First of all – THANK YOU, guys, for backing and making this FUN TRPG! I was searching for the whole 2012 for The Game, both to introduce new people to RPGs and to have no headache about GMing and preps. I live in Russia, and there’s a really small community of actual players and GMs, so I decided that it’ll be much easier to “convert” my real mates into a dungeon crawlin’ squad:)
So, I missed your Kickstarter but I’ve bought a PDF and was actually shocked, cause you’ve nailed it! I’ve been playing different stuff since 97 maybe, and every year since then fantasy games became more and more hardcore and tactics/builds/balance oriented, and lot of good PC games and new consoles added some casual feel to gaming itself, in any form, so hardcore went deeper underground. After all, MMORPG took all my friends interested in tabletop playing and there were no FUN things on a tabletop market. Easy and fun. And finally – a solution! Fast and really clear system, comfortable level of maths and rules and many features to choose from, free flow of both narrative and crunch, and the most important – the feel reminds me of my favorite campaigns in the past:) So THANK YOU one more time. It was a really big quest to find your game.
Though, I have a couple of questions/ideas:
1. How can any DW progress beyond +3/-3 modifiers with 2d6 roll? Cause -3 it’s ok, but with +4 you’ve never get fail, so… I have an idea, but I’m not sure that it’ll suite quite well. And if there is any reason to do that at all?
2. I really appreciate the fact, that we can freely add moves and classes and so on, but I hope that this book is just the beginning of your game development, right? Are you going to release any supplements in Q1/2013?
3. Defy Danger is an absolutely beautiful solution for any kind of… em.. dangers:) But as I understood, all the character’s interactions within the game world in a “positive way” are provided through their class moves or special moves. In theory, for making some potions/weapons etc. or dealing with anyone or other stuff like “not-killing-not-evading” there are lots of specialized moves. What if simplify some of them to Try It or Overcome and make it also depending on basic attributes? Roll + str for all the bullying/breaking stuff, roll + dex for all the cunning/speedy stuff and so on. Cause sometimes there is no fighter in the party, but there are some situations when you need to bend some bars. Literally 😀 And it could help newbies to start improvising…
Sorry for such a big post, but I’m just too excited about DW and that’s it:)
Thanks for the enthusiastic post! We are glad you like the game. Sage LaTorra might have some things to say, but here’s what I think…
1) Generally, we’ve avoided situations where you can get a consistent bonus of more than +3 over time. There’s lots of opportunities to rack up one-time bonuses (via a number of “+1 forward” actions) but those are hard to stack up. Generally, aiding someone isn’t a statistically useful thing to do every single round, though I’ve seen it done. Sage will be able to speak to the math more directly, but from my point of view, the meat of the game is in the 7-9 anyway, and a character who never fails a roll will have a hell of a time leveling up.
2) You know, when we started the project, we were all “we’ll do a game and like a lot of indie games, it’ll be the only book and we’ll just let people make their own things.” So, we were half right, it’s definitely open to all kinds of additions and hacks and crazy extra weirdness but we’re not done developing for Dungeon World by a long shot. In 2013 we’ve got a few more Kickstarter-based supplements coming out. The Barbarian and a “War” supplement to start. We’ve got a good idea of how we want to frame up new supplements that we create, but we’re not quite ready to spill those beans yet. Keep an eye out – we love to blab about our game, so you’ll see more soon enough.
3) Defy Danger is so useful because it’s the broadest (and least obviously laid out) roll you can make in the game. It can apply to overcoming any situation in which danger, doom and calamity are present or possible. The only downside is that it’s something the GM needs to improvise just about every time. Wherever there are specific mechanisms of reward or failure, we’ve added a move to the game. So, I think that if you’ve got situations that are coming up in your game on a regular basis, they deserve codified Custom Moves. You could very easily make a “When you craft a magic potion…” move (or rely on a more free-form solution like Ritual) for example.
To speak to your bend bars, lift gates query – anyone can break something, but the Fighter always has a chance to break it in a very specific, player-focused manner. The Thief might not even get a chance to roll where a Fighter would be entitled to his move. A lot of the way DW works is through moment-by-moment fictional analysis. What is happening? What do the players want to do? What have we made clear, in the game-as-it-happens and in the moves-on-the-sheets as to what is possible?
I would say that if the party came across an iron portcullis in their way and there was no Fighter to bend those bars, well, the PCs will have to either justify their action (Thief says “I drank that potion of Hill Giant Strength! I am so totally ripping the bars out of the wall!”) or find another way. Part of the classes’ fun and challenge is working with what you’ve got, right?
Whew, speaking of big posts… anyway, I hope that helps! I’d love to hear what other fans have to say, too.
Make sure to come back and let us know how the session goes! I am totally curious.
I hope, then, that it is totally mathematical! Dungeon World is like tofu – it absorbs the flavour of the people playing it. If your players are crazy, your Dungeon World will also be crazy.
Doesn’t his generic moves idea sound a lot like World of Dungeons? I don’t have the game but from the AP I read it is very close to that.
Raoni Monteiro World of Dungeons operates on a core mechanism that acts much like Defy Danger. I understand WoD will be released as a Creative Commons game, with some new stuff, pretty soon…
Yep. World of Dungeons is John Harper’s “Dungeon World 0th Edition” It’s the white box to our AD&D, only developed in reverse. Like so much of John’s work, it’s a thing of minimalist loveliness.
If you want to be able to hand out a few more +1 situational bonuses without getting to auto-success territory, one idea I’ve toyed with is to roll 2d8 for moves instead of 2d6. I haven’t tried in in actual play yet, but if you do success on 13+, partial on 9-12, and failure on 8-, you get similar odds to the standard numbers on 2d6. By making the numbers a little larger, theoretically you make stats a little less important and have scope to make situational and tactical modifiers more important. 2d10 with results on 16+, 11-15, 10- would probably also work.
I should say, I haven’t tried those because I’m getting the sense that the Dungeon World way to account for the difference between “hard” actions and “easy” actions is not to get into computing a lot of bonuses, but rather to let players know that they’re risking more painful consequences of failure. Basically, let the odds of success stay the same, but raise the stakes. It seems like that will work out to pretty much the same thing in the end, and possibly be more fun at the table. Well, it seems like it may be more cinematic and less tactical, but it’s still possible to get players to think twice about crazy risks.
When I first read DW, I had the exact same thought as you; “This is the fantasy RPG I have always been looking for.”
Before you begin coming up with a lot of houserules, I would suggest actually try playing the game a few times. Some of the rules seems a bit lacking before actual play.
About the Defy Danger move; it seems that this move has caused quite the confusion for first time readers, so I would like to elaborate on it a little.
The way I see it, Defy Danger is the “in case no other move applies” move. Getting out of the way of a rolling boulder? Roll+dex. You do not have a Defy Rolling Boulders move. Sweet talk that tavern wench so that the fighter can sneak upstairs? Roll+CHA. You don’t have a “Sweet Talk Tavern Wench” move.
Try thinking of it like this when you play. Every time the players wish to something not covered by their move, and it has an inherent “danger”, roll Defy Danger. The “danger” doesn’t have to be lethal. In the example with the boulder, it pretty much is, but in the other example, the danger is that the fighter can get seen.
My experience is that you might want to slow down on the amount of rolls though. Improvising is hard enough as it is, and requiring too many rolls generates a fair share of 6- results, and these result are often the ones that causes the greatest need for improvisation. There might be a rolling boulder, but that doesn’t mean everyone is threatened.