16 thoughts on “Dungeon World revitalized my interest in pen & paper RPGs.”

  1. Looking through this, I was confused by the character creation a little. There was a line that said look at the Survivor profiles, which I thought meant playbooks, but I guess it means the character types under good guys? Not sure though, because those are way at the end of the book.

    If you are still accepting suggestions, I think you should rename Body to Meat – the more visceral sound goes well with Brains and Guts, and that seems to be the sort of feel the game is going for based on the design

  3. How are you dealing with infection in the case of players being wounded by said zombies? I tried to run a post-apoc campaign around this one time only to have it end VERY quickly (party wipe)

  5. I should point out that the most current content rules wise is available via download – the survivors guide is what you want. We are still in the process of updated the text on the blog itself so some of what you see there via the links isn’t altogether up to date.

  7. This all looks really good =D

    It has an Apocalypse World feel to it as well as Dungeon World.

    I would say, though, that there might be too many basic moves. Especially in *World games I generally enjoy a “less is more” when it comes to basic moves. 

    I feel like “Fight” and “Shoot” are a little too similar. I really enjoy the dual mechanic from AW where there is a “Seize by Force” and a “Go Aggro” move. The difference being; “seize” is a direct assault, and “aggro” is a threat of violence. However the dynamic is a little different in your game wherein you’re either fighting zombies, or other survivors. So perhaps you could have two moves based on that dynamic. One could be a more aggressive move for fighting zombies, and the other a more threatening move to use against intelligent survivors that you really don’t want to have to fight with (obviously you can’t threaten zombies… they don’t care).

    Act Under Pressure – I don’t know how I feel about this. I mean it’s a classic AW move. It’s a super important move for sure. But when I play AW or MH I feel like people with the highest “guts” or equivalent stat have a huge advantage in avoiding terrible things. I really love DW’s “Defy Danger” mechanic. To have some flexibility in how you avoid danger is not only more fair (imo) but more creatively empowering to players. Obviously you won’t always be able to use “brains” to avoid a danger, but having the option in certain situations it pretty cool.

    Read a Person or Situation feels a bit too simplified. The specific questions in other games’ equivalent moves takes some of the burden off of the GM to come up with all the data, it also helps to guide the player, and helps the game designer guide the flavour of the world based on the kind of questions that are available to ask. There’s a big difference between “What here is useful or valuable to me” and “What is my nearest escape route”. One values exploration, and one values survival.

    In respect to “Apply Knowledge” “React” and “Read a Person or Situation” they all seem to have a lot of overlap. I can tell that you were hoping to have two basic moves for each stat, and that makes sense. But I think they should be either more specific, or combined in some cases. I don’t have any specific recommendation, but it’s just a thought. If you look at the DW Basic Moves, they only have one for each stat. AW has two for some and one for others. I don’t think you have to force two moves where one more specific one would work. Also, again, I think having more specific options to choose from would be better too.

    All that said, I think all this stuff is a great start! I’m looking forward to play testing it!

  9. Ooh! I just had another thought about your combat moves. (sorry for so many posts).

    You might want to consider either a full move, or a special move for “mow ’em down” situations that happen sometimes where survivors unload on a horde. It would be time consuming and annoying to shoot each “insipid” zombie one by one. So maybe a move where more than one player all work together and unload on a horde you could take care of it in one roll and your damage roll would, instead, count the number of zombies with the “insipid” tag that are destroyed. 

    I do like rousing moments of victory. All the better to contrast the terrible moments of defeat!

  10. ok, one more thing and I’m done (for now). I noticed that on the banner on your homepage you misspelled “cannibalization”.

    Hopefully these comments are helpful. I don’t mean to be annoying, I’m just excited about the idea =D

    One quick question though. Which materieals on your download site are the most current? The stuff under “current” is called Alpha, but the Beta stuff is labeled as outdated. That just seemed a bit backward.

  11. Ben –

    Thanks for all the input and suggestions.

    The Alpha content is current. Yes, it’s backwards but it’s sort of an inside joke.

    Going with guts on act under pressure was intentional. Otherwise, with only 4 stats, body quickly became the go-to stat in our play-test sessions. We kept seeing everyone load up on that stat and disregard the rest.

    There is a supplement on its way that covers your “mow them down” move. In theory, it’s mechanic can be used to resolve almost any “zoom-out/group effort” situation.

    Originally, read person/situation and apply knowledge worked the same as they did in DW, there was a list of questions. Not one player at our table was comfortable with this and we universally agreed that picking from a list of questions interferred with the flow and feel of the game. It felt artificial, if you will.

    React was originally a special move that was built upon DW’s take watch move. Again, through play testing we found players triggered it constantly so we moved it to the basic moves and trashed the other brains-based move.

    Cannibalization has been misspelled since day one – forgive us, we are slightly brain dead around here.

    Cheers!

  13. Are you referring to a ‘go aggro’ type of move? It might be worthwhile to play test a threaten/intimidate type move under zombieworld. Like you say, it’s another option when it comes to dealing with the living. Maybe link it to sway or body as a starting point.

    When it comes to combat, we feel that ZW is much closer to DW than AW. In our experiences, combat is more a ‘wholistic’ event in AW, meaning combat seems to focus on the fight as a whole, while in DW and ZW combat is much more segmented, focusing on each individual blow. (At least that is how it went for us).

    That said, when it comes to a bloody horde of the undead, it becomes a grind resolving things at the individual level. We are developing a custom move to handle scrims at the group level. So, again, we agree that there ought to be some mechanic for taking out a mob of zombies all at once.

  14. Sure, I just feel like your two fighting moves are a bit redundant. The context of what kind of fight you’re in would del with the difference between your moves, I think. I’m not sure you need two moves for fighting armed and fighting barefist. Unless you make a move for shooting and one for melee.

    The point of the threaten move is not to negotiate though. It’s meant to still cause damage if the opponent doesn’t give in.

  15. adam ferguson  I got a chance to read through part of this last night… dude, nice work.  Yeah, like this thread is noting, there’s a few issues for cleanup, but you should be super proud!

  16. Thanks, man. It’s been a collaborative effort on the part of my players and myself and, obviously, we could have spent a bit more time on polishing things up, but we are happy with the basic framework as it stands. We have a few more things to add and then maybe will we go back and refine things.

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