How would you pitch Dungeon World to another role-player?

How would you pitch Dungeon World to another role-player?

How would you pitch Dungeon World to another role-player? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as I really want to “pitch it right”. I’ve been thinking about signing up as GM at Fastaval 2014, so I feel it needs some polishing.

I invite you to write down your game pitch below, I’d love to see it 🙂

My pitch

Dungeon World is a fantasy role-playing game. It differs from mainstream RPG’s mainly on two accounts.

1) Characters are, mechanically, comprised of moves, rules that says exactly what happens when they pursue a specific course of action. Each class has their own set of “Class Moves”, making then uniquely capable at fulfilling their intended role in the party.

2) It does away with the binary outcomes of Success vs. Failure. Instead there are three margins of success; “what you wanted”, “what you wanted but at a cost or compromise”, and “the GM decides the outcome but you get an experience point”. Whatever you roll, something interesting happens making every roll count.

13 thoughts on “How would you pitch Dungeon World to another role-player?”

  2. DW is a fantasy adventure game that’s all about describing your characters and their actions, and escalating situations.

    Character creation takes around 10 to 15 minutes, so well be playing really soon, and when you roll there’s 3 kinds of outcomes: success, success with a cost or complication, and things get worse.

  3. Remember when when someone first described DnD to you, what you thought it would be like? DW is that game. No turns, no endless lists of lists. Describe what you do, then roll.

  5. Pitch: There’s a reason D&D is so popular: going into the darkness and slaying monsters is timeless and full of challenging fun. DW is D&D with rules so fast, sleek and clear it won Golden Geek and Indie RPG Game of the Year as well as an ENnie for Best Rules. The question isn’t whether you should play DW, but why aren’t you playing it right now?

  6. The best thing to let another role-player know what makes DW special is how much freedom and creativity they get. Let them know that with how the rules work, that the player can do just about anything. Explain how move’s work and what those 7-9’s really mean. 

    Oh and what Krusty Wightbred said!

  7. My best pitch so far was when I told the players that I wanted to playtest a game.

    Other then the fact that I didn’t know how to do much of anything, it went quite well.

    There might be more creative ways, but this one kind of started us all off with open minds.

  10. If fantasy is about feeling the wind of adventure blowing through your hair.

    If roleplaying is about telling challenging stories of heroes beating overwhelming odds.

    If ruling is about helping you to bring fantasy and roleplaying at the table.

    Than Dungeon World is your game. come and dive into the days of high adventure!

    Basil Poledouris – Prologue / Anvil Of Crom

  12. Remember how you played D&D when you didn’t actually know how to play D&D? You probably played for years without actually knowing what you were doing. But damn it was fun. You probably had awesome memorable adventures and your heroes did super wild shit that somehow made sense. You probably ignored most of the rules and the ones you didn’t ignore you probably applied incorrectly or only when it felt right. Now you look back and you wonder how those games happened with the D&D rules you understand. You kind of laugh about how crazy kids just do whatever. Or how kids don’t really know good rules from bad. You were actually playing Dungeon World back then but you just didn’t know it. Adam and Sage played that same game and instead of growing up and stopping, they wrote it all down and called it Dungeon World so we can play D&D without anyone telling us we’re doing it wrong.

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