I was wondering what is needed when the desire amounts to creating a hack for DW.

I was wondering what is needed when the desire amounts to creating a hack for DW.

I was wondering what is needed when the desire amounts to creating a hack for DW… I’m debating creating a World of Warcraft one, but I’d like to know where to start from.

11 thoughts on “I was wondering what is needed when the desire amounts to creating a hack for DW.”

  1. Time and organisation! Like holy crap lots of time. On the plus side, it’s a hell of a lot of fun and the community is full of wonderful people who’ll support the hell out of you and give constructive criticism like nothing else, so that’s just awesome.

    For making Pirate World, I ran a pirate themed DW campaign a couple of months after Dungeon World came out. I had so much fun with it that I just kept making stuff and realised I wanted other people to have the same experience.

    So the first thing I did was throw everything out and start again from scratch, making sure I knew the themes I wanted from the hack (chaos! fun! a weird and unique world) and my core goal: all players must have fun and fictionally interesting options all the time.

    From there, I worked out what was different about what I was intending to do and worked out everything as concrete options. I realised that with the new classes I wanted people to play with, tons of new races and completely new Hireling and Background systems, I could barely jam it into a book. Then I got in touch with a couple of artists, who are both so damn excited (a wonderful excuse to draw pirates, sea monsters and weird crab people!).

    It’s been a great process, and taken a hell of a lot of organisation so far, but I’m definitely having fun. Even better, people seem to like Pirate World and keep throwing awesome suggestions my way that I hadn’t even thought of, and they get to go right into the book!

    I think someone is making a WoW hack! I’m sure someone knows about it, might have heard about it on the SA forums.

  7. As Josh Mannon says, play DW and see what feels like it’s wrong or missing. Also, think about what is core to WOW – what is absolutely essential for a game to feel like WOW. Maybe it’s the constant leveling or competition to level faster than other players. Maybe it has to do with the feel of modern people possessing people from a fantasy world and having their real world conversation while casually piloting another person into danger, talking smack all the while. Maybe it has to do with the way players have to work as a team, setting each up for powerful combos (fictional positioning already kind of does this but you could reward it or mechanize it to a greater degree).

  9. It depends on how deep you want to hack.

    If you just want to create new classes and races do that.

    If you want to go deeper then that don’t start with playbooks and stuff like that but with the GM Agenda and Principles. The basic moves and GM Moves.

    That is the best place to start.

  10. In general Races are maybe the single most easy thing to do. There are some things you have to keep in mind and doing a very elegant race surely isn’t that easy but it is not HARD.

    Then there are single moves you can write.

    The next thing would be compendium classes (classes that you can qualify for by doing specific things in the game and that give you access to a new set of moves)

    Then there are classes. Keep in mind that a class has roughly 24 moves you need to write + extra spells or stuff like that if you need it. That is A LOT of work.

    Then there is a deep hack with new basic moves, principles and way to play etc.

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