Author: Brian Reynolds

What if there was a modular set for running without a GM?

If you’re like me, you’re either stuck always being the GM and never just getting to play, or you can only reliably get a couple people and the groups can run a little small. But I find that DW and World of Dungeons are already incredibly modular, with a lot of the play evolving naturally, including things that happen when I as the GM make a move . So I’m throwing together something very much like World of Dungeons that’s built for as few as two people to enjoy together, without a GM.

Functioning a lot like Perilous Wilds, it’ll basically be a big modular collection of tables for rolling on (at my table we may even keep a copy of PW on hand). Players roll for the weather, what they find, monsters, NPC temperaments, treasures, what happens as a hard or soft move — with the narrative freedom to limit actions to what makes fictional sense, of course.

There’ll be prompts for rumors, jobs, bounties, towns, people, creatures, events, wars, battles, politics — all springboards for play, with players collectively shouldering the burden of GMing.

I really only intend to use it at my table, though maybe with enough work it could become something I’d share on a wider scale — but this is what I’ve worked up so far, just this morning. I’m calling it Dungeonlords. What do you think?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwF75bfO6_4LRm1pUTdMZ2V4YTg

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwF75bfO6_4LRm1pUTdMZ2V4YTg

I’ve got a Mage who suggested a clever idea.

What about a move where a non-Vancian wizard (like the Mage, but others too) could write spells into a spellbook, then incant those spells to repeat the magic?

As in, they have their “do magic” move, but if they take time (maybe via ritual, or in a place of power) to reflect on some magic they’ve performed, or witnessed, they can write the spell into a book — a literal book, such that the player would keep their own unique log.

Then, instead of doing the magic move, which can often have terrible effects, they could recite an incantation to achieve more reliable effects?

The real question, I suppose, is what incentive there would be to doing magic once you’d built up enough good spells — or what downsides there would be to the spellbook.

Mouse Guard advancement and Dungeon World, aka overhauling XP (hopefully without having to overhaul the whole game).

Kicking around an idea here, thought I’d get some feedback. In Mouse Guard, one of my favorite elements, and one which feels very PbtA in its fiction-first lean, is the way you advance. You level up skills organically, as you use them — it takes X successes when rolling a skill, and X-n failures, to advance it. This means you have to use skills to make them better — the things you neglect aren’t going anywhere. Additionally, you have to screw up a little, too, which is a neat touch — you learn from your mistakes, as it were.

Additionally, at the end of a session you choose a skill you used and advance it. Then you choose one you didn’t use — and decrease it. It really keeps things lively, and it’s always been a fun system to me.

What if we tried something like that in DW, I wonder? First of all, what if instead of XP for misses, it just took, say, 5 10+ rolls on a stat and 3 6- rolls to then increase that stat mod by 1 (max +3, as always).

Then, what if at the end of every session we chose a stat we’d used and increased it by one, and a stat we did not use and decreased it by one? (my instinct is the actual stat, not the mod, though… the mod could work too)

We’d need to rewrite some moves to not bother with marking XP anymore, but that’s a small matter. The remaining big question, then, is how we handle taking advanced moves, and max level. Without a universal XP and level up, we have no way of tracking our level and, thereby controlling what moves we can unlock, and when.

I’ll admit that this is the only part that has me stymied. I can’t think of a way of doing it without tracking level. It could be per-session, maybe. At the end of session, you pick a new move from the 2-5 list. At the end of the fifth session, pick any advanced move.

At the end of 10th session, you can’t pick moves anymore, but you can retire and all the normal stuff. You could even keep playing and growing your stats with rolls — though if that was the case, I do think the losing a modifier each session is vital, to curb the ability to get +3’s in all stats. In theory I suppose it would be possible to max everything out, but you’d have to be doing a lot of rolling in every session.

Thoughts? Is this possible without obliterating the entire game?

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)