DO YOU USE STEADINGS!? How do you use them? Why do you use them? What are they REALLY for?

DO YOU USE STEADINGS!? How do you use them? Why do you use them? What are they REALLY for?

DO YOU USE STEADINGS!? How do you use them? Why do you use them? What are they REALLY for?

I have yet to find any GMs that like using steading rules. Help me and the rest of the DW community understand!

9 thoughts on “DO YOU USE STEADINGS!? How do you use them? Why do you use them? What are they REALLY for?”

  1. At one point I would have used them, but quite some time ago, someone sparked me the idea of using a single monster to represent an army, now I have a blogspot tag called “A Whole Damn Army” the last post of which “Constcripting (etc)” changes what a lot of the original Steading information is exactly. I could use them as is, but they’d be something that would come up really rarely.

  3. In my Fourth World hack, I tried pretty hard to connect each play book to steading rules in at least one small way. For example, moves that trigger when entering steadings with specific tags. There is also a flying fortress-style vehicle with bombardment moves that alter a steading’s tags as “damage”.

  4. Like all things in Dungeon World there notes to maybe make fun play for you, I did use them in play my first session because Steadings and how they were organised were important but my second game that was more a Wilderness one I didn’t really.

    So if your using them and it creates fun then great! If your not using them and your still having fun, then great! You do what you feel is best

  5. Fourth world works well for steadings that are remarkable in a civilization. Otherwise I think perilous wilds’ steading writing works fast well and fast enough to do things on the fly- and able to just throw away without feeling youvr wasted imagining juice.

  6. I’ve used steadings in my vanilla DW games, and I mostly like them. I like the fact that there’s a process for making them, and that the process makes you think about things like trade and oaths and enmities and personages. I particularly like that it got me to think about stuff that I wouldn’t have thought about otherwise. And I like the tag-based shorthand as a way to record that stuff.

    What I wish, though, is that it was more like the monster questionnaire: you asked yourself questions about the steading, and the questions generated “stats.”

    Like…

    1) How big is the steading, in terms of buildings and infrastructure? How many people could it comfortably support?

    * a couple dozen: hamlet, prosperity dirt

    * a few hundred: village, prosperity poor

    * a thousand or so: town, prosperity moderate

    * thousands: city, prosperity wealthy

    2) Why does the steading exist? Why does it exist here? Pick 1 for a hamlet, 2 for a village, 3 for a town, and 4 for a city.

    * It sits on a trade route: +prosperity, trade (nearby steading), trade (another nearby steading)

    * It’s near some valuable natural resource, like timber, fish, rich cropland, etc: resource (describe)

    * It’s a strategic, fortified position: +defenses, structure

    * It’s the traditional home of a particular people: elf, dwarf, halfling, or_

    * A person or family of some import established/maintains it: personage

    * Etc.

    * Etc.

    * No one rightly knows: -prosperity

    3) Which of the following describe it? (choose all that apply)

    * etc.

    * etc.

    Those probably aren’t the right questions, but something like that… enough to get your brain thinking about the actual, fictional story behind the steading.

    I’ve never used the rules for updating the campaign map. I like those guidelines in theory, but I have a hard time imagining myself actually using them. Like, most of the changes implied by the map are either descriptive updates to things that have happened on screen (and could be handled by saying “if it changes, change it”), the results of grim portents/impending dooms advancing, or things that I’d reveal as GM moves.

  8. I shamelessly admit that I use this site and then customize from there. What I don’t like about the steading rules is the time it takes me to go through the process step-by-step. But with the details done for me with a button click, I find the tags and info useful thereafter. dmmuse.com

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