Knave: A Modern Basic Dungeons & Dragons?

I recently had the opportunity to run a one-shot using Ben Milton’s KNAVE. During the course of the game I repeatedly found myself thinking; “This is what Basic D&D would be if it were written today with 40+ years of game design to draw upon.”

I don’t feel like that’s a particularly controversial statement. I’m sure some folks will disagree. Knave takes the mechanical assumptions of D&D and streamlines them in such a way that makes the mechanics receded into the background but the whole experience still “feel” like Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve tried this with other systems in the past and they have always come up short.

TSR’s Basic Dungeons & Dragons detailed the essential concepts of the D&D game, trying to frame it for an audience that did not have a background in Napolionic wargaming. However, at the time Basic was created D&D was still a game that was in flux. Still defining exactly what it was.

What does Knave do here in the 21st Century that makes it more accessible to new RPG players that B/X or a retro-clone does not? Quite simple it addresses all the oddities of D&D that someone new to the hobby would rightfully question and find unintuitive. 

Ability Scores. “Abilities are king” in Knave. Roll 3d6 down the line. Rather than adding them together, take the lowest die result and this is your Ability Bonus. For example, you roll 2, 2, and 6 for Strength. Your strength bonus is +2. Add 10 to this and your Strength Ability is 12 (called your Strength Defense in Knave, but truely the same thing).Swap out the values of one set of Abilities if desired. Every time a character levels up they can increase three Ability Bonuses (and thus Defense) by +1. Easy!

Your Ability Score does what it says on the tin. Bumping three of them each level adequately mirrors character progression in other OSR D&D games. 

Saving Throws. All saves are against a target difficulty of 15. Roll a d20, add the relevant Ability Bonus and beat 15. The many versions of D&D and their OSR offspring have a host of strange saving throw mechanics. All are understandable given enough time to adapt to them but none of them simply relate directly back to the Ability Scores of a character. Some versions of them are downright unintuitive. There’s an unnecessary learning curve.

Slot based inventory. Your Constitution Ability (Defense) is how many inventory slots you have. Knave is a classless system and what you carry largely defines what sort of Knave you are. Modern D&D doesn’t care about inventory or encumbrance. You can carry ludacris amounts of gear with no penalty. But what you carry and how much is a central tenet of old school dungeon crawling D&D. It’s also usually more work than players are interested in doing. The Bag of Holding wasn’t invented in a void. It was spawned by countless whining players. 

In a very video game way, Knave’s slot based Inventory turns tracking your gear into a fun game within the game. Do you load up on spell books or armor and weapons? How you fill your backpack determines who you are to a large degree, and you can change it up adventure to adventure.

And that’s it in a nutshell. Roll high on a d20, Armor Class (Defense in Knave), Hit Points, and delving dark dungeons. It sounds like D&D to me, but a version that only takes minutes to learn.

As a parting thought, what I also like about Knave is how easy it has been to tack my own house rules onto it. As someone who likes a little more fidelity in my games it was very easy to just adjust the dials to get exactly the play experience that I wanted out of Knave. I tried a similar thing with 5e a while back and the smallest hacks ended up sending ripples through the rest of the game that I was unprepared for.

Check out Ben Milton’s Knave here. And his excellent blog. And consider supporting his Patreon.