If this has been put forth before, forgive me, but: is it just me, or is Skyrim a pretty great example of a Dungeon World campaign and setting done right?
Think about it. You’ve got two diverse and interesting Fronts: The Return of the Dragons, and The War of Succession. You were slammed feet first into both in the first session, which had a fantastic opening pitch: “You are captured and will be executed in the next thirty seconds. How do you escape?”
And after surviving that first session, the world that opens up to you is full of monsters, dungeons, diverse races, ancient mysteries and Places of Power, peppered with steadings of various sizes but for the most part wild and unknown. There are so many crazy side bits they could only have been generated on the fly by party input. And all the while, those two big Fronts are going on in the background, coloring everything.
(Granted, they don’t advance without player input, but that’s a limitation of the medium.)
Anyway, yeah, just thought I’d share those thoughts.
I had this same thought.
It would be an interesting experiment (given infinite time/resources, natch) to ‘force’ all other fronts in Skyrim to advance whenever the player advanced one of them. It would certainly make the world feel more alive and change the fundamental replayability of the game.
That said, I don’t know if I’d actually like that as a player. Part of what makes Skyrim great is the ability to play it at one’s own pace, exploring at leisure, getting distracted (and getting distracted from that distraction by another distraction and oh what’s over that hill…)
Sean Gomes I agree. It’s a sandbox game, and would really suffer if it started lighting fires under the player’s backside. The side quests are well over 90% of what the game is really about.
I would like to see a game of similar scale where you have to make hard choices about which (equally pressing and interesting) plot lines to engage with, but it would be a very different style of game.
I’m too old to play computer games. For those old enough, my first computer was a Sinclair 48k ZX Spectrum, and the best “RPG” on it was Velnor’s lair. DnD was so much better so I never tried computer games again.
I haven’t played Skyrim but I do remember the ZX Spectrum. I play more tabletop games nowadays. I did play Lord of the Rings online for a while last year. Using ideas from computer games for role playing games is a good idea. A lot of creative people are employed to make a great computer game. It’s worth mining that resource for your own campaign.