Ben Milton sets the record straight

If you didn't understand OSR or Knave 2e, you will now

Greetings, Ben! Let’s do 20 questions.

1. How would you introduce yourself to my audience of largely indie RPG cognoscenti?

Hello! I run the Questing Beast YouTube channel where I mostly do reviews of OSR systems and adventures. I’ve also written the games Maze Rats and Knave, as well as a few adventures like The Waking of Willowby Hall and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: The Adventure Game.

Right now I’m kickstarting Knave: Second Edition which is in its last 48 hours.

2. I want to get to Knave in detail, but first, I’m curious about your start as a YouTuber. What was the thing that finally made you decide: ‘I’m going to start a channel’?

I started teaching 5th grade about ten years ago, and another teacher at that school had a YouTube channel. I figured “If he can do it, I can do it!” It started out as a fun hobby and slowly evolved into a full-time job.

3. I’ve learned a lot in the four or so years of making YouTube content. What are three core pieces of advice you would give to anyone thinking of starting their own YouTube channel in the RPG space?

First, find a relatively unexplored niche and fill it. There’s an enormous number of channels out there today, so it’s best to find a topic that doesn’t have too much competition. Or at the very least be intentional about covering a popular topic in a new way.

Second, make your channel as straightforward and useful as possible. Don’t focus too much on high production quality or editing effects (apart from good sound quality, which is vital). Just make videos that don’t waste your viewers’ time and give them something valuable.

Third, grow your channel on YouTube. Early on, it can be helpful to post videos on social media (I certainly got a lot of early traction from reddit) but very quickly the amount of traffic from YouTube will overwhelm the traffic from anywhere else, so that’s where you should put your effort. Learn how to make thumbnails and titles that people want to click, and put out content regularly.

Oh, and some bonus advice: start a newsletter! Email is woefully ignored today as everyone tries to promote their stuff on social media, but that’s a mistake. You don’t own all of those social media followers, Facebook or Instagram or Twitter do, and you can’t reach them without their help. What’s going to happen when those platforms close one day? With an email list, you own all of those contacts and can take them with you, and people are much more likely to see and open an email than a social media post. Substack is a great platform to use for newsletters, as it’s completely free. My newsletter, the Glatisant, has been essential in promoting my work and the work of others in the OSR.

4. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that your YouTube channel and your newsletter are pillars in the OSR community. You’ve reviewed countless OSR games and supplements large and small, and the newsletter is a comprehensive roundup of happenings in the scene. Where do you see the OSR community in ten years and why?

The OSR as a playstyle is much better known now than it was when I started my channel, and its player base is going to continue to expand as D&D players branch out. While 5e is still growing, more and more of them have been looking for alternatives, both from system fatigue and because of Hasbro’s poor treatment of its fanbase. This has resulted in three huge OSR kickstarters this year so far, and there are several more to come.

I expect that the main way that the OSR will shape RPGs in the coming decade won’t be its rules per se but its open-world sandbox approach to RPG campaigns, where players are given real freedom to explore and shape a world rather than follow a plot. As AI tools continue to improve, running these types of campaigns is only going to get easier and easier. Pretty soon you’ll be able to hit a button on a phone and get a rich, original encounter that perfectly fits the tone, aesthetics, and lore of your world.

5. If you had a magic wand, what would you change about the RPG industry today?

I’d love it if RPG core books were mostly full of content to put in your game rather than rules. The majority of the GM’s job is making stuff for players to interact with, but core books usually offer very little support.

6. When you’re not playtesting your own games, which particular games do you find yourself playing most and why?

Recently I played in a Crokinole tournament with friends here in Wichita. It’s a Canadian dexterity game where you flick disks towards the center of a wooden board, trying to knock your opponent’s pieces out. In general, I’ve been drawing to quick-playing abstract games because it’s a nice change of pace from modern boardgames and RPGs, which can be so involved. In general, I don’t like learning a ton of rules for almost any kind of game.

7. I sort of eat, sleep and breathe new game mechanics as a matter of course when reviewing different games and actually encounter incredible rules innovations from time to time. What are the elements of OSR rules that make you think: “okay, this is good enough”? or “This is all I’ll ever need?”

I think the rules that are really at the core of the OSR are the random encounter roll and the reaction roll. Old School D&D is almost alone in how dedicated it is to simulating a living world and procedurally generating content that the GM and the players never expected. It’s one of the best parts of the game, and I wish more games would give it a go.

8. One of the aspects of OSR-style gaming that I see cited as a hallmark of the movement is giving players the freedom to approach and solve in-game problems and obstacles. How does that approach jibe with a player character who has a very low Intelligence or Wisdom score? In other words, where do you draw the line between the player’s capacity for problem solving and the roleplaying of a player-character within the fiction?

When I play OSR games, stats like intelligence or Wisdom are mostly there for their mechanical effects rather than as roleplaying prompts. I have no problem with other players getting really into character if that’s what they want to do, though. I would just find it personally frustrating if I wasn’t able to solve a problem because my character had low INT, even though I could see the solution. The enjoyment I get out of TTRPGs is largely from the “tactical infinity” or “anything may be attempted” side of things.” I like poking and prodding the world to see what it will do or macgyvering it to get results.

9. What are your thoughts on other rules paradigms such as Fate, Powered by the Apocalypse/Forged in the Dark, and solo journaling games?

Fudge (the earlier, more straightforward predecessor to Fate) was actually the first RPG I ever read, since it was free online. I think I prefer it to Fate, which feels too “writers’ room” for me, with its meta currencies, compels, and so forth. I generally prioritize immersion when I’m running games, and systems where the players’ role is to help construct the story from the “outside” isn’t my preference.

I haven’t had a chance to play Forged in the Dark games yet, although things like the flashback mechanic probably wouldn’t sit well with me, since it skips over the planning part, which I enjoy.

I actually like quite a few PbtA games though, especially World of Dungeons. The way that PbtA games have GM and Player principles definitely influenced some of my early games like Maze Rats, and the OSR in general. Moves in these games are really just subsystems, which the OSR is no stranger to. I think one of the things that a lot of OSR GMs object to is the way that games like Dungeon World encourage the players to fill in the setting as you play, but that’s not really a core principle of PbtA games.

When I first got into RPGs I bought and read quite a few indie storygames like Fiasco, Primetime Adventures, Polaris, etc. because I do love an original mechanical system. But after playing a few of them, I realized that I’m not very good at creating stories on the fly! I just find it stressful. Whereas playing a dude trying to escape a dungeon while only armed with a torch, 50 feet of rope, a live chicken and a block of lard was way more fun than I expected it to be.

10. That last point actually circles back to something I wanted to follow up on. With the OSR paradigm of using your actual intelligence to solve problems and obstacles, wouldn’t it end up being the case that you’re always just playing as Ben Milton with your player-character just serving as a thin veneer or mask that you wear each session? If that were true, then wouldn’t OSR games be better described as social puzzle or logic games as less as actual role-playing games where you assume a role and play it?

There's a sliding scale between playing yourself at one end and acting exclusively as your PC on the other. At the Forge, these were called Pawn Stance and Actor Stance. I would argue that pretty much everyone plays a mix of both. If everyone went full actor stance in a traditional D&D campaign, for example, it would likely fall apart due to all the metagame considerations that players have to be aware of to keep the game functional.

I'm just more on the "PC as avatar" end of the spectrum. I do enjoy incorporating my character's background and personality into a session, it's just not a super high priority. For other OSR players, it is.

I actually think that “roleplaying game” is not the most accurate term for the sorts of games that we play, although I admit that the term has stuck and isn’t likely to change. People certainly play roles in RPGs, but you also play a role in Halo, or cops and robbers, or Starcraft, and we don't call those RPGs. You can also shift between pawn and actor stance in an RPG and the structure of the game remains the same, which is evidence that it’s not a core feature. I believe it was Vincent Baker who pointed out that roleplaying is really just an aspect of play that lots of games have had for centuries. Today's RPGs just put more of a focus on it.

The innovation that caused RPGs to branch out into a completely new genre was not roleplaying in my opinion but the "anything can be attempted" rule from Kriegsspiel. Once you remove that, an RPG immediately stops feeling like an RPG. 

I've heard some OSR players call old-school D&D a World-Playing Game, since long campaigns can see whole parties die off and get replaced, with the story of the world ending up as the long-term focus. There's also a case to be made that Old-School DnD is a type of wargame, not because it’s combat focused, but because it’s so closely derived from the simulations of Kriegsspiel and Braunstein. Eero Tuovinen has a great free primer called Muster that explores this. I also like how in Japan RPGs are called Tabletalk Games, which is a brilliant term.

The best description of an OSR campaign might be an immersive, open-ended fantasy challenge simulator, but good luck getting that to catch on.

11. Great explanation and breakdown of the distinctions there. When you used the term “immersive, open-ended fantasy challenge simulator,” something really clicked: OSR is about simulating those particular things, namely a certain flavor of challenge. OSR rules and the accepted mindset embrace that simulation. Whereas a lot of the games that I review (as well as the one I wrote myself, Fluxfall Horizon, a PbtA game), are more genre simulators. There’s a wide open galaxy of different rulesets out there created in service to a particular genre, and that’s a source of infinite fun and fascination for a lot of folks, including myself. Everyone likes what they like, but I guess just on a personal level, what are your thoughts on genre simulation?

Yes, I think that’s right. As far as I can tell, PbtA games model genres by limiting outcomes via move results and GM principles. I can certainly see the appeal of that, and I’ve enjoyed watching people play genre simulators like Fiasco, but I usually don’t enjoy playing in them for more than a few sessions. When you’re simulating a genre, the possibility space is more constrained and the outcomes are more predictable. This gives you a much more consistent tone and it can make it feel more like you’re in a movie or a book, but it’s not ideal for players who enjoy out-of-the-box problem solving, which often involves violating a genre’s expectations.

12. Okay, onto Knave 2e, the game you are Kickstarting to quite spectacular heights right now. There are now a dizzying number of not only supplements and retroclones but novel rulesets which have been published at this point in the OSR space. What makes Knave worth buying?

I’ve focused on making Knave 2e as useful for OSR and non-OSR players as possible. If you’re not into the old-school style, about half of the book is just tables of content to help you rapidly build anything you might need in a fantasy sandbox campaign. So that’s monsters, magic items, spells, dungeons, wildernesses, cities, NPCs, quests, and so on.

If you’re into OSR games, the ruleset is unique in that it takes the B/X character classes and distills it down to a single classless system that’s much easier to teach new players, while remaining compatible with earlier editions. I made a video explaining how this works here. It also has modular subsystems for hexcrawling, dungeon crawling, warfare, potion making, and base construction.

And if you’re neither of these and just like great old-school art, the book will be packed with black and white illustrations by Peter Mullen, who is, I think, one of the best fantasy artists working today.

13. One of the player responsibilities that you list in the beginning is Prepare to Die. This is a point of pride in OSR games, where PC death is always lingering. How do you think that game feature impacts the kinds of stories that you’re able to tell at the table?

James Maliszewski at Grognardia was probably the first to point out the the story of Old-School DnD is that of the picaresque, where a wandering roguish character gets entangled in a dangerous situation, attempts to escape with their life and preferably some wealth, and then wanders off to the next encounter. The possibility of death means that the stakes are high and you really have to fight for your life, which adds tension and immediacy to the game. It also means that if you survive, you did so because of your own resourcefulness and grit, not because the game said you were supposed to, which feels very rewarding.

And if your character does die, it’s not the end of the world. Making a new character takes just a couple of minutes. You move on to exploring the same world but from a new perspective, which makes the setting more rich.

14. You put out a recent video where you explained how you designed Knave’s level progression to essentially match that of old school D&D’s, such as having a 25% chance of success with any given check at level 1 and by level 10 having a 75% chance. What makes the probability sets from old school Dungeons and Dragons so sacred?

It’s not really that they’re sacred; there’s plenty of excellent Old-School rulesets out there that don’t try to emulate the level progression of B/X, like Into the Odd or Errant. My goal with Knave was just to see if the math of B/X could be boiled down to a single, classless structure. Keeping the percentages of success in line was just to make sure it was very compatible with adventures written for B/X games, so a new GM wouldn’t have to do math conversions on the fly.

15. That makes sense. So it’s a matter of compatibility more than anything. I assume that you chose the deeply familiar stat array of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma also because it is so familiar to the OSR and D&D crowd. But if you did not have that constraint and could develop a stat array from scratch, would you still use those six?

I’m very fond of the three stat array of Strength, Dexterity, and Will that I used in Maze Rats (which was borrowed from Into the Odd). It’s the same breakdown that D&D 3e used for its saving throws. Doing a four stat array of Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma works well too.

One of the fun things that Knave does, though, is to make each ability score correspond to a character archetype. Strength for Fighters, Dexterity for Thieves, Intelligence of Wizards, Wisdom for Rangers, Charisma for Clerics, and Constitution for Adventurers in general. All of the stats are on a 0-10 scale, so each time you add a point to an ability, it’s a bit like gaining a level in the corresponding class.

16. Knave has this really starkly clear, no-nonsense aesthetic to its layout, which reminds me of Gavin Norman’s design in Old School Essentials, the beloved repackaging of Basic/Expert D&D rules from the early ‘80s. Were you inspired by Gavin’s design? Where did this clean approach come from?

Old-School Essentials was definitely an inspiration, as well as books like World of Dungeons, Augmented Reality, and Vornheim, but really a lot of it comes down to the fact that I like clear, simple layout. I want each page or spread to correspond to a single topic and I want each random table to take up exactly half a page, with its title on top. I want high density while also making information easy to find.

I’m also limited by the fact that I’m pretty new to doing layout and I’m completely self taught, so I don’t try to get too fancy.

17. One of the massive selling points of Knave is how it presents endless tables so that you can create your own gritty fantasy dungeons, monsters, spells, items, environs, etc. In other words, it’s a sandbox. Do you personally see any value in pre-imagined and settings that are laid out in exquisite detail (e.g. Glorantha from Runequest, Pathfinder’s Golarion, or AD 2500s Europe from Degenesis)? 

I haven’t read much about those settings, to be honest. When I read a game’s background lore I often can’t hold it in my brain, it’s like water through a sieve. I suppose there’s a distinction to be made between lore-focused settings, which just describe every aspect of a world, and adventure-focused ones, which try to make it as easy as possible to run a campaign there. Good examples of that would be The Dark of Hot Springs Island, the Stygian Library, or Yoon-Suin. The previews of Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood campaign setting looks fantastic as well.

18. The Knave 2e crowdfunding project on Kickstarter raised almost $300k in the first day, which didn’t surprise me personally since I was seeing the number of pre-launch followers reach something like 6000 sign-ups before you launched. But getting 6000 pre-launch followers is no easy task. Can you walk us through all the methods you used to get people to sign up for the Knave Kickstarter before launching?

The majority of signups came from two places: my YouTube channel and my email newsletter. Like I said, newsletters are awesome and every YouTuber should have one. The third source was from people who had previously purchased one of my products on DriveThruRPG or Itch. DriveThru normally doesn’t let you send emails to your customers with links to other websites, but what you can do is make a preview PDF that contains a link to the Kickstarter, upload it to DriveThru, and then notify your customers about that. It’s an odd workaround, but it works. You can also do things like adding a video or text to your other DriveThru products announcing the campaign and telling customers to go search for it on Kickstarter. Itch, on the other hand, just lets you email customers about whatever you want.

Getting a lot of people to sign up to be notified is really important before you launch, since you want to have as much momentum on day one as possible. If you’re planning a Kickstarter, get that preview page up as early as you can and start promoting it.

19. Is there any third party license or standard reference document in the works for Knave 2e?

My previous games were released under a Creative Common Attribution license, which allows anyone to do anything they want with the text, including making money off of it, as long as they give me credit. I got the idea from Dungeon World, originally. I haven’t decided on what license Knave 2e will have, but it’s important to me that my games are easy to hack and remix, so it will probably be something pretty permissive.

20. Where can one find the Knave community hanging out? And do you have any other links you’d like to include?

I have a private Questing Beast discord for my Patreon supporters that has a lot of Knave fans on it, but apart from that I don’t know of any other centralized “communities” for the game. The OSR subreddit, probably. Moderating any kind of public forum quickly turns into too much of a headache for me. 

In a way, I think it’s good that most Knave fans chat about it on general OSR or RPG forums. The OSR is such a niche to start off with and it’s all intercompatible, so breaking the scene down into each of its many retroclones ends up being counterproductive.

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Other helpful links:

Knave 2e on Kickstarter

Questing Beast YouTube channel

QUESTING BEAST GAMES

All of Ben’s RPG rules and adventures: http://bit.ly/ItchStore

Maze Rats (worldbuilding toolkit): https://bit.ly/MazeRats

Knave (classless OSR-compatible rules): https://bit.ly/KnaveRPG

The Waking of Willowby Hall (print): http://bit.ly/WillowbyPrint

The Waking of Willowby Hall (PDF): http://bit.ly/WillowbyDTRPG

The Alchemist's Repose: https://bit.ly/AlchemistsRepose

Jim Henson's Labyrinth (print): http://bit.ly/LabyrinthRPG

Jim Henson's Labyrinth (PDF): https://bit.ly/LabyrinthDTRPG

Forbidden Lands: The Spire of Quetzel (print): http://bit.ly/SpireofQuetzelPrint

Forbidden Lands: The Spire of Quetzel (PDF): http://bit.ly/SpireofQuetzelPDF

Knock! Magazine #1 (print): http://bit.ly/Knock1Print

Knock! Magazine #1 (PDF): http://bit.ly/Knock1PDF

BEN’S OSR RESOURCES

What is the Old-School Renaissance? http://bit.ly/WhatistheOSR

A Beginner's Guide to OSR Rulesets: http://bit.ly/OSRRulesets

How to run Old-School games: http://bit.ly/QBAdvice

A summary of the OSR playstyle: http://bit.ly/PrincipApoc

Essential OSR articles to read: http://bit.ly/BestOSRPosts

My favorite OSR blogs: http://bit.ly/TopOSRBlogs