"I don’t like blogs. They're pompous, self-indulgent,
and irritating... and no one reads them."
Further research has yielded a reddit post on r/OSR that actually provides an excellent link tree for the various contributions to KNOCK! #1, so just go look at that instead of my section headers.
NAMING MY GAME by Ben Milton
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
- (Stolen by Shakespeare from Team Rocket, if you didn't know)
There's a certain prestige that comes with popularizing the term by which we call a category or phenomena, and everyone is going to have an opinion on why their answer is best. I recently read a good chunk of Brian Murphy's Flame and Crimson: A history of sword-and-sorcery wherein the first six or so pages of chapter 5 are dedicated to the witherto's and whyfor's of naming of the literary subgenre. There were many arguments offered as to why it came about and it was all very researched on the part of the author, but as a reader, it frankly did little to keep me engaged.
As long as we all generally know what we're talking about, we can call it whatever. It may even help to wait for the dust to settle before declaring it as anything definitive. Spoiler alert: KNOCK! editors may very well be in the same boat; Marcia B's the OSR Should Die is featured in K!5 with an affirmative editor's note.
EXPOSE YOUR PREP by Chris McDowall
Alright, Chris cooked with this one. This piece is a few crisp bullet points of what to show your players for being good, attentive noodles, and I agree with practically all of it.
EXPOSE THE MAP - I hate having to draw rooms as they are discovered, and I detest the idea of trusting a player to accurately draw it out as described. There are some online tools that help with this, but that defeats the reason for having the maps conveniently drawn out for you by many modules ahead of time. I am very lazy when it comes to giving my players eye candy because I am quite busy as it is doing my NPC voices and answering the same question several times when it comes to descriptions. If the players are emotionally dependent on a grid (or NPC portrait for that matter), let them have it. They'll come crawling back to you anyway to learn what each of the rooms actually look like.
EXPOSE THE NPCS - My subtle cue for whether or not I want my players to engage further with an NPC to learn their motives, abilities, relationships, etc. is doing a voice for them. I make it distinct from my normal speaking tone so that they are clued into the fact that I am putting extra effort into this particular character. My NPCs also generally stray into George Lucas dialogue territory so nothing gets lost in translation. The more they talk, the more I rat out to the players. I'll be damned before I let anyone roll an Insight check (or equivalent) to figure out if someone is lying to them.
EXPOSE THE FUTURE - Communicate consequences. It's out of your hands after that.
EXPOSE THE TABLES - I had never thought about this one before, honestly. It may actually be even more fun to let the players roll on it since they already see the odds (and they have no one to blame but themselves). Now, this may only apply to tables that serve as resource taxes as opposed to storytelling ones (see previous post on Bryce Lynch's thoughts on random tables) as to not over-divulge, but I think the point is still salient for communicating the likelihood of any given encounter.
EXPOSE THE MECHANICS - While the advice is specifically tied to one of Chris' games, it is still entirely applicable to other... adventure games. The purpose of the flexible rule structures in old-school systems is to cater towards the eventuality that both the players and GM will stray into uncharted rule-waters. As such, your players may feel strongly about the perceived fairness or applicability of your rulings, so if you are genuinely just making stuff up, might as well be honest about it. If you've given it some thought about how to rule it, demonstrate to the players that you made an honest attempt to gameify the process.
ENCOURAGE SCHEMING by Chris McDowall
"PLOTS FOR THE PLOT GOD! SCHEMES FOR THE SCHEME THRONE!" as the kids say.
Chris enumerates some flavorful examples of how to enable the players to create a plan to solve a problem aside from brute forcing their way through it; players need time, tools, and reliable information to make the decisions required to solve a problem.
Granted, I believe I heard this from Ben Milton at some point, but something that is unspoken here is the fact that the way you would solve a problem isn't the way the players might try to do the same. Relinquish the pride you have in your clearly superior intellect for a moment and explain the consequences to players should their version of the plan fail, but assume that there is still a solid chance of it succeeding if they make an attempt to account for a wide number of variables. It's even alright for you to create problems that you wouldn't even know how to start solving yourself and letting players surprise you with an answer. Affording PCs the opportunity to be cool and tell a good story is more or less the point of the experience, right?
Why Setting HIGH STAKES Matters by Sean McCoy
Sean delineates a perception issue that I have been trying to highlight as a throughline in my writing this whole time: the players are accountable for the type of game they want to experience. Attachment to characters is earned as opposed to given, and fail states (including death) ensure that consequences for that attachment is genuine.
If the basis of stories is conflict/resolution and TTRPGS are a medium to try more or less anything in the pursuit of telling a story, it is both cheap and purposeless to handwave away additional ramifications arising from decisions made in its telling. Let stuff that happens matter, because otherwise the "happening" doesn't. The power and allure of these games diminish in the absence of repercussions. There is a difference between challenging/inviting someone to participate in the story and making them straight up uncomfortable, but to truly live vicariously through our hallucinated avatars, we must accept their mortal foibles and capabilities in equal measure.
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I got all of those responses to my gygaxian-democratized table of d20 Pixie Tribes, and it doesn't get accepted to KNOCK! itself, I'll publish it here with credits.
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