Hello all,
My friend and I are hacking DW to suit our particular needs by drawing elements from AW and adapting existing ones from DW. This is the beginning of a homebrew version that I’ve started thinking of as Advanced DungeonWorld (as an homage to D&D not to suggest it’s much more complicated). I hoped to tap into the collective experience of the Tavern Hive Mind to get feedback.
The place we’re starting is in PC conflict. I’ve been reading through threads and discussion groups on how to handle PvP and I’ve seen two major themes arise:
1. The PC who acts first get’s an advantage.
2. Resolving two, sometimes identical, PC moves can be messy.
To address these, he and I have come up with two additional basic moves; Awareness and PC Conflict.
Awareness:
When your spine tingles and the hairs raise on the back of your neck roll+0. On a 10+, you avoid the potential threat and place yourself in an advantageous position to respond, on a 7-9 you avoid it but gain no advantage.
This is our way of resurrecting the “Perception roll”, something we felt was required for PC Conflict. Because of the player-triggered design of DW (and AW), we needed something in place that mitigated the player knowledge/character knowledge divide in a narrativistic way. This move would be triggered if the player asks if their character notices what’s going on. We intentionally put 0 as the modifier so that the move didn’t favour any one stat. This allows PCs to sneak up or connive against each other, and the MC to throw unknown things at the characters, while still keeping everything open and described at the table.
PC Conflict:
When you’re responding to an unwanted action by a PC, describe how you’re doing it. If you’re…
– overpowering them with physical might, roll+STR+Hx
– relying on speed or agility to avoid the outcome, roll+DEX+Hx
– trusting your mettle to see you through, roll+CON+Hx
– devising a cunning solution, roll+INT+Hx
– letting your strength of will shield you, roll+WIS+Hx
– using social manipulation to dissuade them, roll+CHA+Hx
On a 7-9, you avoid their action. On a 10+, also describe your response.
PC Conflict is clearly an adaption of the Defy Danger move but takes into account the PCs’ relationships (through Hx). We designed it to avoid having to roll Aid/Interfere each time and the cycles that can come from resolving/cancelling when two moves clash. The idea is that the PC who is starting a conflict doesn’t get a move, they simply describe what they’re doing. They target of the narrative action can be unaware of it (thus, the Awareness move) and it just happens, can say they are doing nothing and it just happens, or can describe what they do in response and trigger the PC Conflict move. This will be the start of a series of PC Conflict moves until someone gets the upper hand (the other PC misses) or someone calls quits to the conflict. We imagine this as a contest of one-upping the other PC(s) until someone comes out on top, similar to the duel between Merlin and Mad Madam Mim (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LwnAMu4QyM). The 7-9 range simply lets the responding player avoid the result, but then the other PC gets to act again. 10+ lets you turn the tables and change the flow of the conflict. 6- is a miss and the action goes through.
Thoughts?
With the exceptions of Aid/Interfere and Parley (off the top of my head), I’ve never understood using the number of bonds a character has with another character as a Stat for rolling. And even Aid/Interfere is iffy when aiding in a physical manner. Bonds are a social construct, so unless players/NPC’s are interacting in a social sense (verbally trying to outmaneuver the other, providing encouraging words, or in some meaningful way leveraging their relationship) using Bonds as a bonus to rolls seems contrived and meaningless within the narrative.
That being said, I like the idea of using a Defy Danger style response by the defending player character. My group has had arguments come close to blows between characters, so how to handle inter-PC conflict has come up. I was already going to go with the Dread rule that the initiating character has the advantage, and this fits right into that. This also would be a good way to resolve any sort of contest that arises within game that doesn’t already have a Dungeon/Adventure Move prepared (such as riddles, chess, caber toss, etc.).
Bare in mind that within the conflict the Players are more or less providing their own Soft & Hard Moves as far as success with complications and failure are concerned. However, the GM should not put everything else on pause as far as their own moves are concerned. Dungeon World is not static. It moves around the players and especially reacts to their presence and actions. Complications and failures in such a situation are great Golden Opportunities for actions behind/beyond the scene and even introduce an Unwelcome Truth in the form of a ‘Wandering Monster’.
Eld Nathr Your concerns are valid. The problem with any kind of general purpose move is that, inevitably, there are going to be cases that are hard to fit the mechanic into. We felt that Hx represented how well the responding PC can predict the actions of the other PCs, which plays a part in social and physical conflicts. While developing this move, we used an example that came up in play:
A Bard and a Thief who worked as a team (each has Hx+3 with the other) were having a conflict over the Bard ditching the Thief during a bar brawl incited by the Bard’s playing:
Bard: Now that everyone is otherwise occupied, I walk up the stairs to the upper floors to see which doors are unlocked.
Thief: He was only supposed to distract them! I go after him and slap him across the face. (Since the Bard wants to know if he notices the Thief, he would use the Awareness move here. He does. Listed below are some of the example responses we came up with.)
1. I catch her wrist, stopping her slap (roll+STR+Hx)
2. I lean back, letting her hand go right by (roll+DEX+Hx)
3. I know she won’t really hit me hard, so I’ll just take it (roll+CON+Hx)
4. I give her that impish grin I know she can’t resist (roll+CHA+Hx)
You can see that 1 and 2 are both responses that anyone could give, but that 3 and 4 are guided by the relationship between the PCs (both mechanically and narrativistically). Depending on how the Bard rolls, 3 & 4 have different social effects. 3 lets the physical effect of the Thief’s action continue but evades the social implication (“Slap me all you want, I’m fine with what I did.”) whereas 4 shifts the conflict (at least for one “volley”) from the physical to the social.
If the Bard were to roll 10+ and pushed forward with a social response, the Thief might respond by simply ignoring the strength of the Bard’s personality (roll+WIS+Hx). Again, the Hx plays a role here as the Bard has probably pulled this trick many times.
Here’s my main argument against using Hx IN ADDITION to a stat.
Any player that understands how DW works is going to explain the use of their best stat within the narrative for the ‘defense’ roll. The fight initiator should have the advantage of forcing the potential defender to weigh the reward/consequence of making that roll. If the player goes with their best stat (we’ll assume a starting character here, so +2) and has two Bonds with the attacker, their getting a roll+4. They have 2.7% chance of rolling a two (the only way they would end up with 6-). On the other side of that, they have about a 72.4% chance of rolling a 6 or higher to get the 10+ result.
All of that is a really long winded way of saying the attacker has no actual benefit to initiating anything and the defender has no reason NOT to roll. If you are looking to keep conflict between players to a minimum, this is a great way to handle it. I don’t think, personally, that it is in keeping with the intent of colaborative gaming and the general ‘Let ’em do as they wish’ vibe of DW.
Any bonus higher than +3 runs the risk of off balancing the game as far as straight up consequences (ie Hard Moves) are concerned. You have about a 50/50 shot of getting a 10+ result with a +3 as it stands.
If you are trying to differentiate between external conflict (the group vs. the world) and internal conflict (the group vs. itself), then I think using roll+Hx would be the way to do that. In any case, I would suggest using roll+STAT or Roll+Hx, but not both.
(The proceeding message is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of The Dungeon World Tavern ;-}
Eld Nathr I understand what you mean in regards to the pure probabilities of the mechanics, though I don’t personally agree that the players will always choose their highest stat. Since, at this point, I’m designing a homebrew move for my specific group, I know I can rely on many of them to choose a variety of narrative responses (thus different stats).
However, as you showed, when the modifiers are on the high end, there’s a good chance of an endless loop. This should be partially mitigated by the MC pushing in their own elements and the other PCs acting. It would be good, though, for the initiator to have some influence on how the defender can respond. Can you think of any ideas?
I don’t want to abandon STAT+Hx entirely because, I feel, it represents both the character and the relationship.
Nothing comes to mind. Let me stew on it.
Eld Nathr How about an “anti” Hx hack? Basically as I’ve described but the math for PC Conflict is: roll+STAT(yours)-Hx(theirs).
It would level the playing field a bit more.
Thank you for this. The first time I have seen something that handles PvP mechanics in DW that doesn’t boil down to. “it’s up to the GM to make it fair and fun”. Obviously that’s important at any rolepalying table, but this gives combat structure instead of contrived GM rulings based on their judgement. I will definitely use this, or something similar to this. Additionally, to incorporate both Eld’s concerns and well-thought out comments, when I use this in my own game (if I need to) I will allow the player defying danger (the awareness move) to choose the higher of the two. Either +Hx/bond or +STAT as like Eld says, the probabilities get pretty darn skewed with both. Cheers!
Harrison s Please report back about your experiences with this!
I like the idea of the player choosing which to use. As long, of course, as it fits the narrative.