Backgrounds and Drives, or race and alignment?
We’ve used playbooks with both at our table without much difficulty (usually when using base and hacked playbooks together), but I’m undertaking a project to reformat all the playbooks our group likes (base plus a bunch of hacked ones) into a cool mini-booklet format. I’m striving for consistency, though, and so I have the dilemma of adjusting the drives and backgrounds to alignments and races, or adjusting the race and alignments in the base books to backgrounds and drives — and I wonder what other people prefer?
Most of my table prefers drives and backgrounds, but they’re familiar enough with RPG’s to have race ideas in mind, and they usually write new moves anyway. But it’s hard to deny the sheer simplicity of simple race and alignment moves, too — I mean, the whole name, look, race, alignment thing is meant to be easy, and yet you can extrapolate as much complexity as you prefer too.
What do people like? I’m getting tempted to do drives (being slightly more open than alignment), with race moves, and just letting players cherrypick different races/moves as they like — assuming they can justify it. (But mostly I’m tempted because I’m feeling a little daunted by the task of coming up with backgrounds for all the base classes)
My suggestion:
Drives + Race OR Player Supplied Background. Give a set of about 8-12 “generic Backgrounds.”
Please, let us see the finished result!
Someone on the old Barf Forth forums already made a set of “humans only” sheets that turn most of the racial moves directly into backgrounds.
Check it out here:
drive.google.com – Dungeon World – Humans – Google Drive
As for which you should do… I’d start with whatever your group finds most useful and make that. Then, if you have the wherewithal, make alternative versions.
I prefer race and alignment to be honest, they are very clear in what you have to do to get xp i feel.
I have a preference for races and alignments for fantasy games, but for an anime based project that I’ve just got to the point of being worthy of playtest, I have races, backgrounds and drives, skipping only alignment. It only works within the context of my document taking the Class Warfare approach though.