I have a really basic question that probably just has something to do with something real basic I’m missing, but I thought I’d go ahead and ask:
In general, how does power scaling and leveling up play out over the course of a campaign? There are obviously monsters that are more difficult, do more damage, have more hit points, etc. in the book, so you could imagine that much like similar fantasy RPGs, the party starts out fighting weak things and then works their way up to dragons and demigods and all that jazz. However, unlike something like D&D, there doesn’t appear to be any intrinsic bonuses to the players’ own corresponding “combat stats” that they gain when leveling up (other than increasing your attributes, which make you more likely to succeed without consequences, which I get is also a big deal.)
For a playbook like the Fighter, for example, you have to intentionally grab moves like “Merciless” when you advance, if you want to improve your damage. If you want to get to a particularly epic level of play where you’re slaying all sorts of great beasts, do these moves start to become “mandatory?” Is it possible to take a character all the way to max level without improving your damage and not be overwhelmed by higher difficulty monsters?
I know it’s generally not the mentality of PBtA games to encourage min-maxing or be particularly strict about builds or anything, since the focus is much more on narrative and expressive gameplay. This is easy enough in something like AW or The Sprawl where you might just have a gun and it does 3 harm and most people die to being shot once or twice and you’re never going to meet an enemy that’s gonna soak like 20 harm or whatever, cause it’s not that type of game. But I’m curious how this plays out in DW, since it introduces vaguely D&D style health and damage rolls for both players and NPCs.
90% of it just comes down to how you frame the fiction. If you haven’t read the 16HP dragon story, go do that, but the short version is that it’s not the numbers that make a monster more or less dangerous, it’s the moves you make with them.
So, for example, at low levels, you might say that a group of wargs is super dangerous, so you make harder moves, require Defy Danger or paying a price to get in close enough to attack, that sort of thing. But later on, the PCs are fictionally more powerful, so you make softer moves, and the PCs don’t have to work as hard to hurt them. You don’t need to change the numbers, everyone is doing the same damage and has the same hp as before, but it’s still a different fight because of how you run it.
Don’t inflate numbers, that just makes fights last longer without any real added danger or tension.16hp is about as high as you go, and it’s really not that much. Use the fiction, and it’ll make for a much cooler experience.
latorra.org – A 16 HP Dragon | LaTorra.org
In addition to what James wrote, I wanted to respond to this:
> you could imagine that much like similar fantasy RPGs, the party starts out fighting weak things and then works their way up to dragons and demigods and all that jazz.
That’s not how I run it. If the worldbuilding and fronts establish dragons and demigods, I’m just as happy to deploy them at level 1 as level 10. The key is showing the players what they are getting into (point to looming threats), and let them make any reasonable preparations or “heck no” contingency plans that they want.
In my Planets Collide campaign, we had kobolds in Session 1, and in Session 2 we had a dragon with a portal opening between two worlds, with the looming threat that the planets would immediately crash into each other.
It’s not just in Dungeon World: I generally don’t favor carefully balanced challenges in any RPG. The whole idea of tactical infinity that role-playing affords means that lucky and (especially) resourceful players can often leverage favorable positioning, logic, and unforeseen advantages to one-shot even the most over-powered threats. On the flip-side, sometimes even the most piddly creatures can wipe them out if they have bad information, bad positioning, bad judgment, and bad luck.
As far as powering up the characters, the advanced moves they get do a lot of heavy lifting—far more than the numeric bonuses. Moves that give them unconventional means of movement, travel, and persuasion can be especially powerful. In Planets Collide, the party tracked and were tracked by a rival gang over 22 sessions who would have easily murdered them all if the party hadn’t luckily evaded them many times. Then one character got a Compendium Class move that allowed him to fly, which completely turned the tables in their next encounter. The rival gang is no more.
You noted that the ability score bonuses you get from leveling lead to more outright successes and less complications, which is nothing to sneeze at either. Over the course of a session, a few partial successes can really add up, snowballing minor problems into major catastrophes. This feature of the system has had a huge impact on our play experience, and seeing the complications taper off over the long run does have significant impact, even though the +1 here and there doesn’t seem sizable.
Related: youtube.com – Running Combat as War: Old School Academy Ep. 1
James Etheridge John at Deep Six Delver The idea of adjusting the severity of the moves the DM makes makes sense to me, but I guess I was wondering more about the sort of “hard coded” consequences, like a 7-9 on Hack and Slash, as written, will return harm to the player, regardless of what other consequences the DM imposes after that, and there are monsters in the book that do more damage, have more hp, armor, etc., than others, so there seems to be a natural difference in difficulty, just purely based on those stats, depending on what your’e fighting, before you introduce more contextual advantages or disadvantages.
Like, even with the softest of moves from the DM, a 7-9 against a goblin is only returning 1d6 damage, and the same result against a dragon is returning b[2d12]+5, 4 piercing, which is obviously much, much worse. Even if the DM is trying to make the player feel really heroic and not have the dragon just straight up rip their arm off or anything, the baseline math seems like it could end someone real fast.
If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like what everyone is saying is that that being the case, the variation in those stats isn’t enough to completely make or break a fight for characters at really any level?
Or I guess, is the idea that narrative and contextual advantages are going to be more worth pursuing than any purely numerical ones? Like going on a quest to find the special ancient dragon slaying sword is really gonna be the key to slaying that dragon, whether you have the “Merciless” move or not?
> If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like what everyone is saying is that that being the case, the variation in those stats isn’t enough to completely make or break a fight for characters at really any level?
>
> Or I guess, is the idea that narrative and contextual advantages are going to be more worth pursuing than any purely numerical ones? Like finding the special ancient dragon slaying sword is really gonna be the key to slaying that dragon, whether you have the “Merciless” move or not?
Yes, more or less.
Dealing extra damage can definitely make a huge difference IF you can get into position to deal damage. Consider Bard in The Hobbit: It took special, secret knowledge to deal damage against Smaug at all, but when he hit, he was skillful enough to slay the dragon in one blow.
That was similar to the situation with the rival gang in my game. They were ruthless, calculating, and cautious, and almost always in a better strategic position than the heroes. But when the players got the ability to mount airborne attacks (plus a magical device that let them briefly stop time), the tables were turned—and big time.
>Like, even with the softest of moves from the DM, a 7-9 against a goblin is only returning 1d6 damage, and the same result against a dragon is returning b[2d12]+5, 4 piercing, which is obviously much, much worse. Even if the DM is trying to make the player feel really heroic and not have the dragon just straight up rip their arm off or anything, the baseline math seems like it could end someone real fast.
I would say that, in general, Dungeon world is a lot grittier than recent editions of Dungeons and Dragons. That seems to be, in part, due to its trying to be evocative of original editions of DnD.
If you want to get to a particularly epic level of play where you’re slaying all sorts of great beasts, do these moves start to become “mandatory?” Is it possible to take a character all the way to max level without improving your damage and not be overwhelmed by higher difficulty monsters?
Mandatory? No. They sure help, though. Being able to dish out d10+d8+d4 damage is pretty hardcore. So is having 5 armor and being able to effectively ignore the counter attacks of most horde tagged creatures.
As others have indicated, those damage bonuses don’t give you the right to inflict damage or even to Hack and Slash. Figuring out control your own fear, reach the enemy, get past their guard, penetrate their defenses, and land a solid blow… that’s where the epic challenge comes into play.
But… if you do all that, and swing, and deal d10 damage with no mods, and they’ve still got, oh, 8 hit points left and now you’re looking at the GM and it’s their turn to make a move, and that move involves nine-inch teeth and steel-like scales and 2 tons of fire and fury?
I bet you’ll wish you did you more damage.
> So is having 5 armor and being able to effectively ignore the counter attacks of most horde tagged creatures.
Ignore the attacks if they are attacking 1-by-1 like a bunch of nimrods! (And some of them are…) But if they have you surrounded and are attacking you as a horde, with goblins in the second ranks hitting you with reach weapons, you could suffer 1d6+5 or 1d6+11, which is hard to ignore.
Think dangerous. 😉
John at Deep Six Delver, sure, of course. But the fighter with 1 Armor is gonna feel a lot worse after tangling with that same horde.
Pretty much all of the replies here have been “monsters are more than their HP.” But Brock McCord didn’t ask us how to make monsters more fictionally dangerous. He asked us whether moves that increase PC damage output and armor are basically required to stand toe-to-toe with epic-tier monsters.
And again: no, not required, but they sure help. Because if you don’t take it down in one shot, and you don’t have the staying power to survive one of it’s shots, you’re not gonna last long.
Two important corollaries:
1) If you don’t have the damage output, the resilience, or the fictional position to tank a Big Bad, then don’t do it. Find a better (smarter) way, one that doesn’t involve direct confrontation.
In “Red Nails,” Conan doesn’t kill a dragon by stabbing it with a sword, he kills it by sticking it in the gums with a sharpened tree branch that’s laced with poison fruit.
2) Just because you have the damage output or the armor doesn’t mean you can stand toe-to-toe. The ogre or treant will bat you aside and send you flying. The dragon’s fiery breath will melt your armor and make you wish you weren’t wearing it. The ghost will ignore your mortal steel and reach through your flesh to stop your heart.
Jeremy Strandberg Thanks for the advice! This is exactly what I was getting at.
Oh, one last (?) thing… Brock McCord, when you say that “even with the softest of moves from the DM, a 7-9 against a goblin is only returning 1d6 damage” that’s not entirely true.
On a 7-9 H&S, the monster makes an attack against you. An attack doesn’t necessarily = deal damage.
If the goblins had a move like “fling mud and muck,” their attack could be flinging mud in your eyes (“oh, god, I hope that’s just mud… you can’t see, what do you do?”).
If you had a long sword and they had a dagger, you’ve got a reach advantage, right? So if they don’t go down, maybe they ducked inside your guard and they are dealing damage yet, but they are making an attack, and you can’t just swing your sword at them, what do you do?
But none of that negates the fact that, yeah, when a single goblin does damage, it’s 1d6 and when a single dragon does damage, it’s a lot, lot worse.
Jim Jones I think this is something I’m still wrapping my head around. I’m used to the idea that there are very few things that a player can’t stand toe to toe with if they just naturally progress far enough in levels, whereas some of the tougher monsters in DW can still really mess a party up in direct confrontation no matter what level they are.
Jeremy Strandberg Ah, good point. I’d sort of short-handed reading “you deal your damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you” as “you deal damage and so do they,” but I see what you mean.
I think there’s more substance here than simply “monsters are more than their HP”, but I do like the way you explain it, Jeremy Strandberg. 😉