Leo Breebaart – Page 2 – Dungeon World Tavern G+ Archives

I have mentioned here before that I am GM’ing for a group of mostly RPG-newbies who tend to carefully and…

I have mentioned here before that I am GM’ing for a group of mostly RPG-newbies who tend to carefully and systematically interview NPCs, gather information, scout the land, grill the NPC’s some more, and and then have endless discussion amongst themselves on what to do next, rather than, you know, actually doing something next. Bless ’em. 🙂

It therefore did not come as a complete surprise to me that when our shy Fighter finally levelled up to Level 2 (after only nine sessions!), she chose Heirloom as her first Advanced Move. Heirloom, in case you need a refresher, is defined as:

“When you consult the spirits that reside within your signature weapon, they will give you an insight relating to the current situation, and might ask you some questions in return, roll+CHA. On a 10+, the GM will give you good detail. On a 7-9, the GM will give you an impression.”

Personally, I would have thought that in a group that already includes a Wizard with a Detect Magic cantrip, a Paladin with a “what here is evil?” race move, a Druid with Spirit Tongue, and a Ranger with Wild Empathy (plus of course everybody capable of casting SL and DR), the very last thing they’d need was another “tell me more about my situation” infodump effect, but hey: I’m a fan of my players characters — even if those characters are overcautious little engineer heroes.

What I would like to ask the Tavern is for some ideas on how to make Heirloom fun and a bit different from the other infodump Moves. What I came up with myself was that I could have my Fighter’s weapon indeed contain several spirits, each with wildly different personalities and interests. That way, when the Fighter calls upon them she’ll never know who she’ll get. The cowardly spirit will focus on escape routes, the gung-ho spirit will focus on enemy weaknesses, etc.

Does that sound like a cool idea? Any other suggestions?

I am also a bit unclear about this whole “the spirits might ask you some questions in return”. Why would they do that? What would they ask? Is the idea simply to provide a hook for bits of player-driven world-building? Or is there another angle I’m not seeing here?

As always, many thanks in advance for your thoughts and feedback.

A second request for feedback, also having to do with Rituals and custom Moves.

A second request for feedback, also having to do with Rituals and custom Moves. Having acquired a taste for it, our Wizard player has started a second Ritual with a rather vague goal: he wants to gain insight in the overall, global effects on the world of the bad-guy magic they’ve been encountering.

(His out-of-game explanation for it is that he wants to learn something that will give him and the other players more insight in how the things they are discovering about the world fit together, and hence “what they could do next” , either in the current campaign, or perhaps in the next one.)

So after mulling it over, I’ve come up with some conditions, which should result in a new Spell when fulfilled. I want it to be a nice juicy Spell, well worth the considerable effort, but of course also with considerable risk. What I’ve got so far is:

EVERYBODY WANTS TO RUNE THE WORLD

If you attempt to gain all-encompassing insight into a specific type of magic, roll +INT. On a successful roll, you will learn when and where this type of magic is interacting with your current world. In addition:

– On a 12+: the GM will tell you an immediately useful fact about the magic system;

– On a 10-11: you can ask the GM one question about the magic system that will get a truthful answer;

– On a 7-9 your insight will come at a cost — you get to tell the GM what that cost is.

The 7-9 is specifically there because my players are still more puzzle solvers than collaborative storytellers, and I want to take all the opportunities I can to stimulate the latter behaviour. The success rolls are there because as GM I want to help my players have a good time, and if that means they actually need to get an occasional info-dump — well, why not?.

So what do you think? Are there better Spells I could come up with in this situation? Better roll results I could use? Better wording? And are there any nice in-fiction GM moves I could hit them with if the roll for this spell fails?

All feedback much appreciated, as usual!

Another month has passed, so once again I’m doing prep for my group’s upcoming DW session, and once again I’d like…

Another month has passed, so once again I’m doing prep for my group’s upcoming DW session, and once again I’d like to ask for feedback one some things I’m wresting with.

Last session the Wizard completed a Ritual that gave him a jamming device for the particular kind of magic our baddies use. He specified it was to be a passive device, and I said that’s fine, but stipulated (as per the Ritual conditions) that it would be an unreliable/limited device.

I am thinking of using a custom Move to implement this limitation. Something along the lines of:

When you move the jammer within a 10m radius of one or more biomagical sources, roll +CON. On a 10+ the biomagic will be nullified and either have no effect or stop working. On a 7-9 the jamming is also successful, but choose one of:

– the source of the jamming will be revealed

– there will be an unexpected magical interference effect

– other kinds of magic will also be jammed

With this move I am just trying to use the jammer as a way of moving the story forwards in hopefully interesting ways. The CON roll is because I am thinking of telling the wizard the jamming affect requires him to ‘power’ it, so his general health will influence how well the jammer works.

Is this any good? Would you handle it differently?

So.

So. Last night was game night. It was … frustrating for me as GM. My players rescued the kidnapped girl, simply declined to engage in any fights with the lizard priests whatsoever, and then kept making such insanely good rolls that they made it back to the girl’s village without anything or anyone standing in their way.

Sure, it was great fun that they then decided to throw an epic mega party for the entire village (Carouse!), which lasted until the wee small hours, with everyone in the party either getting laid, or drunk, or both. Definitely fun to narrate and see played out (PG-rated, I hasten to add :-)).

My problem as GM is my usual one with this group: by deliberately and successfully avoiding all conflict, my players ended up with another session of mostly information-gathering and talking to NPCs a lot, leaving me scrambling madly to provide said information.

As none of my fronts, dangers, and portents were even remotely concerned with the village, there was very little I could do to tie it all in with the rest of the campaign (which, despite their evasive manoeuvres this time, the players are still keen to tackle next), so now there’s a whole new set of information tidbits (“watch out for the order of the green cloak!” — wtf was I thinking…) that need to be given a place somehow.

Oh well, back to the drawing board!

So.

So. Tomorrow is game night, and for the first time I want to try my hand at some Fronts. As usual, I turn to you guys for advice.

My single campaign front at the moment is embarrassingly cliché, but still fun for us as first-timers: the lizard priest cult wants to bring the blood god Groth back into the world. So the doom is “usurpation”, and the grim portents are obvious, I think: 1) find a victim (cult already did this), 2) find magical battery doohickey for ritual (heroes thwarted this first time around), 3) perform equinox ritual, 4) Groth manifests into victim’s body, 5) the world burns.

First question: I suspect that the Abbot of the cult is secretly plotting to subjugate Groth once he manifests, so that he (the Abbot) will become the true ruler of the world. Would I best represent that as an additional Danger in the campaign front, or is it better to turn that into its own Front once the manifestation Front is complete?

Next, I need to translate the ongoing story-so-far into a couple of adventure fronts, and that is causing me a bit of a headache. Is the big bad forest that the heroes have already passed through once and which has various monsters and dangers inside it a Front of its own, or is it a Danger in the scope of a larger “return the kidnapped girl to her parents before she gets sacrificed” Front?

Is the imminent arrival at the abbey of two surviving lizard priests from an earlier encounter a couple of sessions ago a grim portent in the “Groth usurpation” campaign front? Or is it also a Danger/Portent in the aforementioned “Kidnap rescue” adventure front? Or is it maybe its own Adventure Front?

The Abbot is also trying to get the heroes to retrieve the battery doohickey for him (they’re on to him, but playing along for now), and some of the monks in the monastery are suspicious of the Abott and have asked the heroes to help them uncover the truth. (The heroes have so far not followed up on that request.) I am having trouble placing events like these (which just arose naturally on the spot during game play) in a Front.

I understand that the beauty of Fronts is that they are just flexible groupings of ideas that are allowed and expected to move from one grouping to the other, so I suspect there’s not real One True Way of answering my questions, but I’m nevertheless curious: do you have any guidelines or rules of thumb for how and where you incorporate events such as the ones I mentioned above into your Fronts?

As always, many many thanks in advance for your feedback!

I suspect that next week my players will have rescued the kidnap victim and will want to quickly make their way back…

I suspect that next week my players will have rescued the kidnap victim and will want to quickly make their way back to the village she came from.

This involves travelling through the dangerous forest it took them two sessions to pass through previously, but now they’ll just want to hurry back, so I think Perilous Journey will be applicable.

My question: how does the GM decide if ‘trouble’ happens during the Journey or not? I suppose if sometime during the next session somebody throws a 6- I could have “you will be attacked by goblins in the forest on your way back” as a hidden result, or otherwise make that decision as a GM hard move somewhere, but that doesn’t seem to fit in well with the fiction.

Am I overthinking things as usual, or are there more interesting/fun ways to trigger “trouble” during a Perilous Journey? Or conversely, to decide that there will be no trouble — I want to play fair!

A quick follow-up for those that are interested.

A quick follow-up for those that are interested. Last week’s DW session went quite okay. In the end I decided not to use any Mind Control monster moves (but I may still do in the future!), opting instead to introduce a physical mind control object that the players could interact with in a more direct fashion (destroy it, take it out of range, use it for their own purposes, etc.) rather than through NPC interaction. Easier for them, easier for me, and it fit in quite well with the already established fiction of bio-mechanomagical engineering lizard priests. 🙂

Despite that concession to making things less difficult for myself, I’m growing increasingly more comfortable with the improvisational “react to or come up with stuff on the fly” aspects of DW, and hence with the idea of worrying a lot less about (lack of) plot-based prep. I’m also getting a lot better at pacing the session in general, and using GM moves to nudge players a little bit towards gameplay that is more fun for them (“offer an opportunity” is so useful!).

I have also started using two resources that I think are not very well known, but may be useful to others as well:

http://robotacid.com/games/dw-improv/ is a version of the DW reference documentation (and more) that has almost zero look-up time or context switching (i.e. no scrolling or page-turning). Sounds trivial, but that really makes a big difference for me.

The other idea is one I got off a Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/DungeonWorld/comments/3v25kn/keeping_track_of_monsters_npcs_cities_items/cxkxj8c), offering a similar benefit: I now maintain all my objects/places/things/NPC/monster information on a single Trello board. No more scrolling — just one-click access to crucial information on an editable index card. Joy.

http://robotacid.com/games/dw-improv/

OK, final question for the day (can you tell I have a new session coming up on Tuesday, and am doing prep? :-))

So, my Lizard Abbot already has the kidnapped NPC girl under mind control, and it seems logical to me that he will try to do the same thing to one or more of the player characters as well. So I am looking for a good Mind Control monster move — but have been surprisingly unsuccessful at finding anything online, and am therefore trying to come up with something myself. Jeremy Strandberg had some ideas for that in a previous discussion, but it’s still a struggle to distill a good Move out of it.

I was thinking of an ‘opening’ GM move (perhaps triggered as the result of a previous 6- on something?) along the lines of “The Abbot opens his third lizard eye and starts speaking to you in a low voice. What do you do?“, followed by:

“When you try to break away from the Abbot’s stare, roll +WIS. On a 10+, you are successful; on 7-9 you are successful but you also do not remember that he tried something; and on a 6- the GM will tell you which idea has been implanted in your head that you will now act upon as if it was your own.”

I like the ‘implant one idea’ concept, but I can’t imagine any player is ever going to voluntarily continue to listen to the Abbot (and if they did, the 6- result would presumably just happen anyway?), so the trigger seems a bit dodgy, and I’m not sure this move will really enable fun game play. I also have not been able to come up with a good idea for how the players could actually break the spell.

Any thoughts?

Another small question that came up during our last session.

Another small question that came up during our last session. Three people in the party went sneaking through the temple at night, so I felt that they were collectively defying the danger of being discovered by any monks that happened to be up late.

If it had just been them entering a specific room or area where somebody unexpected could be located, I probably would have asked “who of you is in front?”, and made that character roll Defy Danger. But this was more of a the-three-of-us-are-roaming-through-the-entire-building scene. So how do I as a GM best handle a zoomed-out ‘aggregated’ Defy Danger like that?

My semi-newbie players’ characters are still carrying a number of magic items with them that they haven’t even…

My semi-newbie players’ characters are still carrying a number of magic items with them that they haven’t even identified as such yet.

What would be a good way to nudge my players towards starting to integrate those items in their roleplaying? I was thinking of e.g. using the answer to a “what here is valuable to me?” DR question. But it feels a bit like cheating because even if the item is indeed valuable w.r.t. the situation being studied for the DR move, it is very unlikely to really make much fictional sense: “You are intensely studying the mechanism of the lock on the door. Suddenly you feel the urge to insert in the keyhole that shard of glass you stole from the ogre three sessions ago.”

I have in fact also tried the mundane solution of reminding the players a couple of times “by the way guys, you’re carrying a lot of stuff around you haven’t even properly looked at yet!”, but that seems to not have landed, and if I really start hammering on it, I feel it will become railroading.

So, any good tips for introducing my group’s characters to their own magic items? Or should I just let them be and move on with new stuff?