Overview
What is a Role-Playing Game?
A role-playing game, or RPG, is a shared storytelling experience. You and your friends get together and create an open-ended story, more like a television series than a movie. One person becomes the narrator, setting the stage and creating challenges for the players. Everyone else creates characters, heroes who go on adventures.
What is an RPG System?
An RPG system is the set of rules the game uses to build characters, set challenges, and otherwise manage the world. Players can choose what their characters are going to be like, their strengths and weaknesses, and the narrator uses the same rules to determine the difficulty of various tasks that come up during the story. One player might decide to make a very strong character, which means they are more likely to climb a sheer cliff, but that might leave them without enough points to distribute into their mental attributes, making tasks requiring those traits more difficult.
What is The Knaack Hack?
The Knaack Hack is an old-school revival role-playing game, aiming to recapture the look and feel of older games from the 1970s while simultaneously modernizing the core system to avoid any of the awkwardness from which many of them suffered.
What do You Need to Play?
You’ll need 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20-sided dice, referred to as d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. While most experienced gamers will have a set of these dice on hand, newer players can always find online dice rollers or smartphone apps to accomplish the same results. You’re also going to need pencils and paper for character sheets. While you can easily draw up your own character sheets, here is one to get you started.
How do You Use the Dice?
The notation for rolls indicates the number of dice to roll before the ‘d’ and the size of die after. For example, 3d6 would mean you roll three six-sided dice and add them together. Most of the time, you’ll be adding modifiers as well, such as your attribute, proficiency, or other situational bonuses or penalties that affect your final total. The one exception to this is percentile dice, when you roll two ten-sided dice with each one representing a digit from 1 to 100. For example, a 0 and a 7 would result in 7. A 3 and a 1 would be 31, and two zeroes is 100.
Influences
Veteran gamers will recognize aspects of several RPGs in the Knaack Hack, and it wouldn’t be unfair to classify it as a collection of the best parts of each of those assembled into one system. Special thanks are due to all those games that came before, providing a sturdy, time-tested foundation for the Knaack Hack. Thank you!