Dungeon World

"Dungeon World: A Game with Modern Rules & Old-School Style."

What do they mean by this? Can someone explain to me?

The game was marketed as a way to do old-school dungeon crawls with the Apocalypse World engine, which uses a lot of modern ideas in game design.

It's an attempt to appeal to people who like the idea of D&D but not the game itself.

Its like D&D, but the rules arn't awful and bloated. Still not good though.

They haphazardly tacked what they believed to be "old-school D&D" onto the relatively new Apocalypse World framework, mangling both in the process.

They set out to make D&D for the indie RPG people, but wound up making Apocalypse World for the D&D people.
It's light and fast and fairly narrative-oriented, though not in the metagamey way of FATE, and Veeky Forums can't talk about it because some folks get triggered and slip their shit whenever it's mentioned. (Just wait, they'll show up.)

No, they didn't wind up making AW for D&D people, they openly and officially hacked AW into some D&D analogue. And what a poor hack job they made of it.

They tried to make D&D for hipsters who are either too stupid or too lazy to actually play D&D.

It's shit.

Translation
>Yes, game is shit, we know. But we need a tagline to sell it to idiots both young & old.

>Just wait, they'll show up.

Yep.

And if they don't show up? I'm already with the popcorn ready.

They already have.

They took two very different systems DnD and Apocalypse World haphazardly smashed them together and produced a game that does a shit job of imitating either of them

Okay okay a lot of people on Veeky Forums hate dungeon world and I'm no exception but I'll try to give it a fair enough assessment as I can.


Sum it up. DW is aimed squarely at people Who played 3.5 when they were 16 for a few sessions because they found the rules too complicated and all they really wanted to do was describe how bad ass their looked when their twin scimitar Ranger Drow looked when he did stuff.

If that's what you're looking for in a game Dungeon World does that and it does it to a T.

>it does it to a T
A what?

It does not. DW combat is characterized by drudgery and whiffing.

T. Twentieth letter of the alphabet.

It's not a terrible hack. It's just not overly impressive.

If you're a beer and pretzels player I honestly can't find issue with the system, other then the existence of beer and pretzel systems

It's easy to run, easy to play, It's a group storytelling with dice game. It doesn't try anything so it can't fail.

>If you're a beer and pretzels player
There's Risus for that, and it's better.

No it's not. I wish people would stop pushing this meme.

It's a straight addition based d6 dice pool system. That's a probability curve a state as the Marianna trench.

>I wish people would stop pushing this meme
You mean GURPS, yeah?

My god you people know nothing about Bell Curves.

t. analphabet

It's an expression that means "fits this need or situation perfectly".

Do you want to play an RPG that claims to be simpler than D&D but is actually more complex than at least four versions of D&D, which claims to be "narrative" just because it stole some rules from Apocalypse World and slapped them on its poor man's D&D, and which purports to be a great game for beginners without any real evidence to support that claim?

Then Dungeon World is the game for you.

That's a lot of words for no real information.

It takes the idea of old school D&D and replaces resource management and careful strategizing with the ability to gain bonuses by chit-chatting with other player characters in the middle of combat. I mean, if you want to know the mechanics of the game, read the book or Google it.

It has modern rules in the sense that its rules were created more recently. It has old school style in the sense that if you've never played old school D&D you might think it has old school style. There. I answered OP's question.

>gain bonuses by chit-chatting with other player characters in the middle of combat

You're actually making me want to play this now. 80% of D&D players I've ever played with don't actually talk in character and it infuriates me.

>It takes the idea of old school D&D and replaces resource management and careful strategizing with the ability to gain bonuses by chit-chatting with other player characters in the middle of combat.
That sounds a lot better than D&D. Thanks!

After dealing with power gamers and rules lawyers who would ignore campaign until combat started, that actually sounds much more appealing.

That's the players' fault
I mean, it isn't thematic at all, but okay.
Just play a game where munchkining is hard.

In a way, but encouraging roleplaying in a roleplaying game ain't bad. Quite the opposite really.

I agree. I just think that in a game where you're trying to survive while you steal shit from monsters, roleplaying is best encouraged by putting the characters in high-stress situations where even the players don't feel certain they'll survive, and giving them opportunities to develop their own motivations by having them run into NPCs with their own motivations and personalities and so on.

I feel like chit-chatting about their lives in the middle of dangerous situations is roleplaying, but kind of bad roleplaying.

>resources in osr
>hp, spells per day, torches and shit, hirelings, time between random encounter rolls
>resources in dw
>hp, spells per day, torches and shit, hirelings, time between random encounter moves

That being said, dw isn't really played in that similar a manner as what seems like a fair amount of osr. Its old school vibe is largely a e s t h e t i c textures for tactically rich narrative combat to build on rather than actual osr, which is already pretty rules light and simple all things considered. It totally fails to make use of the apocalypse engine's big thing, which is intergroup drama, triangles and conflicts over time.

There are some decent mashups though. Beyond The Wall does really cool shit with collaborative character, village and campaign world/hex map generation. The Black Hack does an interesting job of moving rolling largely to the players and abstracting resource management in some areas (torches and shit), while making others more intense (time and armour) and engaging.

>tries to make the game sound bad
>It actually makes people interested in the game because surprise surprise some people have different tastes in this hobby about having personal make believe adventures with friends
>gets buttblasted in response

Nice

>ability to gain bonuses by chit-chatting with other player characters in the middle of combat
What rule is that?

Agree completely.

My friend once said that DW plays more like the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons, and with the right group I'd agree.