Bonds.

12 thoughts on “Bonds.”

1. I’ve haven’t had any problems yet.  We’ve had bonds resolve, new bonds written, character death (resulting in resolved bonds), the works.

   What problems are you anticipating?

2. I’m not anticipating anything. My goal here is to start a discussion about bonds and peoples’ experiences with them.

3. We initially had a misunderstanding of the value of bonds, believing that if we fulfilled that resolved it, but kept it after.

   Current issue is not enough bonds. I believe the cap should be 2-3 per individual. But sometimes players don’t have 1.

4. Every character should always have 3-5 (most have four, but the wizard and bard). Oh, and there are a few moves in our later output that let you take a new bond, but most of those are in compendium classes.

5. Per character? Seems too high to me. When you think about how a bond works, it should be some strong motivation, or past incident rather, that binds you together. More than two makes things… Off. Or at least I don’t see how the fiction would work right.

6. No, he means 3-5 total bonds per PC.

7. Yeah, each PC will have 3-5 outbound bonds. That means that in a typical group of 3-5 players each PC will have a bond with at least two other PCs.

   I think of it as graph theory: it’s possible for there to be cliques or cycles, but the most common distribution will be a mix where each character relates to at least two others somehow.

8. Sage LaTorra my mistake. I was referring to per character.

9. I like to hack my games with custom bonds. It’s great for setting campaign expectations. It’s probably the easiest hack there and it’s very effective.  Also I don’t limit bond number at all: any time player wants a new bond, he can write one.  Moreover, when a new character enters the game, it’s mandatory that existing character or two makes a bond with them. That leads for a vary light emphasis on each bond: most of them don’t come up in play but once or twice. But overall effect is great: characters are strongly tied with each other and with the world.

10. I’m not sure I follow. Each player character will have 3-5 outbound bonds, and, typically, a similar number of inbound bonds.

    Sure, there are weird configs like the ring where everyone focuses on the person next to them. Or the sink, where most of the bonds all go to one person. But more typically, it’s a random-ish distribution where each character has 4 outbound bonds and 4 inbound (since each bond connects two characters).

11. Yeah, Vasiliy. Really what I was getting at was how often people create custom bonds and how well that went.

12. One of the games I play in had some problems because we have a relatively large pool of players of which a only a subset can play on a given week (this is suboptimal for Dungeon World, but it’s logistically what we have to work with).

    We have a house rule that you’re allowed to have a bond with each existing character, but you can only have a number of bonds “active” in a given session equal to the number your class would normally have. I don’t think it’s a great solution, but it’s worked ok so far.

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