Played my first DW session where five players were delving into a pre-written module. They got through four combats, two traps and a puzzle in three hours of real time! I knew DW team fast, but I never expected them to fly through the dungeon THAT fast…
Played my first DW session where five players were delving into a pre-written module.
Played my first DW session where five players were delving into a pre-written module.
Thats extremely fast for even Dungeon World.
How much detail was there in the fictional narrative? If you distill an adventure down to its core mechanics, it can appear short in DW, since rolls are abstracted pretty heavily. The trick with DW is that most of the action actually occurs in the fiction; the rolls just guide pacing.
Also, what kinds of things did you do on misses? Misses are your chance to present significant new obstacles and opportunities beyond whatever prepared material you might be drawing on. Misses are how what started as a ‘simple combat’ turns into the Fighter trapped in another room due to a rock slide from an over-enthusiastic magic missile while the Wizard is pinned down by kobolds.
Sub.
Good insights Dan. Thanks for the ideas.
Another thought if it feels like you’re just flying through content is to try to identify additional opportunities to Defy Danger in the narrative. Even on a 7-9 result, you get to offer a “worse outcome, hard bargain or ugly choice.” This can result in chains of interesting complications, especially if you make one of the possible choices to shift the danger to another character.
You can also offer opportunities for sacrifices like “Thief, the Fighter is about to fall into the pit; you can use the treasure you were examining to quickly jam the mechanism, but it’ll certainly ruin it. What do you do?” These kinds of things can spur inter-character development/conflict, which can naturally shift focus for a bit from the ‘dungeon progression’ to a bit of role-playing.