Category: Dungeon World Tavern

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.