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>Experience in DW only incentivizes one thing: failure.
By word of the designer of DW the reason for that design choice was essentially that since players are getting rewarded when they fail it gives the GM more leeway to be harsh on failure without seeming 'unfair'. Quite a few PbtA games use the same thing (2nd ed of MonsterHearts has, I believe, changed to this way of giving xp)

>it gives the GM more leeway to be harsh on failure without seeming 'unfair'
Something similar happens with Numenera and the GM intrusions, and it works very well.

I've just played a single game of Dungeon World, but I would want to try a small campaign using the The Cold Ruins of Lastlife or The Last Days of Anglekite books, both being apocalyptic fantasy settings.

>The Cold Ruins of Lastlife or The Last Days of Anglekite books

These own. I just dislike Lastlife ending when it could be interesting. I happen to find restoring Lastlife into either it's old Glory or something New something very gameable, enjoyable, and interesting.

Instead the book says, welp. End the game once it reaches that point. No way. Don't tell me what to do book.

>players are getting rewarded when they fail
For what purpose?
Why incentivize intentionally tripping over your own feet, so to speak?

And the only reason the GM has to be harsh on failure in DW in the first place is because the Moves are incompetently written.

Does anybody have the PDF for The Green Law of Varkith? I wanted to take a look at it.

I've been looking for that too.

...

...

Laughably shitty

I tried it and liked it. Not sure how it stacks up to other PbtA games though.

77 is hilarious.

>Opening your soul to the psychic maelstrom of the setting requires getting high
>Move set is based on 70s slang
>You can be a luchador

Enough said

I downloaded the rulebook to that a while back, I really need to get round to playing it

Not gonna say it's perfect, but honestly the low HP for the enemies to me meant it wasn't really an issue.

I'd say the real thing that DW should've had were bettere/different bond rules.

Should really try Fellowship for comparision, as it is "the other fantasy PBTA" (there are things like Epyllion, but...).

Anyway, what about Night Witches and The Warren? I'd really like to play those. Someone did?

On the topic of PbtA games, I like K6BD, but I'm not sure about it's RPG Broken World.

A while back, I asked Veeky Forums what they thought it did well/not so well. I can't quite remember what the criticism was, but I think it was somewhere along the line of "trying to do too much, whilst not having a clear core concept of what the game is supposed to be". Also that the primary GM Principle (Barf forth Apocalyptica in AW), is very generic when compared to other PbtA games, and doesn't communicate the setting properly.

Skimming through 4Plebs, I also see a handful of anons noting that Broken World has fewer GM tools to figure out consequences and shaping the world compared to other PbtA games.

Found the original response I had. I think this was around the time 1.3

>Last I checked, when the author was asked (off Veeky Forums, some other website) why they picked the PbtA engine, they said they weren't a huge gamer and it was just a system that seemed good. So... not the best impression.

>The playbooks themselves look OK from a skim.

>However, a lot of the game seems like it's trying to cram a lot into the framework. 'Flourish' is a different move from 'do violence', for example... even when they're both going to do harm. This is bad because it should NEVER be ambiguous which move you're using - it should be immediately obvious from the way you're describing things.

>Here's something telling - there's almost no unique GM moves or principles.
>Monsterhearts has 'Make humans seem monstrous, and monsters seem human'.
>Apocalypse World has 'barf forth apocalyptica'.
>By comparison, Broken World just has 'create a rich, living world'. What? Rich how? There's nothing in the principles about the mood of the setting!

>There needs to be a focus on what the game is ABOUT, and it's not coming through in the rules, leaping out.

Also, have a vampire game to go along with this

Played the Warren as a one-shot. It went pretty well. Never trust fox gypsies.

I sometimes wonder if Veeky Forums could design a superior Dungeon World, fix it.

I think a key element would be to more strongly tie classic dungeon fantasy RPG mechanics and tropes into the Moves. Traps, monsters, treasure, puzzles, tables, quests, traveling, etc. Create more specific effects that tie into them and tie them into PC moves.

I don't know what that would entail though. I'm just spitballing.

Like this?

Freebooters on the Frontier + The Perilous Wilds + The Perilous Deeps.

I can confirm that Urban Shadows is a good game. It take the purpose of moves (which is to say the narrative driving effects) in AW and applies it to a WoD/UA environment.

PbtA does a good job emulating schemes and intrigue, not just balls-to-the-walls grindhouse post-apocalypse. Worth trying if you haven't already.

>Plus I heard that the system breaks down under long term play.

I've had a 30-session campaign in Apocalypse World. is right in that there's a lot of give and take designed into the system - it tends to come to a rising action and climax, where a Front is either dealt with or wins. Starting back up and keeping the momentum going is a challenge. It helps if your players are willing to branch out with characters - the rules let you play two characters at a time (once you pick that advance) and you can also retire characters to safety, so you can keep the cast rotating to avoid things getting too insane with one character constantly earning XP and buying every advance in the book.

Well, if you want to go REALLY old-school on it you could just focus on the old thing where treasure is where you get experience and monsters are just an obstacle on your way there (and an annoyance at best) - something that really digs into the logistical dungeoncrawl gameplay of OD%D/AD&D/Basic, in other words.
Play up being alone and hungry in the dark underbelly of the world, scrabbling for treasure to bring to the surface, with every minute wasted trying to get that door open another minute that a monster might wander out of the darkness and claw at your back.

The big issue there, though, is that Torchbearer already did the whole "rebuild the procedural dungeoncrawl in a non-D&D system" thing pretty well so you've already got hard competition on that front.
(It's in the Burning Wheel system, if you wonder.)

Vincent Baker already did that.
It's called Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires.

Apocalypse World is a pretty good game. Works kind of like the Walking Dead comics if you run it right, but don't run it with zombies, that's fucking retarded. The best parts are the wounds system and harm moves, and the stats. The moves are a bit generic IMO but they work in the context of the game. And the game certainly works as is, it's brilliant. I just have issues letting go of "lmao attack rolls" and "lmao skill checks" which is my own fault.

There are zero good PbtA hacks, though. Monster of the Week is okay, but Dungeon World and Urban Shadows are fucked.

> keep 2d6 mechanic
> use proficiency from 5e, going +1 to +4 over 10 or so levels
> keep the OSR stat bonuses
> keep rolling for stats
> 1d6 damage for all weapons, +1 for two handed weapon
> etc etc

Just a 2d6 OSR game would've been okay. Honestly though, the entire idea of Dungeon World is such rank shit its better to ditch it entirely. Grimdark firefly storytelling just doesn't fit heroic fantasy. End of story.

It's a hybrid, and it feels like one. It's basically a traditional game designed by an indie designer using what he's learned from making indie games. So it's got levels and classes and hit points and PCs and a GM and everything you'd expect from a traditional game. The indie part manifests in the way it's wholly focused on co-operative improvisational story-telling, and that it relies a lot on common sense and social skills instead of rules lawyering. it's an approach that works really well for some people and not at all for others.

It's a good foundation, but a lot of pbta games don't do enough to customise the system to their own needs.

In regards to Dungeon World, the criticisms in this thread are overly harsh and largely unfounded. DW is certainly a slightly worse game than AW, but that's arguably unavoidable given it's design goals. DW is meant to closely emulate Basic D&D and it's flaws stem directly from that. It's a feature, not a bug, essentially. It does leave me wanting a pbta fantasy game that isn't so closely tied to emulating D&D mechanics, but you can't really blame it for being exactly what it set out to be.

>There are zero good PbtA hacks, though. Monster of the Week is okay, but Dungeon World and Urban Shadows are fucked
what about Monsterhearts, Masks, Night Witches, Fallen Empires, Action Movie World, or World Wide Wrestling? (to name a few)

Fallen Empires is not a hack.
It IS Apocalypse World.

>> 1d6 damage for all weapons, +1 for two handed weapon

I didn't mind the 'Classes have their own damage dice' thing; it lets you pick weapons as you like, with a couple of modifiers, instead of the race for the perfect weapon. It's more important to fix the boring fight mechanic; the damage/HP isn't the main problem, it's that moves only affect HP.

my point was that it seems unlikely every game on this list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1whsN3C5e31CZfo8hqlJbiKTPBX9kkCDSEG_An9FlP5s/edit#gid=0 is bad

>simplicity of d20

>reading comprehension

>DW is meant to closely emulate Basic D&D and it's flaws stem directly from that.
It doesn't really do that, though? Basic is roughlessly logistical at times, and I haven't really seen that come through in DW.

I think it's more meant to be a loveletter to D&D "as they played it", in this case probably being specifically 2E with the heroic adventures and lack of GP=XP and whatnot. (This is especially obvious when you look at the available classes, and the limited classes available per race. Elf isn't a class here.)

>you can't really blame it for being exactly what it set out to be
But it's not. It's a haphazard copy of AW's mechanics with various D&Disms from different editions bolted on.
It is neither a translation of any D&D edition into AW's framework, nor does it use AW's framework to augment the mechanics of any edition of D&D.

It set out to be "a love letter to D&D", but all it managed to do was fail to evoke AW and fail to evoke D&D.

>My only issue is I miss the nostalgia of d20 and the simplicity of it makes other games seem over complicated and frustrating.

In a sentence, "it" always refers to the most recently stated subject, in this case, "d20". So, if I made a mistake, it would be because whoever made that post wrote it wrong.

> le "there's a bunch of these so probaility dictates one is good" meme

There are a ton of homebrews on Veeky Forums, doesn't mean even a single one is any good.

Well Dungeon World was too cowardly to adopt the Harm moves AW had, because DW was just "AD&D plus AW", and class-based damage is honestly kinda gay.

But I did click the wrong post.

The problem here is that people have very different ideas of what constitutes a "good" AW hack.

That user is already somewhat dissatisfied with AW itself, so that is inevitably going to color their impression of its hacks.

and myself would instead argue that Urban Shadows is a good hack.

The context makes it sufficiently clear that "it" does not refer to d20.

>Urban Shadows is a good hack.

It has some good mechanics, but the fact it rips of Apocalypse World wholesale and in an ineffective way, ruins it.

It's Basic D&D plus AW, you cretin.

It could be argued that. If you stick to doing things that you excel at. And not taking any chances that you never place yourself in the position to fail and learn from your mistakes. It less incentivises failure and more incentivises branchign out, taking risks and not playing it safe all the time.

Perhaps not the wisest of actions on a character level, if you are thinking of them as an actual person who wants to live, not be hurt or traumatized. However on a meta level. It makes for a far more interesting story. Success rapidly grows boring. Constant failure is frustrating. taking a chance and it paying off or creating complications is the meat and potatoes of drama.

>it rips of Apocalypse World wholesale
Well, duh. It's an Apocalypse World hack. Of course it "rips off" AW. That's what a hack does.
Also, it's not "wholesale" because it is not just a simple re-skin. It actually builds on the source material.

>in an ineffective way
Care to go into a bit more detail?

Sorry, meant to quote

>Race=/=class
>Paladins, Bards and Rangers
>GP=XP is a no-go (it's failure=XP instead, mostly)
>Good/Evil are alignments
>General heroic tone to things
>Wizard
>Also, Wizard gets automatic spells

Yeah, no, this is based on 2E. There's elements of Basic - ability scores, f'rex - but not a lot. It's more generically D&D.

I used the word closely instead of the word exactly for a reason.
It's not exactly like any D&D because it is, in fact, an AW hack.
But all of it's flaws, all the ways in which it differs from AW in a way which is detrimental and counter to AW's design, are obviously all changes made to make it more like D&D.
And even with all those flaws, it's still a decent game, and if you prefer pbta games to more traditional fare, it's the best version of D&D that currently exists.
It's a game hampered by it's nostalgia driven design, but nostalgia driven is exactly what it set out to be.

And you're just full of shit. You're just saying it's bad because it's bad. That's not a criticism, that's a petulant and poorly stated opinion.

The thing is that it makes no sense with DW mechanics. The most basic move in DW is Defy Danger, because it's the move that's universally applied to any situation unless there is a more specific move superseding it, and it works with literally every stat.

When a boulder is coming down the mountain at the party, the solution which makes the most sense (both mechanically and story-wise as something that the characters would do) is for them to use their strengths to avoid it - the rogue jumps out of the way, the barbarian braces a log to deflect it's path, the wizard calculates it's descent and takes a precisely measured 3-foot step to the left, etc.

But DW wants you to make the bad decision for bad reasons. It wants you to say, "My rogue isn't going to dodge, he's going to try and endure the boulder hitting him," so you can get XP when you fail. It doesn't make the story more interesting, it makes it less coherent because people grab the Idiot Ball for meta reasons. PbtA is not a system where failure is rare enough that you need to incentivize people to make rolls with the goal of failing, or success is boring enough that you need to discourage people from being successful (and, funnily enough, punish them for being successful by drastically limiting their XP). AW allows the players and MC to encourage each other to choose to handle situations in certain ways for XP; DW gives you a universal move to handle problems, then scolds you for trying to handle your problems effectively/the way the character would handle them. PbtA should be all about narrative first.

sometimes, obviously, you would Defy Danger using something other than your best stat. That's natural for certain situations. But the move is open enough that you can make a case for just about any stat in any roll, and it's dumb to try and make doing something that is obviously the wrong way to handle the situation both mechanically and narratively the right metachoice

It doesn't make sense on a meta-level, either.

D&D, and by extension DW, is supposed to be a game about a group of specialists combining their respective strengths to overcome challenges against which they would be powerless on their own. Rewarding failure incentivizes these specialists to use anything but their specialty.
Additionally, the reward is experience, which results in more class-specific bonuses. So these specialists need to do things they are not specialized in to get better at their specialization which they don't want to use because they're so good at it.

I'm saying it's bad because .

As stated in pic related, not every approach is useful, and the DM can veto an action if it just isn't gonna work.

You might be strong, but you're not gonna stop the momentum of a 10 ton granite boulder rolling down a hill.
You might be hyper intelligent and superbly observant, you won't find a clear path through a hail of arrows.
Deft of hand as you might be , it won't help you pass through a cloud of poisonous gas.

I was thinking more along the lines of MH2 ed. and other systems that reward failure with experience. I personally am not a fan of DW. Though I don't have a hate on for it either.

And for me at least. I and my group do not usually make a decision to 'mash an experience button' more we try to do what would make narrative sense. So there is less of a disconnect than perhaps other groups. So YMMV

I've been working on a hack of Simple World and World of Dungeons, because my players, while they know how to have a good time, are either geriatric or too busy to learn new systems. Pulling out the old D&D books isn't really doing it for me anymore. The prep is atrocious and resolving everything takes too god damned long.

So, let's hear your best house rules for a 2d6+attribute system. One user said to use 5e's proficiency bonus. That's interesting. A lot of the stuff is pretty intuitive: armor soak, a wound on snake eyes, exploding dice for guns or magic weapons, tri-stat. I read somewhere, a guy suggested having the players provide a few hints as to what might happen to them in the next "episode" like a TV teaser. I thought that was pretty cool. I like World of Dungeon's removal of the move system, where you're either rolling 2d6+att or using one of your iconic abilities/spotlights. Of course I'm tying everything to a custom campaign setting, but I'm sure nobody wants to hear me drone on about that.

> keep 2d6 mechanic
> use proficiency from 5e, going +1 to +4 over 10 or so levels

>Giving a +4 bonus to a 2d6 roll in addition to stat bonuses

u wot m8

Fuck, the 2d6 bellcurve is fragile enough as-is without throwing that kind of numbers at it - this is like when Gygax tried to directly translate bonuses from a 2d6 table to a 1d20 one, except even worse because you're going TO the bellcurve. You realize that a +1 is worth twice as much on a 2d6 roll than on a 1d20 one, right? And that a +4 means that you're rolling between 6-16, with the average being 11?

Well, you could assign difficulty modifiers, but yeah, this is a pretty bad idea in general.

Proficiency bonus wrecks the system just like said. If you need a bigger range, there are lightweight 2d6 games that work with the different target numbers like Barbarians of Lemuria. But then you miss on a neat 6-/7-9/10+ scale of failure/partial success/success.

It brings up an interesting point: are people more varied by physiological determinism, or in their ability to learn. In a 2d6 system you're stuck at a -4 to +4 range of combined penalties and bonuses, without the game breaking down. So do you split those bonuses up between stats and proficiencies, or do you, say like in World of Dungeon, have a player learn skills to which they can't fail (only partially fail.) In that way, your character can grow without necessarily fiddling with the math.

I always like moves that grant you hold, with the 1 hold even on a fail; you still do the thing, just not as well as you otherwise might, represented by the hard move the MC makes.

>You might be hyper intelligent and superbly observant, you won't find a clear path through a hail of arrows.

Correction, make that "You might be hyper intelligent and observant to find a clear path through a hail of arrows, you won't be able to exploit it without equal reflexes."

And now I realize it doesn't say that in there anywhere. I could've sworn I read it somewhere, but I cant for the life of me remember where.

So why don't you just run a (good) existing PbtA game?
They're particularly light on player-facing mechanics, so there's no need for your group to learn the system beyond what happens during the session.

One of the reasons there are so many hacks is because it's a system where the fluff and the mechanics intertwine. Like somebody else was saying, the design of classes and their moves is so intrinsically tied to the setting, that you can't be broad without losing that je ne sais quoi. Monsterhearts for example, lays it on really thick. Dungeon World went generic and has an identity crisis. So applying one of these games to my own campaign setting just doesn't work. DW was designed for dungeon crawling, but let's say you wanted to do fantasy with an investigative bent. Just doesn't work. You're gonna have one very unhappy Goblin PI.

you can use it for your own setting, you'd just have to basically make your own hack, or at least the classes. Definitely a bit of a damper, but it's not really meant for generic gaming like you said.