A dream– DW Hardcover, with text revised to take into account best-practice discovered over the last few years, with artwork by TheosOne http://theosone.blogspot.com/ and Jakob Rebelka. http://shzrebelka.tumblr.com/
A dream– DW Hardcover, with text revised to take into account best-practice discovered over the last few years,…
A dream– DW Hardcover, with text revised to take into account best-practice discovered over the last few years,…
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Jakub Rebelka is SO AWESOME.
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No disrespect to Nate Marcel, the original DW cover artist. His stuff is really great–I would have loved to see what he would have done if he were the artist for the whole DW book.
Is there a link to these “best practices”?
Well, that’s just the problem, Ryan M. Danks. As an RPG newbie, I stumbled upon Dungeon World, thought it looked cool, and dove in to the rules. But I had to do a lot of searching for clarification and the why of many rules. Helpful were the Dungeon World Guide, blogs like Walking Mind, Red Box Vancouver, Joe Banner, the DW subreddit, DW’s downloads page, and lots of other places, including commentary here from people like Tim Franzke and others. Some of what I found was so helpful that I wish it was preserved as part of the source material.
That is a problem I’ve found with World games overall. They write their games by listing ideas, but are not very good at describing and teaching them.
Right. Not to say that D&D books (the only other RPG I have played) are any better at explaining (they’re not), but I personally know a lot of D&Ders from deeper in the nerd forest than I, who can explain everything to me as we play. Not so with DW…. yet? Maybe in twenty years, when DW is a pop cultural stalwart, newbs won’t have to figure it all out just from the books.
Yeah, the Tavern alone is chock full of awesome advice and helpful posts, but good luck finding it all.
Where D&D fails is not enough examples. They do a great job of describing all of the rules and how they function, but they don’t show us.
World games show us everything, but they don’t explain it, so if we encounter any circumstance other than the example, we have to interpret the rules.
I read DW twice before I kind of understood it, and had to purchase and read AW three times before I got the system well enough to run a game of DW.
If I weren’t really dedicated to the idea, I would have ditched the effort altogether and just played Fate Core, which does the best job I’ve seen of explaining and showing.
Ryan M. Danks “read AW three times before I got the system well enough to run a game” – Me too, me too. NEVER happened before in my RpG history. I read and re-read that damn 😀 manual, then I was if front of my players, they chose the playbooks, made the characters… and I had a TOTAL BLOCK. I said… “I don’t know how manage all this”. “I don’t understand my role and my instruments”. “People, sorry, we can’t play, tonight”. NEVER happened before! It was brainfucking to me. Thanks, thanks forever, Vincent Baker . Now, years later, I can blast my nights with wonderful games thanks to him, and Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel .
However, +1 for a DW Revamped Edition.
How big would the book then be? It’s already quite filled with stuff…
Generally, I agree. The *World games are quite traditional, mechanically (they’re quite different from 3E D&D, but very similar to other traditions), but they’re also quite odd in some ways, in particular in the way that the GM is constrained. It’s not easy to learn.
(If you’re coming from purely 3E/4E/Pathfinder, I can imagine the transition being really quite difficult)
Tim Franzke they could lose two thirds of the monsters, for sure. Do people really use them as-is, rather than as examples?
I’ll put in a note here that I really don’t like any of the DW art. Far too cartoony for me. Like it almost as little as I like the art in 3E and Pathfinder.
(NB no promise here that I represent the tastes of… anyone else at all, really 🙂 )
Oh well, Rob Alexander, ready-to-use magical objects, monsters, weapons, locations are a real blessing for all the full job working, middle aged, father of family Masters. I love to have a good choice of pre-made things, and of course I love to twist’em for my personal taste.
Andrea Parducci noted. But do they need to be in the core book?
Well, it’s difficult to choice… Do I like ready-to-use things over extra explanations and examples? What deserve to stay in a core book? Maybe the book is quite balanced as it is now. If I could choice, surely I’d redoing the art, and I’ll patch/modify/polish the classes, now that they are around for years.
I’d rather have more monsters that make stuff up on the fly.
I’m in the camp of provide me with common examples (some archetypes, a few orcs and goblins, a couple monsters, and some mundane beasts). From there, personally, I’ll create my own. But, if there’s demand, totally make a bestiary sourcebook (or 4) for those who never want to create their own villains.
That would ease up space for more explanation of terms and concepts.
So, just got the FATE Core book… That is one well put-together instruction book.