounds and how to make a monster quick. And guess what, that is all you actually need in order to have the best fun you could possibly have in a made up fantasy world. At least for as long as it took you to finish Final Fantasy VII, with the advantage that Knave costs 2.99 (at the moment of this writing) and it will always have the best graphics you can possibly conceive.
There's a couple of simple ways of doing AC, encumbrance is done by way of items slots, spells are single use and must be found while adventuring, if you really, REALLY, feel the need to make a skill roll, do it by rolling under the most relevant attribute score. If you want to beat someone up, roll and add your modifier. It has more cool little features and an incredibly clever way of rolling Attribute scores but I won't spoil that, you'll have to buy it to find out.
Character Generation
It's FAST! And COMPLETELY RANDOMIZED! Which means it takes less than five minutes for a group of 4 people to make their characters. Also, it doesn't have classes. You randomly roll your starting equipment and off you go! You wanna be a wizard? Fine then, trade your armor for a spell scroll. Because in Knave everyone is a poor sod trying to survive in a harsh, harsh world.
How Does It Play?
It plays the way you want it to play. It forces you to use your imagination and come up with solutions to problems rather than have you execute mechanics. Eralphus found a spell scroll in one of the towers' rooms. I rolled on the 100 level-less spells table and Gate came up. The description says: "A portal to a random plane opens", so that's what he found. Later on, the party met a bunch of giants guarding a treasure and decided to write them a letter, an insulting one, hoping it would lure them out of their lair. INT scores weren't bad overall and everyone who can write even just a little, gotta be able to write insults, so I let them do it. Luckily for the party, a goblin they had previously captured was unanimously elected as the messenger, 'cause he got thrown out the window as soon as the giants grasped the offensiveness of the missive (it took them a while but they got the "mum" part eventually). When Eralphus, coming out from behind a corner, cast the Gate spell, two of the enraged creatures plunged headlong into the Realm of the Giant Mashroom Dong, while the third one was taken down with wits and teamwork, instead of abilities-that-you-have-to-look-up-three-times-on-the-character-sheet-before-you-can-remember-how-they-work, in a battle the bards will sing about for decades to come.
Conclusions
Pros
- Really fast to teach and play.
- It doesn't get in the way of your imagination and it's never bogged down by book-keeping or mechanic-recollecting, even more than any other rules-light OSR book that I have read so far
- Requires you to make rulings for almost everything, the OSR way. All hail rulings.
- It's perfect for someone like me who can devour the OSR primer along with 400 posts by Jeff Rients but can only remember 1/3 of what's in the Dungeon Master Guide and uses 1/10 of it on his best day. Knave it's 7 PAGES LONG!
- It has designer's notes
Cons
- It requires you to already have a knowledge of D&D in one form or another. I very much doubt that someone who has never heard of it (or RPGs in general) would be able to pick it up and play it.
- In the text, Attribute scores are sometimes referred to as "Defenses", and although I can see why Ben would see them that way, I still think it's a little confusing. But we're just nitpicking here. This game is so cool he can call them "puppies" for all I care. In fact, this last point is not even a con. And even the first con is not really a con. F**k it, this game has only pros as far as I'm concerned.
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