An idea I was thinking about today, as I would love to lure the players in my pathfinder campaign over to dungeon world. (By converting their characters and their favorite parts of pathfinder.)
So that got my thinking about knowledge checks and spout lore.
What if every class had a list of ‘knowledge’ or ‘knacks/expertise’? Similar to the bardic lore bard move, but very much specialized.
A revised spout lore move could allow the player to tell us something about that area of expertise or knowledge if you have it. (I know many people house-rule this to allow full player input anyways.)
For example:
Fighter Bob has the knowledge: “Weapons and Arms”
Whenever he spouts lore on “Weapons and Arms”, he tells the party the information and how he knows it. Then, if it was a 10+ result, it’s fully true, on a 7-9 it’s partially true (GM tags on a ‘but….’) and on a miss you’re wrong and the GM will tell a witty story about what led you to believe false information in the past.
Thoughts? Input? 🙂
I don’t think you need a move for this. As GM, just use Spout Lore as normal and ask for the players’ input.
Pathfinder and Dungeon World have different tones, so you need to decide which one you want. When converting my game, I tried to keep a more Pathfinder like tone, so had to add things like wands and sorcerers and such. Some of the results are specific to the campaign and setting we use, but other bits may be of use to you: http://rpg.divnull.com/wiki/index.php/Ptolus_Dungeon_World
I’d like to ask about your players. Kinda obvious question, sure, but still. Do they like crunch of Pathfinder system or they are for RP? DW is not about stacking bonuses, you know, so I’d propose you to think of how you’re going to lure them in.
On the question, though. Hmm… it’s too specialized, as Chris Stone-Bush said. You don’t really need it. There could be fighters that really don’t care about other weapons and there could be wizards that are “gun nuts” as one could call them. It’s more player dependent rather than class.
What Chris said… But all it would take is an extra line on the character sheet, so go for it if it will help your group acclimatise.
Could even give them three tick boxes to help them customise their character, like:
Fighter’s Expertise, choose 1:
– Weaponry and Fighting Styles
– War History and Tactics
– Noble Houses and Mercenary Missions or something…
Lester Ward I like this alot. I guess I am looking at a sort of hybrid game like this.I already had plans for something ‘like’ this. I may even redesign character sheets a bit.
My group likes RP as well as the robust character creation of pathfinder. However, two of my players are still very new to roleplaying games so we do half of the mechanical stuff for them. For them, the 20 minute rounds aren’t too fun. However, I have a very number crunching player (who I honestly let run rampant at character creation, as it was my first time ever GMing anything at the beginning of the campaign). I really think they would all enjoy a more narratively-based faster-paced system, but my major hurtle is getting them to want to try something new. We’ve been playing about 6 months, but my newer players get burnt out after 2 hours of pathfinder nowadays. Maybe I’ll just make some more skill-check ‘themed’ moves for what I was going for here.
My advice, at least as far as playing DW goes, is just play the game straight. Don’t try to make it more like Pathfinder to appeal to your players. Present the game as is by playing it as intended, that way you allow everyone the chance to see what Dungeon World is like.
Chris Stone-Bush http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=4531.0
this is what I’m looking for. Converting the cool characters they have without breaking DW. 🙂 We’ll see if they bite.
I see what you’re doing now Harrison s, and I agree with your approach of emulating stuff that makes the PCs cool, rather than trying to do a whole conversion. I still have mixed feelings though. You know your group way better than I do though, so feel free to ignore anything I say. 🙂
Is playing a version of their Pathfinder characters the only way you got your group to agree to play DW? Because if not, why not just run a one-shot with brand new characters? You save yourself a lot of work, you give your players a chance to try out new characters, and you’d be presenting DW as it’s intended to be, rather than as a substitute/emulation of Pathfinder.
It’s that last point that might cause the most trouble. If your players are playing as their Pathfinder characters, they might very well expect those characters to work as they do in the PF game. They’ll play DW as if it was PF, which will cause problems. You initial post about making Spout Lore work more like Knowledge Checks kind of supports this.
My advice, and as I said feel free to ignore it, is to just run a one-shot of Dungeon World. As is, without any connection to your Pathfinder game.
Chris Stone-Bush That’s probably a better idea. I guess I should see if it catches on before converting the characters.
I’m not saying don’t do it. It just seems like you can save yourself some work if the group decides DW isn’t for them. 😉
I have hurdled this myself, having converted a long-running campaign from D&D 4e to PF and eventually DW. It introduced a new paradigm each conversion (though it wasn’t per se intended to alter the tone of the story as much as reduce cognitive load on the GM). It also came with a tricky session or two of “growing pains.” Ultimately, everyone seems happier with the campaign now than ever, me the GM included. So it can be done, but it’s not exactly “non-disruptive.” I second the running of isolated DW games first. I had the luxury of doing so with isolated combos of the main campaign players to whet their whistle for a different type of RPG. It went a long way toward them feeling stoked to port their PF characters as they had an understanding of the framework they would be morphing into. They were also pretty high level (10-12 in PF) when we came over to DW, so we used Class Warfare and I let everyone roll up at level 8 in DW. I was also pretty lenient about letting them take compendium specialties since there was a pretty big swath of campaign history to draw from.
Marshall Brengle Thank you. I can definitely understand how the growing pains can effect a group for a few sessions.
I did the same “emulating stuff that makes the PCs cool” thing. Playbooks for the group turned out customized to their characters: http://rpg.divnull.com/ptolus/ptolus-dw-20141203.pdf
The recognized their characters enough that the transition was fairly smooth.
Looking at those sheets reminded me of something else: when you are converting characters in this way, with characters that are already connected and have a shared history, bonds start to unravel a little. They’ve been more of a hindrance than a help in play.
Lester Ward Awesome. Exactly what I’m looking for, tbh 🙂 What did you use for the template?
No template. I just built them in InDesign. I can send the source if you want it, though it may use fonts you don’t have.
Lester Ward that would be great. Thanks.
Try these: http://rpg.divnull.com/ptolus/ptolus-dw-src.zip
Lester Ward so do I need InDesign to view these?
Yes.
We converted characters from our d20 campaign to DW by the simple process of the GM giving us the playbooks and letting us chose the moves that fitted our characters best. IIRC, we all looked at the playbooks and saw moves that gave us the narrative effect we’d been trying to create with our d20 characters.
– Stats converted directly
– HPs were scrapped in favor of the DW HPs
– We chose moves that matched our characters abilities. For the few abilities not represented we either borrowed moves from other playbooks or compendium classes, abandoned them as we weren’t using them anyway.
– Magic items toned down and the low level ones (e.g. +1 sword) dropped completely
We then played for a couple of weeks and unanimously opted to stay with DW – we haven’t looked back since.