Knave, and the Agency of Dice

Knave is an OSR (Old Style Ruleset, Old School Renaissance, or Old System Revival — I’ve seen them all) RPG. OSR games hearken back to the olden days of dungeon delving and hack n’ slashing. A system without a pre-built world, Knave is designed to be modular and adaptable to any compatible systems, bestiaries, spellbooks, and adventures.

There is a long and detailed history of OSR gaming, and I won’t go into that now. For now, I want to talk about dice.

In Knave, stats are created similarly to old D&D versions: roll three six-sided dice. Instead of adding them up, however, you take the lowest die and mark that number as your “bonus.” Ten plus your bonus is the “defense.” If you roll a 2, 4, and a 5 for your strength, for instance, your strength bonus is 2, and your strength defense is 12.

These two numbers are used for everything. If you roll to do something with your strength, add 2. If something tries to push you back, they need to roll higher than 12. Monsters and villains have defenses too, so if you are trying to hit a monster with a Dexterity defense of 14, you need to roll better than 14 to hit it, while they get a +4 to hit you.

That’s the majority of the ruleset — Knave is remarkably rules-light — and while the system does have some other interesting twists and quirks, I instead want to address one of the more interesting assumptions that a lot of RPGs make and Knave has carefully subverted.

Why do you “roll to hit?”

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to games where you don’t have dice or “to hit” combat, but for those games that do, you roll to hit. You succeed or fail based on if your roll compares favorably to a set number: Armor class, defense stat, or similar. You tell everyone that your warrior swings their mace, or looses their arrow, and then you roll your die to see if it worked.

But you never roll to dodge.

Well, sometimes you do. Both Call of Cthulhu and GURPS, for example, have active defenses. Actually, GURPS has both active and passive defenses, modifying an opponent’s to-hit roll before giving you a dodge roll of your own. Call of Cthulhu has active defenses exclusively; you roll to hit, they roll to dodge, and that’s that.

A lot of games have passive defenses — numbers that represent the difficulty for an attack roll to overcome — but there’s no such thing as a game with passive offense and active defense. Why is that?

Well, obviously, if you are trying to hit someone you are taking action. Rolling the die is also an action, so the ludo-narrative fits. At the same time, armor defends you without doing anything, so rolling to defend would be kinda silly, no? What about dodging? Well, you could make the case that effective dodging is reflexive; if you’re doing it well, you’re not really thinking “a sword is coming towards me, I should move out of its way.”

But what about parrying? Using a shield? GURPS gives characters the choice of actively dodging, parrying, or blocking incoming attacks, for example, but it is a trade-off: having both active offenses and defenses doubles the number of rolls per attack, which doubles the length of combat. If we want fast-paced combat, we can cut the amount of rolls in half by only having attack rolls. Much simpler, easier, and faster.

What if we divided the rolls in half along a different spectrum? What if we didn’t keep attack rolls and get rid of defense rolls, but instead kept PC rolls, and got rid of NPC rolls?

Player-faced rolling is a simple enough concept to grasp: Most RPGs have both the GM and non-GM players make rolls. Player-facing rules for rolling urge that GMs should roll dice rarely if ever. If there is ever a time when a roll is required, non-GM players should roll the die, not the GM.

Let’s go back to Knave’s stats. If a monster with a Dex bonus of 4 is trying to attack you, the GM could roll a d20, add 4, and see if that’s greater than your dexterity defense. That’s a pretty standard method of combat in RPGs. Or we could re-frame the action as the monster is going to hit you unless you dodge. We could have the player roll their dexterity, add their bonus, and try to beat the monster’s attack — a Dex defense of 14.

The math works out both ways, too: rolling to overcome a 14 defense with a +2 bonus has the inverse probability of rolling at +4 to overcome a 12 defense. It’s kinda neat that way.

Math aside, the concept of player-facing rolling acknowledges that rolling the dice is a symbolic act in RPGs. It represents a character taking action; it is the straining sinews, the furrowed brows, the quick fingers and silvered tongues that we ourselves cannot personally influence. All we can do is decide what we want to do, then it’s up to our persona to enact our will.

Why do NPCs also get that honor? Why are they not exclusively set-pieces, the same as any locked door or coded puzzle? We are the heroes of this adventure, why are we not the only ones whose actions guide it?

Who actually has agency in an RPG?

Obviously the non-GM players have some; in Knave, they could be the only ones who roll dice, after all. They decide what their characters do, and the narrative camera follows them. They decide whether the story will include hunting the ogres in the caves or defending a town against bandit raids.

But the GM is the one who makes the cave and controls the bandits. The GM is the one who decides results and consequences. While another player might kill a tyrant or save an innocent, it is the GM who decides how powerful the tyrant is or what traps guard the captured unfortunate, to say nothing of the vast world beyond the players’ scope.

But the system makes the rules that the GM follows. The dice decide if your blows hit, if your defenses hold, if your feet are quick enough or the demon’s teeth too sharp. If you want to do something in an RPG, the rules tell you if you can, and how.

But the story, especially in fiction-first gaming, is not impotent either. Narrative convention and common sense prevent absurdities and maintain the ever important and significant suspension-of-disbelief. If a character wants it and the rules permit it, the needs of the established world and story may still say no.

Rolling dice is something tangible. It makes us feel like we are in control, even though there is no controlling how the dice roll. At best we can decide what we want to have happen and hope we can guess the best method for achieving it. At the same time, we aren’t always in control. As we adventure we come across obstacles and uncertainties, and we will sometimes be an object rather than a subject. Monsters will attack us, comrades will persuade us, and things outside our scope will insert themselves into our story. Sometimes we simply aren’t the ones who roll.

What would that play like, I wonder; a game where rolling the dice is exclusively the purview of the GM? A lesson in disempowerment, perhaps, suited for cosmic horror. A game where you cannot escape the fact that your successes and failures are ultimately the purview of forces beyond your control, your scope, or even your ability to comprehend. Fortune makes fools of us all. Our only hope is to load the die-rolls with stat- and skill-bonuses as best we can, and hope.

And this is all without even discussing the different kinds of dice systems, because there are so many dice systems! I’d never be able to detail them all.

So next time, I’d like to look at a system that asks; what if you could load your dice?