Dungeon World

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Jonathan
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Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

It's a thing, I guess?

My 4e group is giving Dungeon World a thorough test drive. I think our DM has run three nights of it so far, though I have attended just the one. It's a pen and paper RPG with a flat leveling structure. With a couple levels, you can increase your chance of your prime requisite abilities landing successfully by 16%, but that's the entire extent. The HP increases are not tied to level directly, and also fairly constrained (increase by +83% in the extreme case, but on average more like +10% over the lifetime of the character). The monsters are "balanced" around this, but obviously some monsters are intended to be deadly and aren't rendered less deadly through leveling. It is supposed to be more red-box D&D-esque than some other systems, while rethinking some of the faults of that system.

The mechanics are deliberately vague and with the wrong group could really poison a game. In the best case situation, though, they can extemporaneously generate cool scenarios. The underlying theme of the mechanics is a dice roll should always result in something good, something bad, or a little bit of both. You never just whiff, you whiff in spectacularly horrendous way. This has an effect of fast-forwarding to the cool parts of combat, if I were to contrast with 4e. The vagueness of the mechanics does mean sometimes events are tricky to adjudicate.

Here's my first night's adventure. We all created characters & setting anew for this night, and will stick with this setting for the next several weeks. We spent about an hour on character creation (bonds, backstory, motivation, setting) and then slightly less than five hours actually playing, if you want to get a sense of the pace. The sole "epic" fight was with the giant lobster, which due to a failed Spout Lore got regenerating attached to it. It cornered our thief and cleric after a failed attempt to shoot it, with the thief sustaining serious wounds from getting mashed by its claws. I then distracted it so they could escape and persuaded the barbarian to leave it the fuck alone at the time. He may charge back in there now that we've acquired what we came for. It could probably kill my wizard in one blow, more or less, if it rolled well. The barbarian might possibly have been able to kill it after the cleric flailed its claw, but I think it is equally likely that the barbarian would have died in the attempt. Doing the math and using reasonable guesses for what the HP and damage of each were at the time, yeah, probably no more than 60% chance that the barbarian killed the lobster and a 60% chance that the lobster would kill the barbarian (rules allow for mutual destruction). If we go back, well, depends on how we do it, I guess.

The DM is still trying to find the sweet spot in making our characters awesome but not insanely awesome.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

After two more sessions of this, I feel qualified to comment.

1. Dungeon World is difficult to DM. The players will have to contribute more to both the story and adjudication than any D&D product I have played.
2. The reward for this investment is a substantially more "pen & paper"-esque game than any I have played. DW tries to leave the stuff that CRPGs are good at to the CRPGs, which is definitely to its credit.

We had two more interesting encounters. In the first, an enemy squad was destroying a tribe of goblins. We decided to intervene before they finished. I turned the barbarian invisible. The DM ruled he was able to engage the enemy caster in melee since the combat disguised his approach. His big blow distracted her enough for my wizard and our thief to finish her off before we could get hit with spells. What followed was a rather tense battle against the remainder of her squad, which was plenty vicious. We kept generating threats on our rolls, which meant our cleric narrowly escaped death by being ganged up on. The thief and I both ate a hit from some goblins to kill the last guy facing the cleric.

Mechanically, that entire encounter could have occurred in 4e. It would have been more fiddly. It also could have occurred in D&D Next, or Star Wars: Edge of Empire (the two other P&P systems I have played recently). In both of these systems, the big difference is that DW generates success, failure, and complications on the player's roll. There's no monster roll. This weirded me out initially, but I rather like the way that DW has its sights set with laser focus on what the players decide to do. Your success or failure depends on what you make your character do and how you roll, not how clever your DM is feeling or how strong he stats out a monster. Star Wars does the best at mimicking this with the narrative dice system. The boost and setback dice do not provide the same strong causal link between the player's roll (generating "threat" or "advantage") and the challenge's roll, however.

In the second encounter, we were surprised by a spellcaster and a couple of henchswords. This was a tense standoff due to the huge threat these three guys implied to our party. As it turned out just one hit took half of my life away. Our cleric concluded the negotiations by bashing in the knee of one of the henchswords, prompting our druid to call on the primal spirits of air to vacate our opponent's lungs while our thief tried to paralyze the leader. The spirits of air granted the druid's request by creating a vacuum in the entire room as the thief paralyzed both herself and the leader, who escaped magically. The druid attempted to shapeshift into the form of a wolf to leap past the henchsword and drag the thief to safety, but the remaining henchswords attempted to cast sleep on myself and the druid. The druid was forced to fall asleep, but I chose to fight off the effects but left myself open to the advancing, suffocating henchsword. I bulled past the henchsword in my way to move the druid out of the room before he suffocated, losing half my HP to his dying blow in the process. The cleric chose to suffer ill effects from the lack of oxygen from lingering too long in the room to save the paralyzed thief before she suffocated. I then woke the druid and the two of us tracked down the leader and determined he died during his escape. As a result of his bargain with the spirits of the air, the druid is now sick and will be for a while.

That second encounter would have been incredibly difficult mechanically to set up and adjudicate in any of the three other systems I mentioned. All of these systems, but particularly 4e, give the players renewable resources (powers, strain, spells) on top of HP which give the combat a death-by-a-thousand-papercuts quality which is the heart and soul of many CRPGs. A really tough encounter would involve enemies with lots of hitpoints, maybe ones who were difficult to hit, and multiple rounds of trading blows until we got to a decisive point. An existential threat would take the form of a tough fight after a long day of battles which wore down the characters. In DW, the DM is free to create an existential threat whenever the story demands it, and the players who survive that threat do so in a real skin-of-your-teeth way. Mechanically. Because this is how combat in DW works. Almost all the player's resources are "use 'em and lose 'em", even things like ammo. The renewable resources tend to be easy to acquire, unless you are in combat. You get half your HP back when you sleep for a few hours, but combat healing is limited to certain characters and not particularly effective, even for the cleric, unless you invest heavily in it. Spells can be forgotten, but are easily memorized again with only an hour of downtime (not once per rest or day), and indeed don't need to be forgotten if desired. Casters have options when they do not completely succeed on a cast, like take a penalty to further casting or put themselves in a spot.

I approve. The best 4e encounters I had were the ones where the fight was difficult and the party had to use some tactics. DW tends to require some creative thinking more continuously, which I find to be satisfying as a player.

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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Alan »

Jonathan wrote: I approve. The best 4e encounters I had were the ones where the fight was difficult and the party had to use some tactics. DW tends to require some creative thinking more continuously, which I find to be satisfying as a player.
But can you burn a snake respectfully?
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jason »

Alan wrote:
Jonathan wrote: I approve. The best 4e encounters I had were the ones where the fight was difficult and the party had to use some tactics. DW tends to require some creative thinking more continuously, which I find to be satisfying as a player.
But can you burn a snake respectfully?
I doubt he was playing with Neal.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

I have taken over as DM of our Dungeon World game. I burnt down the inn and slashed the throat of the innkeeper in the street because they failed a stealth roll. I tackled the halfing with a bunch of orphans related to the barbarian because they were starving to death and it amused me to pit them against the party.

I WILL END YOU

There's definitely no way I would have devoted the time to statting out some 4E monsters. I tried, actually, so I know this is a 100% true statement. I got a little bit into it, cobbled together one encounter from some pre-existing monsters, started tinkering with a custom monster and got horribly bogged down.

Main problem with my DW encounters is I have got to come up with wilder shit. I keep dipping into soldiers of various flavors. This week's flavor of soldier: undead soldier! Next week, I'm thinking more of a tentacle soldier, or a four armed soldier.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

I stopped mastering Dungeon World due to wedding demands on my time. The original DM took over that campaign and is going to wrap it this week.

I feel like our group has decided some of the Dungeon World moves are too hard to correctly adjudicate (particularly Druid Shapeshift, but we have strayed from RAW). Still, by and large, it gives a fun game without too much work for the DM.

I have not kept up with the D&D Next play tests, but I understand that it has drifted from the version I played quite a bit.

edit autocorrect typos

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

Here's the writeup of the penultimate session for this campaign:
http://jonathan.pearce.name/dungeonworl ... 2013_09_29

Jeez, these writeups have gotten a lot more wordy and a lot more snarky since February.

It is important here to note that Nude Sven and Dead Sven are different guys. We had to give them nicknames to distinguish between the two Svens.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

Alright, I created my own campaign setting based on A Song of Ice and Fire. It is set roughly ten thousand years before the action of Game of Thrones.

http://jonathan.pearce.name/dungeonworl ... y:Westeros

I wrote four new classes and three new compendium classes for it. We're only using two classes I wrote, one of which I didn't write for this setting.

http://jonathan.pearce.name/dungeonworl ... le=Classes

We have played two sessions so far.

http://jonathan.pearce.name/dungeonworl ... 2013_11_24
http://jonathan.pearce.name/dungeonworl ... 2013_12_08

I am pretty happy with how the campaign has developed, though it is a far cry from the struggle of light against dark that I thought I was setting up. That's cool, though. That's kind of the whole point of the game system, after all.

Combat has gone a bit slowly, I feel. Not sure why that is, but probably I just need to launch a stream of different encounters from my quiver full of critters rather than drop single uber-encounter bombs. I am a little torn in my encounter design, as I feel like the group responded really well to an old-school One Page Dungeon our other DM ran as a sidequest for the characters in our previous campaign. But the gamey feel of things like that make it difficult for me to justify them. Why would so many dangerous things be bunched up so tightly?

I think I do have a good idea for a dungeon town, though, that I am excited to run if the players ever head that way.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

Jonathan wrote:Main problem with my DW encounters is I have got to come up with wilder shit. I keep dipping into soldiers of various flavors. This week's flavor of soldier: undead soldier! Next week, I'm thinking more of a tentacle soldier, or a four armed soldier.
In Westeros, my standby is wild animals: two-headed winter bear, blood hounds (dogs made of animated blood), dire wolves, death butterflies, carnivorous mold, and now apparently acid frogs.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

I bought the DW setting book Grim World. It is a collection of classes, new death moves, magic items, and monsters. It also has some fronts, new races and moves, and suggestions on how to run a grim DW campaign.

I bought it primarily for the classes. Two of my players have already told me which class they want to play from this book. It is a nice cross section of martial and magical classes.
Battlemaster- retcon traps & strategies
Channeler - elemental power
Necromancer - raise the dead
Skirmisher - chip away at powerful foes without getting hit
Slayer - thirsty for destruction
Templar - an interrogator with high burst damage
Shaman - calls on various spirits from a list

They all share the characteristic of not feeling like D&D classes, but integrating well into a party of classic D&D character tropes like the DW base classes. I am keen to run them.

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

We capped off Westeros by burning some orphans alive in R'hllor's name.

That got dark

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

Not sure it was done respectfully, either

Jonathan
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Re: Dungeon World

Post by Jonathan »

I spoke too soon. Westeros keeps chugging along.
We are on a boat, the boat is in a warm climate. Enemies abound. Those we have met are mostly enemies. Those we have yet to meet are probably mostly/all enemies. Gog Mog is a giant scarred killing machine with no remorse. His ribs fill those around him with terror. He can fly, but he is afraid of drowning. Why, we do not know. He has died many times and come back. He will outlast us all. He will outlast the world. This is our default situation. We are damned. This whole world is like the ending of Event Horizon.
The party may have PTSD at this point.

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