I had a longer conversation with Markus Wagner last week about getting moves in the fiction.
His point was, that in DW you only get 9 extra moves from your levels. Getting extra moves breaks that balance. When you can “just” get Divine Guidance/Cast a Spell by rescuing a god, that is not fair to the other players who would have to work to get this. Especially if there is a Cleric in the group. He suddenly is way less interesting/special.
I have no problem with this (especially because it’s a clear example in the book, p 28) and think class balance is really no thing in DW but i understand the argument.
What are your experiences with prescriptive advances in Dungeon World?
(and yes, we freed a god in our session)
In my experience they almost never happen.
If one cares about “balance”, look to the compendium classes. Make “Divine Guidance” a new option that can be taken next level.
That said, meh, I personally wouldn’t worry about it.
/sub
Well, the cleric will still have whatever advanced moves they have, and the opportunity to keep getting them. They’re still more solidly cleric-y, I think.
That said, it doesn’t happen all that often, and when it does I think ‘balance’ isn’t really something we worry about much. If it makes sense in the fiction, run with it. How will the church react to this outsider getting holy powers? If anyone can get spells this way, will a competing god bless a villain with similar powers?
I’m a big fan of cross-classing the Paladin with the Cleric spell move. It’s totally fun to have a spell-wielding Paladin.
My question is, “Why would you want to duplicate what another character already in the party can do? Why not get some other cool ability not yet represented in the party?”
Duplication is also not a problem. Everybody in the group could have the exact same moves and it would be fine.
would it help to think about this kind of advanced moves like if they were powers granted by magic items found in a treasure?
Extra moves don’t break the balance because an extra move isn’t an increase in power, it’s an increase in versatility.
That said, two things:
1) I personally disallow MCing to a move that someone else already has, just to enforce a little bit of niche protection.
2) if you just rescued a god, why is the consequence that you now have a Cleric move? If you want to give the character who rescued them some kind of divine power as a reward, write a custom move; don’t just hand them part of another class’ mechanics.
Increased versatility certainly seems like an increase in power to me; you’ve got more power to solve problems in more ways. I don’t think it’s a big deal in Dungeon World, but it’s definitely there.