As established in the previous article , the World of Darkness' combat system sucks. But the right system can make everything better.

(If you want to skip the system explanations, you can just download the revised White Wolf pdf )

No Combat Emphasis

First off, I'm not making a combat system. The World of Darkness …

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The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel. They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords? And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch. Instead, we should change them.

Knave started as a …

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Chekov's gun poses a real threat to some games.

If a group playing Vampire: The Masquerade ('VtM') encounter a Ravnos, spinning illusions, and confusing mortals, then the next time they hear about unusual events, they will assume that the Ravnos did this. Clearly - the Ravnos is part of the plot! After all, VtM draws …

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In some sense, you don't care about your washing machine. You have no clue where that powder comes from, or where those particles go after the wash. But you care a great deal when your washing machine breaks down.

When to Blame the System

When combat drags out for 45 minutes

the system has failed. Even the purest of …

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When looking at RPG Attributes, one fact returns to me constantly: Olympic Athletes cannot compete in every sport.

• Top wrestlers are stocky, and cannot compete in basketball.
• Top basketball players move quickly, and cannot compete in weightlifting.
• Weight lifters cannot compete in climbing events.

A certain amount of …

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RPGs with a shared narrative mechanic - where players and the GM both come up with interesting people, results, and situations - come with a cost. They pull focus away from the puzzle elements of the RPG, and that's my favourite element, so I can't see myself enjoying shared narration mechanics.

Let's start with an …

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Domination

In Vampire: the Masquerade, the first level of the Dominate ability lets the vampire issue a one-word command, which the target instantly obeys. It might be 'sit', 'stay', 'fight', 'run', or any other one-word command. It's flexible genius, because it clearly defines what the ability does, but can still …

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RPGs have dungeons...well more often those dungeons are caves...no, actually RPG plots often feature caves, which we call 'dungeons'. Anyway, these caves look rather strange, because people began drawing them on graph paper, and later they made sure to fit the entire map onto a single square at the top of a page.

RPG …

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Why is it always the same old elves, and hobbits, and +1 swords? Can't people come up with anything different?

...I hear this every so often, and I wonder if any of these people actually pick up the myriad gonzo-RPGs with novel races (or at least 'novelty races'). Of course, many have the extra barrier of 40 pages …

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What's great about dice-pools is meaningful results, all the time. You'll struggle to get that with a D20.

Listen...

Example 1: Good Chances

The party ranger wants to navigate through the forest. Forests are dangerous, and he might fail, but his bonuses mean he succeeds on the roll of 3 or more.

A 90% chance of …

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