Just some random thoughts…
Watching the Elves in the latest Hobbit movie wade through goblins and orcs made me think how that would translate to DW. I don’t think they would roll Hack & Slash (or any other move), maybe something like:
“When fighting goblins and orcs, as long as you are not surprised and they do not have a name, you deal your damage to them and avoid their attack.”
Fictional positioning. If orcs and goblins are not a threat in your dungeon world then they can just narrate killing them as they are no longer needing to engange in melee with them. Volley on the other hand is different as it is hard to get around the trigger there.
In this kind of situation in a game, you might as well just not bother with them at all. It doesn’t really add much in my opinion.
I was thinking more for just the elves. Other races wouldn’t have this ‘out,’ such as hobbits. They’d still have to roll H&S or similar.
Thinking on what you said tho, fictional positioning or simply skipping it works most of the time. I was just pondering how DW would apply it’s rules to those scenes.
Well, Tolkienesque elves are very different from kitchen sink fantasy elves. First of all, because they are inherrently magical and immortal. I wouldn’t want to play in a game where being an elf was strictly better than everything else.
That said… I used to play a lot of 4e. Me and a friend had a talk about the differences between the Heroic Tier and the Epic Tier. My friend explained it very well:
Heroic characters treat rubble as difficult terrain and a zombie horde as a major threat. Epic characters treat a zombie horde as difficult terrain and a godlike being as a major threat.
While you might not want to actually fight godlike beings in your standard DW game, the same logic could be applied here. If you want the PC’s to be especially bad ass, you could just treat a specific kind of monster as an impediment instead of an actual “enemy”.
No H&S, because that can’t truly fight you, and slaughtering them would take time you might not have. Instead you’d be looking for ways to make them useful, or just to quickly bypass them.
Aren’t the elves in the movies a kind of “elite” unit? Something like a goblin slayer CC?