Author: Leo Breebaart

So me and my newbie players are slowly getting the hang of ‘fiction first’ DW combat and that’s really nice, but now I wanted to expand our repertoire, so I nudged our last session in a direction that was more about interaction with NPCs in a not immediately threatening environment (for those of you who remember my other questions related to that DW session, it’s lizard priests in a monastery, up to no good, but not right now).

Although the session went well and everybody had fun, overall I thought that the evening felt way too much like one long expositionary infodump. The players kept in character and tried to roleplay, but mostly just endlessly ‘interviewed’ the various NPCs, or carefully checked out the environment. Even though this perfectly fit within the fiction (if I had been in the characters’ place I would also have asked lots of questions, and mapped out the location), and even though I successfully nudged them towards a couple of Discern Realities and Spout Lore rolls to drive the story forward in unforeseen ways, I couldn’t help but feel that they were mostly on the rails of what little backstory I had prepared. I was telling them stuff, they were reacting to it.

So, my question is basically: how do I break that pattern, without just taking the easy way out and fabricating more monsters and sudden dangers? Are there any specific other techniques or approaches you guys use to keep player/NPC interactions inventive and spontaneous?

(I have a sneaky suspicion you guys are going to say “Fronts!”. Yeah, you’re going to say “Fronts!”, aren’t you? 🙂 )

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

Here’s another tiny question that came up during gameplay.

When a player Discerns Realities and hits 10+, do they ask all three questions at the same time and then get three answers, or is it Q/A, Q/A, Q/A?

I could not find anything explicit about this in the DW book (the one example they list uses the 3 x Q/A format, so I suppose that’s an implicit endorsement), so again I am just curious how other people are usually playing this.

Is the only difference between a Cantrip and a Spell that the Cantrip does not count towards a Wizard’s number of prepared spells?

I ask, because it seems a little bit odd to me that every time the Wizard wants to do something as simple as e.g. light the way (there are dungeons — this happens a lot!) he has to roll the dice and suffer the possible consequences of a partial success or a miss, etc. Or, conversely, gain experience points at a rate the other players won’t have a chance to match…

It’s no big deal, but I’m just curious to see if everybody else indeed plays cantrips as fully equivalent to spells, with all that implies.

I’ve managed to paint myself in a bit of a corner for next week’s session, and was hoping some of you could help me kickstart my imagination.

My players are on the verge of entering a big monastery where a cult of humanoid lizard priests is trying to perform a ritual that will cause the blood god Groth to manifest itself in the body of a girl they kidnapped (and whom my group is trying to rescue. The girl, not Groth. :-)).

The problem is that a couple of sessions ago, in a different location, my group already encountered and beat a second group of these lizard priests who were trying the same thing on a different kidnap victim (sister of the current girl — they were kidnapped together, and then the lizards split them up. I know, I know — it seemed like a good idea at the time…).

You can probably see what my problem is: I don’t want to offer my players a repeat of the same adventure, but I am stuck on how to escalate / differentiate the plot. In fact, I’d like to avoid a second slugfest altogether, so would prefer to enable something with a bit more potential for NPC interaction, and non-hack’n’slash solutions.

What I was thinking so far, is that I could have the players actually be spotted and welcomed by the priests, told that nothing’s wrong, the girl is there of her own free will, they’re welcome to meet her and stay the night, etc. etc. But of course there should still be some nefarious purpose/front behind all of this, and that’s where I am stuck.

Why would the priests pretend to be friendly to the party (considering that in the monastery the players will be vastly outnumbered, and could basically just be slaughtered at any time)? What is the priests’ ulterior goal with the second girl? What sort of non-violent solutions could I help nudge my party in the direction of? (I don’t want or need to railroad them, but my players do appreciate a bit of “there’s something for us to discover/figure-out here” GM prepped puzzle play). Can I maybe do something with the victim’s fiancee, who is traveling with the players as an NPC, and so far has not been of much use on account of him just being a humble peasant boy?

So yeah, I’m somewhat stuck. Does anybody have any ideas for me?

So, my L2 group has encountered a stone guard lizard that will come alive and attack them as soon as they try to enter the Place of Power the lizard was set to guard. Since this lizard is a magical construct, essentially pure stone magicked to life, I figure it should be impervious to magic, fire, and sharp instruments. But it will be vulnerable to blunt instruments and of course it will also be very heavy, so maybe they will climb a tree and drop boulders on it, or try to lure it into the swamp and drown it — whatever. I am trying to give them an interesting small-stakes enemy they can’t just immediately hack to death.

My problem is this: I am fairly certain that when the beastie starts to attack, the wizard will try Magic Missile (because that’s pretty much all he has), and the others will try their sharp weapons. When I tell them none of those things will actually trigger a Move in this case, I’ve noticed before that instead of thinking “aha, clearly we must find another way of dealing with the situation!” my players tend to feel frustrated and railroaded, because my GM veto on their logical-on-the-face-of-it actions takes them out of the fiction.

But if I just make the lizard vulnerable to magic missiles and normal attacks after all, I’ve also seen in the past that, because there are five players, even at level 1 they will just make mincemeat of the lizard, probably without the poor animal even getting a chance to exhibit its monster moves.

How do you make ‘simple’ monsters interesting against such a large group of players? Thanks to earlier advice from this group, I’ve gained a better understanding of how to handle big bad boss monsters, where a longer, more climactic fight scene is appropriate. But often I also just want to provide some less momentous monsters. How do I achieve that without either frustrating my players or making it too easy for them?

Two more Move phrasing questions. (I am prepping for our next game — my L1 players are finally going to be levelling up, so I’m making sure their choices won’t take me by surprise…)

1. Ranger: A Safer Place. The description says: “After a night in camp when you set the watch everyone takes +1 forward.” Is that just a blanket +1 roll on everyone’s next Move, no matter what it is and when it comes? If so, I don’t get the reasoning. Just because Aragorn is good at taking watch, the next day Frodo gets a +1 on a Spout Lore?

2. Wizard: Logical/Highly Logical. What does it mean for a player to use “strict deduction” to analyze their surroundings? How would that play out in the fiction? Isn’t Discern Realities/Spout Lore for a Wizard pretty much always deductive, as in: “I have studied this mystic language so I should be able to deduce what this scroll says”? Or is that not what is meant here?

A silly little question: during our last game, the Fighter used a 10+ roll on Bend Bars, Lift Gates to destroy a magical battery-cube thing that was powering some evil ritual (and that was impervious to all other attempts to move or damage it). Is that a correct use of the Move, or should I have taken the Move text, which specifies “When you use pure strength to destroy an inanimate obstacle” more literally? The cube was an object, not really an obstacle…

As a quick followup to my post of a few days ago: the DW session went quite well! No major problems identifying magical items arose. 🙂 Thanks again for all your help and suggestions.

One small question came up during game play:

How do you deal with a Volley using a single ranged weapon? One of my players has a spear she likes to throw at enemies. But how do we then deal with the “You have to take several shots, reducing your ammo by one.” failure option? Do we just rule it not applicable, or is there some interpretation that would work?