CHAPTER 1: TIME TO PLAY THE GAME! “Welcome to Know Your Role This is Ji m Ross, with my partner Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler, and we’re coming to you live!” “I can’t wait to get started, J. R. I haven’t been this excited si nce the divas invited me to their party last week after the show!” “I’m pumped too, King! It’s loaded top to bottom with great matches, featuring all your favorit e WWE superstars, and newcomers ready to carve their names into the annals of sports entertainment! Brace yourselves, folks, ‘cuz this is gonna be a slobber- knocker, and it all starts, next!” HERE, IN THIS VERY RING! You’re about to experience Know Your Role, the OGL roleplaying game that thrusts you into the bodyslamming, piledriving, high-octane world of sports entertainment! You can play your favorite WWE superstar or create your own wrestler and lay your brand of smack down in your quest for that ten pounds of championship gold. All you need are a handful of dice, a character sheet, and some jabronies gutsy enough to get into a match with you. Oh, and you’ll need one other thing too: attitude! Each game session of Know Your Role is a single event, such as Velocity, SmackDown!, Raw, or even a pay-per-view extravaganza like Wrestlemania. During the course of a show, anything can happen — backstage sneak attacks, ringside brawls, surprise betrayals, and, of course, pulse-pounding wrestling matches! All this and more can occur in any game session! Just like the real WWE, nothing is static in this game. Tag teams break up, friends become enemies, champions come and go, and superstars hone their abilities to a razor’s edge. Know Your Role is perfect for long-term, continuous play, as your characters develop, grow, and become vital parts of your WWE roster. One day, your grapplers could very well find themselves main-eventing Survivor Series, Summer Slam, and the prestigious Wrestlemania itself! Know Your Role is quite different from other, more traditional, roleplaying games. Whereas most games encourage you to play one character throughout the session (or even the entire campaign), Know Your Role encourages you to play numerous characters. After all, a wrestling event showcases a lot of different superstars, and it would be boring for one wrestler to hog all the “screen time.” Furthermore, Know Your Role can be played without a General Manager (what other RPGs refer to as a Game Master). This adds an entirely new dimension to the game and can be extremely handy when time is short, or when you’re simply in the mood for a good old-fashioned head- smashing wrestling match. On top of the unique take on roleplaying, Know Your Role is versatile and easy to learn! You can quickly access your wrestler’s move set or even create new moves on the spot without wasting precious game time. Simply add up the modifiers, roll the dice, and open a can of whupass on your opponent. It’s really that simple! Know Your Role is smash-mouth roleplaying at its best. Now, put on the tights and shine those boots up real nice — you’re about to check some candy asses into the Smackdown Hotel … if they smelllll what you’re cooking!!! FOR THE ROOKIES If you flip through this book and see all these strange rules and unfamiliar terminology, you might feel a bit overwhelmed. Don’t. You won’t need to memorize the text, nor will you be required to understand all of it before you start playing. Yeah, we know that’s different than other games, but it’s true. In order to play, you’ll only need to know a handful of rules. You see, roleplaying games (RPGs) aren’t like traditional games in many other ways as well. They are essentially cooperative story-telling games and there are no winners or losers … even though your characters can indeed win and lose matches. But more on that later. For now, let’s focus on how RPGs are played out. There are two types of participants in Know Your Role: players and the General Manager (or GM). The General Manager, much like the general managers of Raw and SmackDown!, calls the shots. He is, for want of a better word, the primary story-teller. Here’s a list of things the General Manager does: • He makes the matches that are played out during a game session. • He takes on the roles of all the characters not controlled by the players (known as nonplayer characters, or NPCs). • He can initiate happenings and events. • He handles rules-based situations. • He acts as referee if there’s a dispute between players. Players have a much simpler “job” in the game; they step into the role(s) of one or more characters (known as player characters, or PCs). These characters are often the wrestlers and managers you see each week on WWE programming, such as Triple H, Kurt Angle, Rob Van Dam, Chris Jericho, and Trish Stratus. If you’d rather create your own superstars, you can do that too! Since the GM runs the show, he’s the only participant who needs to know all the rules. The players only have to know what all the stuff on their character sheets means. The rest can be learned as they play the game. So, how does all this work? The GM kicks a game off by describing the scene. Perhaps he tells the players that the show opens with Triple H coming out of his dressing room right as one of the players’ characters walks by, causing a collision. He speaks for Triple H, who berates the character for being “such a clumsy idiot.” The player then describes how his character reacts to Triple H’s verbal attack. Does he tell him off? Does he apologize and walk away? Does he plow right into him? There is no correct answer. The player should choose the character’s course of action based on the character’s personality and what would make for a more entertaining story. Perhaps this altercation will lead to a match between them at some point. Okay, now you might be wondering where the rules fit into all this. After all, it looks like everything can be handled with straight roleplaying, right? Well, no. Not always, anyway. While it’s true that roleplaying the characters’ actions should be emphasized, there are times that you’ll need to know if a character fails or succeeds at certain tasks. Can the character convince Eric Bischoff to suspend an enemy for maliciously beating him down last week? Can he power his way through a door that has been lodged shut by his nemesis? Can he resist being seduced by the drop-dead gorgeous Diva? Most importantly, can he execute a move on his opponent during a match? That’s where the rules come in! If there’s ever any doubt about a character’s success or failure, the rules will help decide. WHAT IS SMASH-MOUTH ROLEPAYING? “Smash-mouth roleplaying” is a term we use to describe the style of gaming that Know Your Role encourages. The concept behind this style is that each game session represents a single episode of a WWE show, such as Raw or SmackDown!. With that established, the traditional trappings of RPGs must be altered to fit such a format better. Multiple Characters You are encouraged to create and play a multitude of characters, of different appearances, attitudes, gimmicks, wrestling styles, and so on. By taking on the roles of more than one character, you’ll be able to experience the game from various perspectives. Acting as an arrogant rule-breaker is very different from playing to the crowd as a fan favorite, which is, in turn, a drastic departure from helping out your wrestlers at ringside as a manager or valet. Narrative Combat Know Your Role isn’t a blow-by-blow wrestling simulator; it’s a game of “competitive narration.” As such, there’s no real need to mess with rules for each and every maneuver your character performs in the ring. Without confusing you with a bunch of rules from the get-go, the core combat system revolves around each opponent choosing (or creating on the fly) a primary move he is going to attempt to use. The players then roll dice. The player with the highest roll describes the action and how the move plays out. The player describes a few minor moves to the mix as well, just to add color and fluidity to the sequence. These minor moves don’t do extra damage; they just make things a bit more interesting. After all, nobody cares about how well the side headlock and Irish whip were pulled off. They’re more interested in that devastating clothesline that almost took somebody’s head off! This means that you get to control the actions of your opponent’s wrestler, but you shouldn’t abuse this privilege, because your opponent will be controlling your wrestler the next time he gets the higher roll. So keep that in mind. On-the-Fly Moves What if you don’t know what a corkscrew plancha is? Or a cradle suplex? Or even a reverse DDT? No problem, we got you covered. Know Your Role features an innovative system for creating your own moves on the spot. All you need to do is tell the GM, in layman’s terms, what your wrestler is doing — “He grabs Jericho at the waist and hurls him backward.” Based on that description, modifiers are assigned and the roll is made.