The Dungeon World Tavern: Actual Play – Page 65 – Dungeon World Tavern G+ Archives

Here’s the map form Sunday’s game of DW. Misha Polonsky, my wife, my friends James and Brandon joined me! James and my wife were new to RPGs entirely but really got into the world and Misha had a great fleshed out background that everyone kind of built on. Everyone got to put something on the map and contribute to the history. Now Jean Claude, cleric of Dracori; Mercury, Druid of the Great Forest; Rakar, Paladin of Puress, and Grausam the Wizard/Secret Necromancer are off on grand adventure.

BTW I threw out all of my prep when I heard Misha’s really fleshed out background and I saw how excited James, new to RPGs got when he was able to extrapolate off it and add his stuff to it.

Play to find out what happens, at the table as well as in the game!

My favorite moment from this weekend’s game of DW: the PCs are exploring a vast, buried city of an ancient…

My favorite moment from this weekend’s game of DW: the PCs are exploring a vast, buried city of an ancient civilization. They know that chokers (horrible little things) are lurking about in the dark, but can’t see them. The figher are artificer are investigating a series of clone-tubes with the NPC. “There might be some sort of control panel in the next room,” says the artificer and the NPC wanders off to find it.

The ranger Discerns Reality, misses. A tentacle-hand shoots out of the dark, covers his face, and drags him away.

The fighter and artificer hear something, look and see that the ranger is gone. The fighter creeps toward where they last saw the ranger, axe out and peering into the dark. He Discerns Realities. The artificer assists, shining the (only) light over the fighter’s shoulder.

Both roll at the same time.

Both miss.

Once upon a time, a camp went horribly, horribly wrong.

It started out pretty mildly. After holing up with all the gold they’d looted, the small, narrow entranced room with good view of any approaches seemed ideal. Admittedly, putting the Bard to watch for the whole camp was optimistic given his 8 Wisdom. Also they did underestimate the danger posed by the beastie that got away and they decided not to pursue.

When the Bard failed watch and the snake leapt from the shadows and coiled around his torso, ready to strike his face, things looked bad. The Bard was already Weak so his powering through was probably going to fail. He did get off a scream, which was generous given the snake then disengaged its jaw and swallowed his head.

But his companions were roused! Surely the Ranger and his pet direwolf will save him. O, they missed the slippery shadow beast and instead skewered and rendered the Bard. O noes!

But the Druid has now scrambled free of his sarcophagus, surely he will save him. With elementary mastery? Wait. You’re summoning a wall of flame in this small room around its only exit. Yes it will burn the snake. The snake wrapped around the Bard. Okay, go for it. Holy smoke, you failed your roll too.

Let us see. Everyone is burnt, blasted and choking from the living inferno the Druid just called forth blocking the only exit from this room full of dry, ruined carpet, pillows and tapestries. Except the Bard was already choking from the large snake swallowing his head. The ring fire around him also isn’t helping. And the fact that his companions have done more damage to him than any other “monster” so far.

The story ends well. The Bard survived with one hp and a little dignity after killing the beast. And even though he was scalded and near dead from smoke and snake bile, it took a while to convince him that resting and recovering was a good idea: “Camping caused all these problems in the first place”.

My first session as a GM:

Well, it could have gone better, I’ll say. But stiff-upper lip and all that!

I see what I could have done differently and I am going to try again – I believe I could be a good GM once I get the hang of it…

Anyway, tell me your first time GM horror stories! Maybe I can feel better about this?

I really wish I could watch other folks GMing, so I could “get it”.

So, Taverners – riddle me this.

The group I was GMing for reacted against my expectations in the late stages of a Front resolution.

Put simply, when the Dwarf Librarians declared (albeit cryptically) they would take forbidden knowledge they and the players suspected was in the Library of Tiza, the PCs decided to run away and hide out with the Blood Mage’s old master in a faraway city, before checking out the group of elves they’ve suspected of having the book all along. The Front of the Dwarf Librarians is reaching its critical stage – all that is left is for them to storm the library and take the forbidden book.

What do I do?

A) Proceed with the Front as planned, leaving the PCs to return to a smoking hellhole of a city, with its people enslaved beneath the Librarians they failed to stop?

B) Resolve the Front, but in a reduced way? (turns out the Librarians just wanted to stop it falling into the wrong hands!)

C) Disregard the Front until they return? (The guards have held them off just long enough! Please, heroes, save us!)

If the front was more obvious, the choice would be simple – “You walk away from the Cultist summoning an Elder God? You sure? Ok, reality buckles…” But it seems to belittle the players when they make such a drastic mistake without realising it, despite the RP opportunities it offers. Advice?

Our Pathfinder group was short 40% of our players last night, so I conned the group into letting me run my first…

Our Pathfinder group was short 40% of our players last night, so I conned the group into letting me run my first Dungeon World session instead. I loved how the game just kept rolling, smoothly in and out of combat, and full of adventure. I recently re-watched the Star Trek reboot, and was struck by how the characters in that movie are constantly being thrown from one trouble to another. I aimed for a similar pacing in our game.

My seven-year-old son joined us right at the end of character creation. I was impressed by his creativity, and by the way the rules both allowed his more fantastical ideas, and kept them in check from being too overwhelming. All of the players had interesting histories for their characters. It’s clear that a continuing campaign would have lots to draw upon. The bonds also really pulled the group together.

I started with these questions:

“Tearos, why are you in this temple?”

“Ajax, who are you running from, and why?”

“Ovid, what did you do just before the cannibals started chasing you?”

“Lily, what have you foreseen about this situation?”

Then the group ran from the cannibals, discovering a secret door which they got through just in time, only to hear it broken down behind just after they had found that the hallway they were then following was collapsed. There was a battle with the cannibals, during which a mage spell had the unintended consequence of awakening some magical sentinel masks, which the party then overcame. We had to stop due to time just after that, but I was amazed by how much story and action we had fit into the one evening, especially given that we did character creation too.

I think I’ll need to learn to balance things better: both the behavior of enemies, and the spotlight time for each player. I was holding back too much with the enemies. Just jotting down a couple of monster moves would have helped, and would have put the characters in a more vibrant situation. But overall, I’m calling it a win.

Thanks to everyone here who has posted such useful resources! I definitely made use of what I’ve read here.

Okay. My first session of DW happened this Friday. Myself as the GM. It was hard. Very hard.

I can say a lot of it was down to my poor preperation. I was confused as to what moves actually were and there were cases where a player wanted to grapple an NPC but I had no idea which move to use. I also had problems keeping everything in my head at the same time. Thinking too much about stats, not enough about the GM principles and moves.

I had a slight problem because I had to GM a group of 5 people. Which I realise now is one too many. As well as that most of my players refused to read, listen and kept on talking. Incessantly.

One of the players was playing a fanatical paladin. This player dominated the group. Whenever anything was going on, he did it. I put a small and incredibly simple puzzle down for the thief at the table, who was the quietest of the group, just to draw attention away from him, but it took at least ten minutes after the paladin had asked me (several times) if there were any guards around (the thief’s task was to unlock a city gate) before the thief piped up and said he had something which could unlock the gate.

Basically what happened was that the idea I had for the adventure was totally hijacked by a domineering (both in and out of game) paladin who lead the group on a journey to deliver divine judgement on some poor, unwitting, desperate soul.

I wanted to ask:

How do you GM a good adventure with a person like that at the table?

And

Should I care about the stats? Or more about the narrative?

P.S. The paladins roleplaying was excellent, though.

From whybird, on the SomethingAwful forums. Thought this was too good not to share!

From whybird, on the SomethingAwful forums. Thought this was too good not to share!

“The session of Dungeon World last night featured the players getting into a cook-off against an undead chef who was being kept alive by a Lovecraftian beast of insatiable appetite so that he could keep on finding it new and exciting flavours.

As challenged party, the undead chef got to choose the key ingredient: he went for gelatinous cube. Cue the Artificer setting up a Rube Goldberg-esque trap to dump their gelatinous cube into a vat of marinade, and the Mastermind using his ‘reveal an enemy to be an ally’ move to order the cube ‘Bad cube! Down! Spit it out!’ after it broke free and swallowed members of the party.

The ending involved the Fae using her Traitor’s Knife (when she stabs someone with it who trusts her, their flesh becomes magically delicious) to murder some of their rival’s sous-chefs and add them to the marinade, and ended up recreating the Iron Chef episode from Futurama. She has now claimed the undead chef’s enchanted pepper-grinder as her primary weapon.”

I put this up a couple of days ago, but forgot to tell anyone. Here.

http://ubersnail.podbean.com/2014/02/18/episode-11-sun-stones-and-such-pt-3/#.UwYVL5i2rSw.google_plusone_share

Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: Actual Play

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Here’s the map form Sunday’s game of DW.