Well, I just finished the first session with a new group. A friend from high school surprised me by starting a board game night at his house a few months ago, and they asked if I’d run something tonight. So, I grabbed my new hardcover and introduced four people to the hobby tonight 🙂 After leading them through the rather enjoyable character creation, we ended up with a barbarian, druid, thief, and ranger.
I started actual play with, “You all wake up lying in a pile of bones; a long shaft extends upwards. Did you jump down here on purpose, or were you thrown down?”, and then went from there.
As these players were totally new to RPGs, this first session was mostly them exploring a small dungeon and getting used to the whole ‘playing as a character’ thing. One rope-bridge-turned-ladder later (their idea), we had a nice split party fighting off a horde of skeletons and a devourer.
Now that the players mostly understand how the game works, we’ll return next week to the party exiting the ruins, badly wounded but alive, ready to explore this world together.
Hearing about first-time gamers using Dungeon World is always pretty fun. How were the transitions between “we’re telling a story” and “we’re rolling dice”?
The transitions went surprisingly smoothly, though I was a bit surprised that the players, at first, looked to their sheets for ‘what was possible’. I think they were still in board gaming mode and were trying to figure out what they were allowed to do within the rules on their playbooks.
Just once, early on, I had to put my hand slightly over the ranger’s playbook and say, “Regardless of what those moves say, what does Throndir want to ~do~ right now?” (This was one of the few times I needed to speak to the player, instead of the character). Once that happened, the conversation really opened up, and they started thinking in terms of the fictional world. (This was about the time that the thief realized he could cut the rope bridge to make a ladder down. I had used the bridge to ‘show signs of an approaching threat’, but the thief and barbarian quickly realized that they didn’t need to wait for the threat to approach them).
The players still looked to me to help them know when a move was triggered, but they really started thinking of cool ways to make their characters shine. They went from “I think I’ll Hack ‘n Slash?” to hanging on the rope ladder throwing daggers and turning into a moose to trample a column of skeletons.
I think the greatest part of the session for me, as a GM, was after we had ended, and one of the players said to the effect of, “This is the best game we’ve played yet; I just say what I want to do, and then you figure out what that means!”
Awesome to hear.