What things did you learn from Dungeon World that improves your standard D&D 4e or D&D Next game? I’m seeking ideas for an upcoming Sly Flourish article.
What things did you learn from Dungeon World that improves your standard D&D 4e or D&D Next game?
What things did you learn from Dungeon World that improves your standard D&D 4e or D&D Next game?
Oh man. I haven’t gone back to DnD after DW yet, but I’m planning on running it so differently.
My best takeaway so far is the Front session prep system. I’ve already written a Front for a Deadlands: Reloaded game. I want to try to use Fronts in every game I run now. The flexibility, clarity, and ease that the Front system provides has turned game prep from a confusing, time-consuming task into having fun in a quick and easy manner.
I don’t know that I’ll play any later editions of D&D, but from now on I’ll think of a failure as triggering a hard move, regardless of the game I’m playing.
What Brennen Reece said. Especially in games like World of Darkness, where everything is so freaking hard…
The principles, agenda, fronts, making hard moves when the players look to the gm or fail a roll. All those are the things that I would import into any other game nearly straight away.
Tricky things like players only rolling dice, I would love to import into other games, but it would depend on game’s mechanics. I don’t see players only rolling working for something like DnD, although I have successfully imported the idea into a few Fate games.
The flow of play is what I’ll take back with me; “feed the fiction” is my new mantra.
“What do you do?” This has always existed in the background of all the games I’ve run, but bringing it to the forefront and being conscious of its use will stick with me since running DW. A close second is the cycle of setting up the move, getting the PC’s action, and following up by setting up another move.
Failing to roll the magic number doesn’t mean you failed to get what you want. That will go with me forever now, even though it is not new from DW (nothing in it is, but it isa very neat and round game).
What JJ and Brennen said. I’ve been “Making Failure Awesome” ever since getting into Fate, but my take-aways from DW at the moment are the whole “GM Move on Player Failure” structure, and the narration always ending up with a “What Do You Do?” invitation to the players to act. I’m still jury-out on the Fronts, as I use “Plot Stress” and Fate-y structures in all my scenario writing and playing, but I’m very keen to try and somehow use the Fronts structure to create a kind of “fractal unpacking mechanic” to use in “random” (ie spontaneous) encounters – could be very fruitful. 🙂
DW is teaching me how to act on the spot with what the game needs, not what i want it to be. A work in progress with two sessions and more to come.