So, it might be a month or so away, but I’m working on my second session of Dungeon World. Alas, because of reasons, only one of the characters from the first session will be returning, so it’ll be an almost completely new party.
Interestingly, the party is going from a thief, barbarian, and ranger, to thief, wizard, and either a cleric or a druid. So it’s going to have more of an old school vibe. That’s going to be fun.
One thing I’m anticipating DW to handle exceptionally well is this sort of revolving door party lineup. I just don’t know how it will handle this. I imagine there’s some sort of set of questions or moves or bonds or somesuch for just this situation.
Any advice is welcome. 🙂
I found that DW didn’t handle that too well. What I had to do is restructure Bonds so they are more… About things that happened between some characters.
So on introducing a new character, they list a Bond with an existing character based on something they did together. When a new cool thing happens, they can replace it.
So instead of it being about relationships, I made it about shared experiences.
Bonds are hard to resolve when the other characters are all gone. You will definitely want to change how they work, if that’s what you’re expecting. You’ll also want to figure out, narratively, how characters are going to be missing all the time; you might want everything to be focused in a single city or something.
The challenges that PCs face is entirely dependent on their character types – so if no thief turns up, no traps should be present.
Peter Cobcroft I don’t agree. That’s the GM move Give an opportunity that fits a class’ abilities:
The thief disables traps, sneaks, and picks locks. The cleric deals with the divine and the dead. Every class has things that they shine at—present an opportunity that plays to what one class shines at.
It doesn’t have to be a class that’s in play right now though. Sometimes a locked door stands between you and treasure and there’s no thief in sight. This is an invitation for invention, bargaining, and creativity. If all you’ve got is a bloody axe doesn’t every problem look like a skull?
Meh, I just chose a poor example. I should have said – the GM’s job is to tailor adventures to fit those present.
For me (been in your sitch), it was easiest to open things with a “(fill in the blank PC from previous party), how do you know (fill in the blank newcomer)” sorta thing, and let things flow from there. It’s simple enough to form new bonds. Furthermore, you can resolve bonds that no longer apply, IIRC.
Soul Stigma That could work.
I play on a Wednesday night, and real life gets in the way of that for MANY people. I have a group now of about 5, but for the first 4 months I had cycled through here and there about 7 people over various reasons. It works pretty well, as I play online and use a forum to update a synopsis of what happened in each session so people who are coming in can keep up with what is going on.
The “revolving door” for this game works pretty well as a level 1 character can play pretty well with a level 8 character for the most part. This would be much more difficult in a game of 3.5 D&D for instance as a lvl 1 character would have a hard time surviving with a party of level 8s.
With 2 of 3 characters being new, I’d treat it more-or-less like another first session. Start them at the doorway to adventure (or right in the thick of it), and start asking questions about how they know each other, why they’re here, etc. etc.Â
I’d let the thief resolve any of his bonds with the no-longer-present characters and write new ones with the new PCs. Â
Revolving players, i find, fit well in short modules or “Starters”. Not sure if you are familiar with the anime “Fairy Tale”, but in its setting there are wizards who belong to Guilds. These guilds provide small groups of wizards with “jobs” to complete for currency.
This might be a good fit for a changing party. Each starts in the guild and are assigned to each other for a mission.
I handle this every week as I run an open table game for new and old players:
Every session we erase bonds for players who aren’t present and write in new bonds for everyone that is here. Then we have a discussion before the game to find out what new histories the players share or what new attitudes have arisen. This has become one of my favourite parts of the session as the stories the players come up with are quite interesting and give me a lot of material to work with.