Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: Discussion

So, debilities.  The rules as written say:  “You can only have each debility once. If you’re already Sick and something makes you Sick you just ignore it.”

Am curious why that rule is there.  It seems like an obvious option to interpret a vampiric attack, for instance, as inflicting the weak debility, but it would be strange if a vampire can’t affect you twice.  Or, say, each day in the nonEuclidean plane of Madness, you grow increasingly confused.  In general, if you can normally have a range of modifiers for ability from -3 to +3, why shouldn’t debility be able to stack likewise?

Descriptionwise, it might be boring to just stack “take another -1 weakness”, but you don’t have to do that – you could presumably describe increasing pallor, and rubbery legs starting to buckle under you, and so on.

Does that sound like a bad idea?

The Hack and Slash move says:  “On a 7–9, you deal your damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you.”  As written, that allows the GM to offer a choice like “you do your damage.  The monster attacks back;  you can either take the damage or be shouldered aside and the monster will have a clear shot at the wizard” . . . but not “you can do your damage, but if you do, you’ll be out of position and the monster will have a clear shot at the wizard.  Do you want to?”  That is, on a 7-9, the rules say the character has definitely hit the monster for full normal damage.  Any hard bargain the GM can offer as part of the monster’s counterattack happens separately from that.

On the on hand, it seems like a bad idea to offer bargains as partial successes that could result in nothing happening.  So having something definitely happen is a good thing.  On the other hand, having characters be so likely to deal damage every time they roll makes it hard to keep monsters alive long enough to be interesting.  How do you all handle this?