Is anyone recording aps of their sessions since the final rules came out? I’m reading through my hard cover and having trouble visualising how some of it works.
Take rot grubs for instance. Their move is to burrow into flesh, lay eggs which can then hatch quite gruesomely. How does this play out in the game, example please? 🙂
How would it play out in a Story? Ask yourself that question and you will get to the Answers.
What Tim said, there are no infection rules, no specific time based moves here.
Yeah, I got that, which is why I was asking for a concrete example of how it can work in practice.
The thing is that it is likely to work out differently for each group.
Ok, so I’d like an example of how it could work out for one group. I understand you don’t want to give an example, which is fine of course, but the advice you and Tim are giving me is no more than I got from the manual already. I’m hoping someone can demonstrate it more concretely.
LEt’s do something Nicholas. I MC and you play a character. Let’s just use basic moves for now.
You have slain the infested Warthogs that attacked you while you made camp. As you get closer to one of them you can still see something moving under it’s skin.
What do you do?
(this is me doing Show signs of an approaching threat)
Ok, being the curious sort, I lean in and poke at the skin with the tip of a knife.
As you poke into the moving flesh you are pretty sure something is in there, something that could explain why all the animals in the elven glades act so strange. You have to open the cadavre though. What is in there could get out.
(Me putting you in a spot)
Ok, I’ll empty out a pouch of coin and hold it near the skin. I’ll cut where the movement is and attempt to trap whatever it is with the pouch.
Okay, you do that, your pouch begins to fill with something slimy and slithering. The stench that you smelled get’s worse and worse. Like a decaying corpse but more sugary.
For a moment everything is okay but then the cut that you made widens and a swarm of tiny purple wormlike things burst out of the corpse. Some of them slithering over the pouch torward your hand, others jumping with more force than you could think at you, clinging to your clothes wherever they land.
What do you do?
(The move Burst forth from an infected creature allows me to simply say that. I trigger the move and it happens)
(other people, feel free to comment on me MCing. I don’t have that much experience ^^)
Ok, I’ll jump back and try to brush the worms off my clothes.
Sounds like you are acting under fire (with Dex maybe?), the fire beeing that the worms do really bad stuff to your skin.
You are up for that?
(Tell them the consequnces and ask)
The alternative is to leave them to get on with business at their own pace, so yeah 🙂 assuming my dex sucks and I fail…
You trash around like a wild monkey, trying to get them off you but you chainmail really isn’t helping. They wiggle through the chainlink and you feel them moving against your underclothes. You get the ones from your hands and feet away easily but you have to get out of your mail before getting to the ones at your torso and now you feel the first crawling against your skin.
(showing downside of equipment)
Ok, trying to get the chain mail off as quickly as possible.
While you do that you feel a new sensation of pain coming up. tiny tiny legs crawling over you and slightly larger maws feeding on your flesh.
You take 2 damage and are sick (-1 Con). As you take your shirt of too you can see tiny shapes crawling under your skin, just as you did on the dead animals.
(burrow under flesh)
Suddenly you hear a howl coming from somewhere close and north. As you look up you see the full moon shining brightly in the night sky.
(reveal an unwelcome truth)
What do you do?
I suppose this would not be the place for me to step in, pour lantern oil all over Nicholas and set him on fire, right? 😉
Great narrative, guys — really helps bring it out.
Thank you Brennan OBrien
Desperate times… I grit my teeth and cut at the shapes, trying to dig them out.
Brennan OBrien actually, given how many of these things there are, that might be the merciful act:-)
So you are doing what? Acting under fire of them doing even more in your body? Sounds like you need Con to bear the pain or Int to make the right cuts. Do you agree?
Given I’m already sick with pain, con seems most pressing
Okay, roll it
(Defy Danger not Act Under Fire) You’re doing great!
Stupid me ^^, thanks Josh Mannon
Call it a fail, my sweat slicked hands are having trouble with the knife and my vision is doubling from the pain.
As you cut deep into your chest your hands start trembling even more. 1, 2 and 3 of them you get out before your vision ge’s dizy. You can open up another spot and squeeze on of them in your first before all get’s dark and you pass out.
(I am not sure what move this is. It follows logicly from the fiction. I guess it’s put someone in a spot)
as you are awake the slithering has stopped for now but you are weakend (-1 Str)
What is the first thing you see?
(Ask questions and build on the answers)
Trees. It’s dark, but the full moon provides more than enough silvery light to make out the swaying shapes.
Is this clear now or do you need more help with another part of the monster?
I think I see now. Thinking back over the monsters, some of them would be very lethal. With moves like “turn to stone” it seems that characters could get torn apart very quickly.
Uh… I light him on fire. And take his stuff. Do I get to mark XP for fighting a notable monster?
That is why you should Spout Lore about stuff so that you know what is coming. Retreat is allways an option and then there is stuff like ritual etc.
Have you read the 16 HP Dragon?
http://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/
From what is going on, i would makeyou keep the debilities until someone comes and heals you (new quest yeah!) like an Elven Priest of something.
If you go on without taking care of it the eggs would hetch “soon” and you would have to defy the danger of them driving you mad (custom move : driving insane by feeding on the intestines. This is based on the fact, that it drove the animals of the forest mad)
You are also still bleeding and there are predators in the wood that can smell that.
Like the Werewolf has a move of
Hunt like man and beast
activating that would mean they find your bloodtrail.
and this is all starting and ending in the fiction i think
I see it now… And thanks for that link, I hadn’t read that before but it was the final missing piece.. You really do just rip off arms and burrow into organs where necessary. Wonder what that char will do now with one arm. 🙂
But as a GM you have to do that sort of thing. If not then threats are not real. You still should be a fan of them but that means watching them struggle against really big problems and cheer at them even if they fail. It’s not going easy on them that allows them to be that much more awesome.
That’s also why it is cool to kick of with 2 Ogres instead of 4 Kobolds. If you want to use Kobolds either use like 30 of them or make them Tuckers Kobolds.
LEt them be big awesome heroes and not guys that kill a few big rats in a cellar.
I think that was one of my best realizations during the game. So long as I didn’t throw something overwhelming (a dragon, for example) at the group, they could handle just about any threat.
I don’t know, those rats look nasty too 🙂 ok, gotta try and sleep now. 3am and I have to be on client site in the morning. Too hot to sleep but gotta try.. Thanks for the help dude!
no Problem. I had fun.
And we all learned something.
And knowledge is approximately 50% of any given conflict.
Tim Franzke
Beautiful
I approve and love it.
Thank you
But doing it here like this is also way easiert because you have a bit of time to make your move and 4 guys’n’gals aren’t staring at you in excitement.
It also shows, that making the move that is the most obvious right now is most often the best thing. Don’t try to be hyper creative and novel when making moves.
Don’t try to be hyper novel, but do think off screen (like the werewolf thing Tim mentioned). Sometimes things that don’t follow immediately make the most sense and are awesome. It’s valid and RIGHT for MCs to use misses to set up future problems (I’ve seen lots of people talk about not making players roll if they can’t think of bad stuff happening — no, just set up for new badness elsewhere).
i don’t think “don’t roll when there is nothing at stake” applies in DW. When you roll there is something at stake by definition of you making a move.
Not sure how this relates to “Take Watch” but still.
This helps to “make their lives interesting” and keeps things moving.
That’s what I’m saying Tim Franzke! I’ve seen people in places saying things about only having one person roll to defy danger when sneaking past giants (even though they’re ALL sneaking past them, they should all be defying danger).
Some people have adapted D&Ds “roll when you do something risky” instead of “to do it, do it” it seems like? And I think it’s important to affirm for anyone having problems with the moves that rolling is what propels the action forward.
Well, one rolls Defy Danger and the other help right? The 7-9 of peoples help moves will create enough opportunities for stuff to happen…
They Could be helping, but that’s different from also sneaking, isn’t it? That’s its own thing.
Well
Thief: “I am leading the group past the giants, trying to be as quick and clever without alerting the giants”
GM: Okay, but you have to defy the danger of them spoting and attacking you.
so far so good. The other people can then try to Help the Thief in his endevaour by beeing extremly quiet, quick and follwoing his lead.
This totally works if everyone says the right stuff.
Here’s where you and I will have to disagree 🙂 helping someone else defy danger doesn’t make you yourself defy danger, just like no one gets to roll their damage by helping someone else hack and slash, at least in my opinion.
Obviously, exceptions exist and that makes talking about anything with DW difficult since context is everything, but in general this is how I feel about it.
If anything, the thief leading them is the Thief Aiding each party member individually, after Discerning Realities to find the right route.
but you are not in danger. The Thief defys the danger for the whole group. You help him doing that by following his orders, making a distraction etc.
It’s a cool montage like scene and everyone can contribute without it beeing defy danger for anyone.
I think we just have to agree to disagree
I’m fine with agreeing to disagree 🙂 it still makes for good rules discussion!
In the end both options make sense from a mechanic standpoint. It’s mostly a question of aesthetics and desired scenes.
It also comes down to what the thief player is doing.
Brennan OBrien by the way, the setting him on fire part would have totally worked. I’d rolled a d10+3 or something for the damage and the Grubs would have been gone.
Nicholas Bronson of course would have had the chance to react and do something once you started doing this.
Nicholas Bronson I wonder if you have read The Dungeon World Guide? You find it at:
http://www.dungeon-world.com/dungeon-world-guide/
i think he said he did
+1 to the whole thread, you guys rock.
Joachim Erdtman actually, I hadn’t seen that no, I’ll have to give it a look.
Tim Franzke a chance to react… By rolling on the ground in the dual pain of grubs and fire, burning merrily? 🙂
Great examples.
We’re four sessions in on my Nordemark DW campaign and I’ve run four or five DW one-shots as well as a bunch of other *World games.
I often feel like I know how to handle stuff like the monster moves above but don’t execute it as well as I’d like when in the moment of play. Still learning even after all my MC’ing…
Tim Franzke can you unpack this a little bit:
“Sounds like you are acting under fire (with Dex maybe?), the fire being that the worms do really bad stuff to your skin.
You are up for that?
(Tell them the consequnces and ask)”
I’m mostly wondering what would have happened if the player had said “No way, I just throw my arms up in front of my face and run screaming from the room.”
Still Defy Danger?
I’ve been really interesting in picking apart my own uses of this move, so I love seeing other people chime in.
That might work getting away from a dragon, but given I was already covered in worms, and they were inside my clothes/armour, I think pretty much anything would be defy danger. Either that, or running from the room and not even making an attempt to get rid of them is just giving the gm carte blanche to make the next move, which is yummy yummy adventurer organs 🙂 that’s how I was thinking about it anyway.
Hey Adam Koebel
i think the idea of the move at this point was:
Can i get these worms away from my body before they can start some funny business.
“No way, I just throw my arms up in front of my face and run screaming from the room.”
^
okay you do that but the worms don’t care
There is not really fire there. Or more importantly, it’s like he jumps into the fire takes a deep breath and tries to juggle some eggs there. Sure he can run away but then i isn’t acting under fire but ignoring it.
(ARRGGHGHHH it’s DEFY DANGER not AuF!!!!)
But still he isn’t really defiyng the danger of the worms at that point. He is still under danger of them but if he just runs away the danger of the wurms doesn’t interefer with it.
a 7-9 would probarbly have dealth with the campfire in some way…