I love Dungeon World’s improvisational nature, but my teenage son is not so thrilled with it. He wants to interact with a world that has it’s own reality and is not made up on the fly. (Nevermind that it’s still made up. I think it’s the illusion he is missing.)
Has anyone used Dungeon World in the manner of a traditional RPG, that is with premade world/adventures, GM is “god” and makes everything up, and there is no player input? My initial thought is it would be better to just break out B/X and use that… except that I LOVE the pacing in Dungeon World, plus the action feels so much more immersive due to to the preeminence of the fiction. (My son loves these aspects too.)
So I’m wondering how to take the move structure of DW and marry them to a traditional approach to play. At first I sat down and tried to find a way to shoehorn moves into something like B/X, but I’m stumped. Any attempt at fusion ends up evolving into straight up DW. My next thought was to just play DW as written, but the GM does all the improv and presents the players with an immersive experience. The sheer load of creativity need to do that much improvisation is staggering though. I could just run premade adventures but I can’t see how the dynamics would work — a lot of moves call for something new or unexpected, which is at odds with any sort of prepared material.
Any thoughts?
I’m using the ruleset for my traditional RPG.. works flawless…. and even if you make it up on the fly… just don’t tell your players, they won’t even realize…
Here is a more-or-less “traditional” adventure I wrote for DW. It’s got a structure, but still leaves a lot of room for the DM to improvise and the players to freelance.
http://www.johnzo.com/indigo-galleon.pdf
There’s no need to necessarily make up everything on the fly in DW. Many folks run old-school modules with it and it works just fine. It’s only really an issue if player choices don’t matter, if the fictional results are the same whatever the player does. The rules of the game just don’t work that way; they ensure that PC actions are consequential and change things. As long as that’s true in your game, you should be fine.
A thing to remember – Dungeon World is only as improvised / collaborated on as the GM wants it to be. The rule is to ask questions, and like all the other GM rules, you use it when you need to.
Hell, throw it out and replace it with “reveal something unexpected about the world”. It’s not too hard to make DW a sandbox-discovery game by altering the classes a little (making the cleric choose a god, for example) and mucking with the Principles, Agenda and GM moves.
With my two teen sons, I play it totally “classic”, as we used to play AD&D (with characteristic checks-remember Xd6 vs CHAR). The younger one is really reluctant to answer questions like “How do you know that ?”. I consequence, I do more prep than with my usual players and less impro. But with practice you’ll see that good ideas come more and more easily “on the fly”.
You can do it only using the DW rules. Really. And will be better than a traditional RPG.
Make some more prep (make more maps, with a little more detail), make fronts (this is essential) before playing, and ask few questions to the player. Narrate the results of moves (so the players only need to roll dices when they trigger a move). And … really remember to think offscreen too! Create some factions that try to overpower each other, or remember to follow the dark omens of your fronts, making a really dynamic world that lives without your PG’s but that only your PG’s can save from chaos and destruction.
Well I’m going to try to use DW to run AD&D2 Night of the Walking Dead adventure. So far I see no problems with it. Also I saw somewhere a report about running Expedition to Castle Ravenloft with DW.
One potential solution is to use or create a setting but keep some details loose. Not improvising everything gives him the comfort level and speaks to what he wants out of a game. Maybe he’ll be more comfortable narrating in little details as time goes on, starting with his character’s background first. Questions like, “Have you been to a city like this before?” “What did your mentor tell you about this?” and “What do you think about X?” might get the creativity flowing.
The GM principle of asking questions and using the answers doesn’t mean they have to be big questions. They can be small stuff as well, if you prefer a less-improvisational game.