A small moment that amused me:
So the dwarven cleric failed his Last Breath roll, and given that it was the very first session, I decided to have a bit of mercy and decided to have him come back, only his heart wasn’t beating, he wasn’t breathing, and he was cold to the touch. Y’know, obviously some form of undead.
A bit later they were fighting some skeletons, and one PC was like “Use healing magic! It will hurt them!” There was a bit of questioning whether it actually worked that way in DW, like it does in D&D 3.5, so I turned to the cleric, and asked “I don’t know, DOES healing magic hurt the undead?”
His reply: “Yeah sur…. wait. No. No it doesn’t.”
Failed Last breath? This sounds more like a 7-9 to me.
Or a result of a Wizard trying to mock around with resurrection using Ritual.
Even then, according to the move the character will move on to the black gates soon.
Yes, you shouldn’t change the outcome of a move. But the undead healing stuff was cool.
Man you guys are harsh. This isn’t Dungeon Crawl Classics. Can’t a player get a break on a Last Breath Move in the first session. Sheesh. 😉
I had a player roll a last breath move on his first session, turned up 8 and he refused the deal. Death is not bad.
1. He even gets a last breath roll and isn’t dead instantly
2. He shouldn’t have died. It’s not like you can’t run away in Dungeon World.
And If you show the players that dead isn’t an option, they won’t be afraid of that in the future.
Well trust me guys, Ben is not usually one for mercy. Guaranteed he is waiting for an (in)opportune moment to suck out the guy’s soul in the middle of a fight or a wedding or something, and now there’s a free-roaming mindless undead roaming around eating us in addition to the task at hand.
The GM will tell you when, man. Could be years…
Isn’t having fun the whole point? Sounds like they accomplished their goal.
Yeah our Druid also turned into a giant spider and then offered to let my fighter ride down the dungeon walls on her butt.
Rules are meant to be broken…
By GMs who think a good story trumps good rules.
-.-
I did something similar in a game. I told a player “your soul is dead, passed on forever. Something else lives in your body, now. You want to play that thing, or make a new character?”
That’s almost word-for-word what Ben said. The healing magic answer was totally amusing though.
Then why have rules at all if we can just all agree on what is most fun…
I’m not throwing out the rules willy-nilly. I mean, this is straight from the book: On a miss, death is inevitable. The most obvious approach is to say “Death takes you across the threshold, into his bleak kingdom.” and move on. However, sometimes Death comes slowly. You might say “you have a week to live” or “you can feel the cold hand of Death on you…” and leave it at that, for now.
and rules-laywerd
Ben was playing exactly by the rules. In case there is any question, he did it right.
creator-laywerd
Lawyer-lawyered.
I feel there is a tension among some players on this kind of point. Personally I don’t give a damn what the rules say, the rules are there to guide us to awesome stories IMO. Other people have it different, they want to see where the rules take us, and screwing around with them undermines the point. With some systems we tend to ruin eachother’s fun, but the *World games make sure the rules lead to good stories instead of getting in the way. At least most of the time.
David Guyll Except that in this case, your days are numbered on a miss. You might not die now. As the move says:
You’re marked as Death’s own and you’ll cross the threshold soon. The GM will tell you when.
I’m not going to rules-lawyer much here. You can house-rule to your hearts content, I just personally like death to be a real threat in DW, something that isn’t a decision point for the GM. What you are doing here is to turn a a miss into a weak hit, IMO.
I like playing by the rules, even if it is house rules. As long as they don’t change at a whim.
I’m doing my best here not to sound negative, but I’m really with Tim Franzke here. The rules are not “meant to be broken”. They are meant to be played by, because rules are what sets the expectations of play.
However! Letting a player reawaken as undead, letting him slowly rot away is actually pretty cool. Especially if Death tells him this and then just laughs.
David Guyll Well, if you are going to ignore the result of a roll, then why even do it in the first place? That was more my line of thought.
Yes, you place some sort of cost to acknowledge the bad roll, but in the grand scheme of things, the context of the OP feels more like “I’ma give you the bargain of a 7-9” but without the choice part.
That’s cool if everyone think it’s great, but I wonder what the next player to die would think, when his character isn’t magically saved this way?
If you don’t want people to die, don’t deal lethal damage to them. Dealing damage is always (unless a player does it to themselves) a deliberate choice.
What Tim Franzke said. This obviously unwanted scenario could have been avoided very easily, without ignoring the roll of the dice, and much more elegantly.
I think it is time to start a new thread on this. Unfortunately, it seems like this one has been seriously derailed.
I’m sorry about that, by the way. I didn’t intend this to happen.
The OP was hilarious, I laughed 🙂