I converted my campaign over to Dungeon World today. The characters began life in the Beyond the Wall game. I love character creation in BtW, but I haven’t really enjoyed the actual gameplay; other than the magic, the rest of the game is pretty much standard D&D.
I made custom playbooks for the characters and we tried them out today. The players seemed to enjoy it, and the “fail forward” style really helped to drive the game. I think the experiment will turn out to be a success, BUT I figured I’d ask the tavern if anybody has had problems converting an ongoing game to DW in the past, or if there is anything specific I should watch for.
Did you have the players redo the characters at level1 or something else for bringing them in from one campaign set of rules to another? Don’t have a ton of experience with BtW but curious on what you did when bringing them into Dungeon World.
Started them at level 1. They had gotten to about level 3 in BtW, but that’s a much lower power system, basically they had just gotten to the point where a single stray arrow wasn’t going to take them out, but more than a couple of mistakes would – that seemed like a good point to match to level 1 in DW
I moved my long running d&d campaign to DW, but started in a new part of the world so they could have a hand in world creation. I’m thinking of moving them to a more familiar location in our next session, now that their characters are quite established and the lone power gamer has bought into DW. This is a campaign that started in 2nd ed, went to 3.5 and ended with a fairly long run of 4th ed. I’m thinking of taking them back to the beginning so they might run into the original characters.
I had two players take some time to make the shift to DW. The power gamer balked and made a character that was a pain in the butt, he’s since retired that character and made an incompetent wizard so he can gain levels faster? Ithink the party might kill him before he kills them from his poor rolls. The other took some time to get to be comfortable with role playing. He’s a math head, and always loved when cool things happened, but didn’t get in character much, that has taken a few sessions to fix, but he’s really enjoying it now.
I find gamers with little or no rpg experience are less work bringing into DW.
New players really do pick up the Dungeon World paradigm faster; it’s easier to create new habits than to change old ones.
Frank Emanuel just need to put the more mature power gamers in Call of Cthulhu rpg adventure, great cure to the power gaming silly mindset when you can give them all the power they want but can still go insane or get homicidal mania now the party has to deal with the power hungry player character now turned against some of them.
Glad I wore out the power gamer mindset early for more exploration of the world & story. And flawed characters are more fun than always playing Buff McLarge-Huge every game with 25 different +5 weapons. If you want that kind of power in a game, I say go play a computer pc rpg instead.