12 thoughts on “Title”

  2. Yeah…don’t really understand what you are looking for and I say this as a fan of both DW and D&D 5E. You can just say your character is a blacksmith and the fiction will apply when it makes sense

  4. Aaron Griffin​, sure. I just had some of my DnD players run through a DW one-shot. Their only complaint was the game didn’t differentiate between backgrounds. I’m not really looking for anything more complicated than the system used for races.

  5. Background in DW comes in the form of the racial bonus move. Because these moves are not universal across the race, it’s easy to swap them out to make a character more unique. Just replace the default with something that better fits the character conception you’re after. You could add an additional layer: have a background move in addition to a racial one. But that seems like overcomplicating things.

  7. So are you basically looking to offer an XP incentive to play up your background, similar to the XP incentive offered for playing to alignment? Or are you looking for some other mechanical bonus, similar to the races?

    You can create something in either case, though it’s probably not necessary. After playing DW a while, your players will realize that the power of fictional positioning is actually stronger than small mechanical bonuses, since it lets you just do things. It’s like a ‘skill’ system, but without any mechanical tracking of skills.

    Here is a very common type of exchange I have with my players. “I’m going to climb that cliff.” “Do you have climbing experience?” “Oh yeah, my town was in the middle of some foothills and I used to go bouldering as a kid.” “Okay, cool, you’re not under immediate pressure and you’ve done this before, so you climb the cliff, no problem.”

    In other words, the players can invent their character background on the fly in response to challenges, which then helps to organically grow the story. I can then take notes on those background descriptions and use them as fodder for new events in the future, further enriching the world.

  9. Dan Bryant​ gets a million gold stars.

    Background is intended to be explored in play. It’s about fictional positioning. “Why would you know how to halt hunting dogs with a whistle?” / “Because I grew up raising hunting dogs for a local lord”.

  10. Dan’s right, of course. My suggestion was only a way to get that same fictional positioning ball rolling during character creation. Which your players may find either inspiring or restrictive, depending on your GMing style and how experienced they are. I had one player (coming from D&D) write me a pretty detailed background narrative for his character after the first session. I pulled out a couple of details directly relevant to the current situation and said “those are great, run with them”, but suggested that the other elements that were not immediately relevant be left up in the air until such time as pinning them down would have an impact on the moment-to-moment story. Leaving your options open can create powerful opportunities to push the story in the most interesting possible direction at any given moment.

  11. All the above said, I’ve seen playbooks and settings that replace the lackluster alignment and/or racial moves with moves having to do with culture or background. I think Inverse World does this, as well as many of the materials created by Joe Banner.

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