Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: Actual Play

After GM’ing several sessions of Dungeon World I feel I’m getting into the ‘flow’ of how the moves are triggered and how to resolve them.

However, I still struggle sometimes with when to use discern realities and spout lore, and when to simply provide information or make them do a different type of roll. Some situations are obvious (someone is checking out a room = discern realities, someone wants to see if they know something about X = spout lore, etc).

But some situations are not so obvious, to me anyway.

Two recent examples:

Situation 1: I described one of my room in a dungeon to have various pictures of rituals etched into the wall. The room was known to belong to a cult they were investigating. One of my players wanted to examine the pictures more closely and figure out if they provided them with any more information. I did not have anything specific in mind up front.

Discern realities’ questions didn’t really seem to apply to this. I went with Spout lore (which resulted in them finding a riddle pointing to a hidden door), but i’m not entirely sure this was the ‘proper’ way to handle this.

What would you have let them roll, if anything?

Situation 2: A player obtained an artifact belonging to the cult I mentioned before. The use of the artifact (a bracelet) has not been established yet (for the players, I do have something in mind). One of the players wanted to fiddle with the artifact around the room to see if it reacted to anything.

Although I wasn’t really planning on them doing this, it seemed cool to me. The answer “It doesn’t react to anything” would be unrewarding and lame. However, simply telling them ‘oh it reacts to XXX’ might be a bit too easy. This action uncovering something potentially dangerous felt unfair without there being a roll involved.

How would you have handled this?