I just discovered DW and I have a question. If I decided to try it out, I’d be playing the game with only one player. I know in most games you generally break immersion when you give a Player, especially a newer player, two to four PC’s to control. Given how narrative and game fiction focused DW is, is this still the case in a game of DW?
I just discovered DW and I have a question.
I just discovered DW and I have a question.
I would say don’t do that. DW works just fine with a single player as a single PC. As the game encourages player contribution to the narrative (and the game mechanics trigger off of narration), juggling multiple characters will be confusing. I say stick with one character.
You can certainly play DW with one character. I haven’t done it, but I would, in a pinch.
I’ve run DW with as few as two players, and it was awesome as each PC gt a lot of spotlight time. Having only one player means you won’t have any inter-party roleplaying, but there is nothing mechanically preventing you from running DW with a single PC. I would simply make sure that the type of quest/mission/or adventure you send the PC on is appropriate (fiction wise) for one person.
Actually, you can do lots of cool adventures that you could’t do with a group. I’m thinking super spy James Bond-inspired stuff.
DW is not about having a set number of roles covered off, so playing a solo adventure will work fine, should be awesome even.
I would like to point out that playing a second character is an option when you get to level 10. Also, I think in ApocWorld Vincent Baker says that there’s no reason the players couldn’t play more than 1.
When I started running DW for my wife, I came from a “typical” rpg background. As such, when she said she would play a Wizard, I “knew” I needed to run two NPCs: a Fighter for muscle and defense, and a Cleric for healing (my wife refuses to play more than one character in any rpg).
Now that I have some experience under my belt, I realize that we don’t really need the two NPCs. DW isn’t built on mechanical assumptions in the way D&D is, for instance. Monsters, etc., are not built with an assumption of a certain number of party members. In fact, the only tangible drawback to having one PC is that Bonds (a mechanic which explores PC relationships) don’t play the role intended with XP, but you’re talking one point of XP which can be made up a different way.
Bottom line, DW lends itself to one player better than any fantasy rpg I’ve played.
The Noble playbook is a two character playbook: one for the Noble and one for the Assistant. It was a little hard for my player at first because he would forget about the Assistant, but now he’s getting the hang of it and it’s pretty neat.
I ran a one player game once to show the system off to my brother. He played a Mage and had a blast. It works fine as a single PC game.
This is extremely encouraging. We’ve picked Dungeon World today after reviewing all of the options on the table (primarily Burning Wheel and GURMSHOE). I’m so very excited. Purchasing the PDF on Wednesday and hope to have our first session on Christmas Day. Wish me luck!! Thank you so much for the feedback guys. It looks like the community here is really going to be an asset to getting the most out of this new endeavor =D