I have a question for my fellow DW fans 🙂
Is there enough dungeon in Dungeon World?
I explain this a bit more in this post over on the StoryGames forum
http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/21383/the-dungeon-in-dungeon-world
http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/21383/the-dungeon-in-dungeon-world
The core ideal of DW is you go to the dungeon, you get the loot, you spend the loot in town, you go to a new dungeon. repeat till campaign over.
I have to say, I completely disagree XD
That is completely incorrect, in my humble opinion. I wonder if you are here just to spark an argument, or if that is what you actually believe. If it is what you think, I find it hard to believe that you have played a game of Dungeon World at all.
IMHO, I kinda feel ya Alessandro Piroddi. There isn’t a lot in the Game As Written that drives play towards dungeons in particular. There are “dungeon moves” and some discussion of dungeons in the fluff, but otherwise it does not seem very “dungeon-centric” to me either.
I think it comes from the whole “replace the word apocalypse with whatever type of game you’re making.” In this case, it was supposed to be D&D, so “Dungeon” was slotted in, making it “Dungeon World”, but I don’t think the designers truly meant for it to be a “dungeon crawler” as opposed to a “play D&D with PbtA rules”. Adam and Sage are too savvy with design skillz; if they wanted it to be strictly a dungeon crawler, there would be explicit rules for it.
Samuel Aguirre I guess you’re replying to Alessandro? If so, this thread seems like a perfectly reasonable assertion to me. Maybe not all will agree but I don’t detect any trolling going on here.
Zack Wolf I have the vague feeling that Samuel Aguirre was answering to Patrick Schenk?
Anyway, mine was more of a practical question.
It could be rephrased like this:
do YOU play dungeon crawls using DW?
do YOU find DW problematic or not adequate for this purpose?
If so, tell me 🙂
If not, tell me 🙂
Zack Wolf I am disagreeing with Patrick Schenk
10-4 fellas.
Do I play dungeon crawls with DW? No usually; mostly because I don’t like dungeon crawls as much as I like wilderness adventure. My dungeons tend to be short and to the point.
Do I find it problematic or not adequate? Not problematic, but not super-well supported by the mechanics; at least not explicitly.
As far as I can recall, the game kind of relies on prior knowledge of “dungeon creation” to make it happen, so that could be viewed as problematic.
Edit: Missed an important “not” in there.
I’ve done plenty of dungeon crawls using DW. It works great for it.
In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the currencies and subsystems in DW don’t make sense without the assumption of “leaving civilization/safety behind to explore a dangerous, limited-resource area”.
Load… uses of adventuring gear/bandages… rations… Ammo… forgetting spells (or -1 ongoing to cast) until you make camp… the Quartermaster role in UPJ… debilities that take 2-3 days of Recovery to heal…
… those scarcity-based systems all work alongside “we’re in a dungeon” to drive interesting decisions. Do we press on, even though we’re low on HP and bandages and our cleric lost Cure Light Wounds? Or do we make camp? If we’re out of rations, and can’t make camp… do we retreat (and let the grim portents advance, or the enemies prepare themselves)?
You’ll notice that if you play DW in a city, or as sky pirates, or rooting out cultists from the small rural town… all of these scarcity-based mechanics start to feel cumbersome and irrelevant and you wonder why you have them. But they’re there for the dungeon crawl. Or at least the exploration of a dangerous area that is removed from safety and civilization. So a hex crawl works, too.
I do think that for a game called Dungeon World, there’s remarkably little in the book or the GM’s procedures or anything about making dungeons. And the guidance of “start with a tense situation” and ask questions… well, that leaves the game wide open for going in all sorts of directions.
Samuel Aguirre I can pretty much guarantee that Patrick Schenk has played DW and is not here trolling for an argument.
Accusing him of such is pretty rude.
While I don’t agree that repeated dungeon crawling is “the core ideal” of DW, I do think a lot of the mechanics of the game point towards it (as I said in my post above). As does a lot of the text, and even things like the way some of the starting bonds are phrased (“I worry about the ability of __ to survive in the dungeon.”)
But the game also works very well other types of adventure.
The core of the rules was built around dungeon crawl, this is a fact admitted by the devs on numerous occasions during panels and other such Q and A. After that they focused on fleshing out the system to work outside the dungeon and to facilitate adventuring and storytelling. The system can work for a wide range of stories and adventures, because they made a good system, but that doesn’t change the fact its core is firmly fitted in dungeon crawling.
I understand your feelings Alessandro Piroddi
The first sessions i play without prep, map… etc..
Worked out well. Same experience you describe in your post.
Then when we started the campaign Plague of Storms. It started at a dungeon with map, planned inhabitants, Traps etc. That feels strange for the first 1-2 hours. I miss the freedom i had before. But i get used to it quick. You loose a little freedom but get a lott of stuff that you don’t have to pull out of… somewhere.
Both ways are fine for me. And my Dungeon world hold as much dungeons as i want. Sometimes more, sometime less.
I personally play it as a game about discovery, rather than dungeons, specifically. A good series of Dungeon World adventures feels a bit like an Indiana Jones film. There are dungeons, they are important, but they usually aren’t the point.