I’ve been thinking about fight scenes in Dungeon World quite a bit (partly inspired by the excellent bursts of action in the superb We Hunt the Keepers podcast http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/we-hunt-the-keepers), and I think this short youtube video on choreography in big fight scenes in comics is super interesting and instructive.
“Moving quickly through the moments keeps the pacing up, and means we’re not seeing people standing around asking who’s next … and having the action be constant means it feels overwhelming, and importantly that’s all it has to do; it doesn’t necessarily have to BE overwhelming, it just has to feel like it … You can see it’s a balancing act between believability, which is important, and pace.”
You can think of every few panels as a DW move, and a page following one character is the same as putting the spotlight on one PC for a few moves, and then this all gels together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUEB96hd5ic&feature=em-subs_digest
This is great – I’d never thought about this before. My best Dungeon World fights generally have followed this rhythm.
I’ve only recently realized this as well and started “setting up” the next move. When the party swarms a single creature, sometimes it gets a secondary attack at an adjacent character, and sometimes the first character’s move sets up the second character. It also shortens the party planning phase that usually happens in D&D.
James Carr That’s right. Some of it’s also just practice, getting a sense of pacing and spotlight at the table, and how long to follow one character before (ideally) seamlessly passing the spotlight to another character. The thing I have to remember is that there’s no action-economy in DW, so a single enemy is as deadly to the group as you choose to make them through hard moves. Some of these comic-book narrative techniques above really help with that.
Also, the simple realization that it’s much more narratively satisfying to follow one character for an extended sequence before switching spotlight than it is to try to follow everybody at the same time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to emulate the visual framing of action in comics in a PtbA project I’m developing and came to a somewhat similar conclusion: the fiction of is evergoing in between panels but whenever you activate a move you’re framing it in a significant way.
My solution is based on a World of Dungeons-like move spread where a Critical Sucess means an end of page panel where the hero does the action and we turn the page to see a panel where we see the triumphant consequence of his action; a Full Sucess is an immediate panel where the hero achieves what he wants; a Partial Success implies a first panel where the hero takes a first action to achieve his goal followed by another panel that shows it will take more to achieve it; and a Miss comes to an end of page panel where the hero tries to act but we turn the page to see its disastrous result – depending on the move and if its nearing the end of the issue the player can describe how the hero apparently dies, gives up his heroic career or his kidnapped by the villain to be taken to his lair gaining a Experience in the process.
My design process was trying to come to a solution midway framing the scene in a somewhat visually structured manner but giving it a little freeway for the group in making it dynamic and surprising.
Sorry for the digression. 🙂
João Mariano Not at all, sounds like an interesting approach!