Got to run Dungeon World for some old high school buds who only have Pathfinder/World of Darkness experience.
The session started with one of them (a Pathfinder DM) remarking that he was impressed by how concise the Druid rules were, and ended with the player of the Cleric leaping into a mine shaft to fight an evil spider-god in midair.
It’s actually made me rethink the traditional RPG assumption of scaling difficulty. . . representing harder tasks fictionally as “more things that could go wrong” instead of mechanically as “higher chance of failure” is pretty brilliant, and interestingly enough ties into the way a lot of the old-school D&D game mechanics worked . . .
Agreed about how nicely consise DW is without burying the player in rules. Scaling is quite tricky when levels are gone though I’ve listened to and/or played a lot of Call of Cthulhu & Eclipse Phase where without levels as well as Dungeon World how you can simply make things harder with good preperation at giving the player character tough choices on a very personal level of the character with lots of gray areas of how the character & the world changes with the choice made.
(…)representing harder tasks fictionally as “more things that could go wrong” instead of mechanically as “higher chance of failure” is pretty brilliant (…)
That’s a great and insightful way to put it. Thanks.
No wonder the session ended – the
Cleric’s PLAYER jumped down a mineshaft???? That’s too hardcore for me. 😉
Chris McGee
What can I say! He took my suggestion that “you don’t trigger a move by saying you trigger a move, you trigger it by DOING SOMETHING” too literally. I forgot to append it with “in the fiction.”