So, I just got Dungeon World a couple of days ago, and I’m trying to round up a group to play. So far, I’ve got two yes’s, and two maybe’s. The yes’s are going to be a halfling thief, and an elf ranger. One of the maybe’s is thinking of either a cleric or a druid; he wants to be a healer. The ranger and the undecided maybe have never played tabletop RPG’s before, while the other two have played in my games, both separately and together.
One thing I’m already liking about the game is that, while it’s designed for a low prep, high improv style of game, it still allows for quite a bit of prep work. (This, I think, is probably a good example of “draw maps, leave blanks”. Or, DMLB.) There’s even a bunch of prep work available as starters and adventures available. This seems ideal for someone like me, who enjoys prep, but is still somehow never actually prepared. As a result, I usually end up both overprepared and underprepared.
While I could put in my typical amount of work, this first time, I want to try to play the game the way it was intended. That means I’m putting in as little planning as I can manage, and hope for the best. All I know so far about this game is that it will be a dingus hunt, will start in a city, and will somehow involve wilderness travel. There may be cultists. I don’t know. I don’t even know what the dingus is, or why they’re hunting it.
We’ll see how this goes.
DW isn’t inherently low prep, it’s more that the players have some control over the world too, and the more prep you do, the more time you’re likely wasting.
In short: the only truths of the world is what happens in play, and the players are able to create a lot of the world during play, making any prep you do have a low chance of actually coming up.
Someone said somewhere that PbtA games are designed to be GM’d the same way normal players play – you show up with a character sheet and that’s all you need.
Yeah, you can prep stuff for DW, but you don’t have to. As Aaron Griffin said, it’s more that the players have control over the world, and you, as GM, should be asking for, and using, their input.
While you can start with the idea of a dingus hunt, for the first session you can just throw the players into a tense situation, say “GO!” and then ask questions as you continue to play.
just to illustrate a melding of these ideas – I’ve had a player specifically ask me for a specific type of plot hook before (“I want to save the world. i want to throw the ring in mount doom.”) which means I had to prep a bunch of stuff, but it wasn’t much more than a normal DW Danger with a bunch of lore attached
“DMing the way normal players play” is a great ideal, but it doesn’t actually quite work in practice. Close, but… You still want to take a bit of time to figure out and/or update your Fronts between sessions. And also, the less prep you have, the more intense you’re going to have to be during the session, under pressure to whip everything together on the spot. It can be exhilarating, and also exhausting. Depends what you want out of the game.
That said, Dungeon World is my game of choice because it gets closer to that ideal than any other game I’ve tried to run. (Including, for some reason, Apocalypse World — I think that one’s mostly on me, though, because I simply can’t whip interesting apocalyptica out of my butt at the same pace as I can swords-and-sorcery.)
My prep for my weakest DW sessions is “write up what happened last time as a 2 paragraph blog post” for my best sessions, it is “come up with 2 likely encounters with a special move and a few monster stats. Come up with half a dozen potential encounters (name only), and draw at least one new map to put on the table for my players to flesh out.
I keep a stack of 6 to 10 index cards with interesting magic items or strange mundane things (mostly cribbed from my old merp treasure book) so I can have things to hand out when appropriate. I tend to write up about three a week and cull the stack if it gets above 15