Has anyone else played DoW? I once played it here on Veeky Forums, but the game fell apart after maybe 5 or 6 turns.
House rules? Problems? Suggestions?
Some questions that my group hasn't yet answered:
What are avatars supposed to do? are they just a cheap bonus action?
Movement. How far can armies/avatars move in a turn?
One house rule that I implemented is that we didn't start with a continent, but instead just started filling in a void. We decided the Shape Land action fills 3 hexes worth of terrain.
gonna bump this, it's falling under all the generals.
Anyone played DoW?
Josiah Rivera
I have.
I'm also one of the dirty questfags
Avatars are an additional action, but they're also the heroes of the world. They're the big movers and shakers in the fictions, the noble dynasties and legendary sages that give the world some history and colour. Some things (like Command Avatar>Create Race) are only supposed to work once.
Cool, I'll give this a read. Thanks for coming over to Veeky Forums as well.
I'm considering letting Avatars fight as if they were an army, so long as the god controlling the avatar pays the cost to raise an army. If it is defeated, then the avatar is reduced to a weakened state and can't fight other armies.
Movement seems important not for the sake of realism, but for allowing reaction. If an army marches and smashes a city all in one turn, you've got no chance to defend or use Catastrophe or something.
I'm considering that an army moves on a turn, and then can attack something at its destination on the following turn. This gives a chance for other armies to arrive to defend the thing, or for another army to flee.
Seems like DoW could really use a Second Edition. I downloaded Microscope, because I heard it was similar, and while it looks like an amazing game, its not really what I want for DoW.
Brandon Gutierrez
General notes by that dev • Size ○ General formula: half the number of squares of land you have, divided by number of players gives approximation of turns ○ Ex. If you have 100 squares and 5 players, about 10 turns of world creation § This gives a well-populated world without being cramped ○ Also, you might want to give general weather patterns, or let the first established feature mark the region, to prevent "Jungle next to Arctic" syndrome • Don't skip eras ○ Make sure you play at least 5 turns in each ○ It can be tempting to skip ahead, but letting it play out is fun and makes sure things don't get empty • Point Burning ○ Burning points to try and keep the bonus ○ Maybe have a couple constructive small-point objectives, to prevent people from corrupting and irritating others just for the bonus
Nathan Fisher
Yeah, I dodged the question around size by just building in a void. The picutre in the OP is my groups current world, after 8 turns of play. I decided that Shape Land would cover 3 hexes of space.
We (the gods) agreed on turn 7 and 8 to just build out land, and took those turns in quick rapid succession. It helped put all of the eastern/southern part of the continent on the map, as well as the arctic continent in the northwest and a bunch more ocean tiles.
So far we've built all that territory, had two avatars created (though they haven't done anything, since we weren't sure how to handle them), and 2 races and a subrace. Elves, their cousins the Satyrs, and a race of robots tentatively named Turbogattlers.
I'm playing as Depthtropulon, tyranical god of the oceans. I raised Bucephlagos, a giant frog monster as my avatar. I'm hoping to eat some elves soon.
Cooper Davis
No worries. The dev goes by kyldere if you want to skip directly to his comment, but Gnome Stew comment section is generally good and there's a decent discussion if you want general stuff about DoW
I never played DoW as a standalone game or a competition between gods, only as a worldbuilding game before campaigns, so I never had a problem with over-aggressive armies. We shared everything we created and did whatever we thought would make a good story.
Joseph Kelly
As an experiment, I tried Dawn of Worlds one night at my University gaming club, thinking it might be a fun way of getting people to think about worldbuilding and have a bit of fun.
It turned out to be arguably the biggest hit at the club since Super Smash Brothers WiiU, with that one session turning into a 6 month epic with over a dozen players. Thus, Dawn: Horizon was born.
Then another 12 player game at the beginning of the next year. Dawn 2: Daybreak Then another shortly after in the same year. Dawn 3: Severance.
I am currently on my placement year but they have just finished Dawn 4: Inheritance, and we are presently working on the rules tweaks for Dawn 5: Ascension (literally open on my computer as I saw this thread).
Obviously, substantial changes were made even from the beginning to make it work on a blank piece of A2 paper. It has strayed further from the original with each iteration but kept the premise and core features. If anyone is interested in hearing about how each went and the mechanics of each Dawn then I am happy to story time.
Attached is the family tree of Gods from 1-4 (I removed the player names). We ended up having a running meta-story emerging across all the Dawns, and hopefully this blossoms into more in the future.
Luis Hernandez
Oh yeah, OP here, tell me all about it. I'd love to know what kind of rule changes you've made.
That's a lot of deities! It each a different player? Or did God's sire more Gods controlled by existing players?
Isaiah Nguyen
And I missed some of the names. Spastic.
Luis Martinez
Almost all of those deities are different players. A few of us, those organising it and working on the ruleset, created several Gods. Mine were Praetorr, Octavia and Mhoira il Maeth.
Dawn 1 was the most simplified of all the rulesets.
The map was not divided into any units of measurement. We had several large continents, each with between 1 and 4 players on.
2D6+3 points per turn. 10 points to found a City. 5 points for an Avatar. 5 points to Research. 2 points for Lore. 10 points for World Event. 30 points for Catastrophe. 3 points to Shape Terrain. 6 points to Shape Magical Terrain. 3 points for Create Animal. 6 points for Create Magical Animal.
Avatars cover every moveable unit on the board, and all have equivalent Combat Strength. This could represent a large dragon, or a regiment of foot soldiers. Avatars have 5HP but can be upgraded to add 5HP to their total, in the case of very elite Avatars.
Avatars can move 3" a turn. Cities function like Avatars but get +1 Combat Strength and cannot move.
When Avatars battle, each player rolls a D10 and the loser takes the difference in damage on their Avatar.
If only we had stuck to this set of rules, the game would not have gotten as ridiculous as it ended.
Isaac Foster
In fact, I think I might just storytime the entirety of Dawn 1 in a separate thread and give explanation and commentary of the rules there. Recounting this is just going to fill your mechanics thread with irrelevant content.
Juan Miller
that sounds pretty interesting. I'll look for your thread.
Do you have a more complete rule document anywhere?
Xavier Edwards
It's not like this thread is going anywhere fast. Do it here.
Jackson Anderson
yeah, OP here, I don't mind you using this thread. You might get more attention by piggybacking my thread anyway.
David Foster
It's going to take me a few hours to write a chunk of it up. In the meantime I will give this discussion point:
Do not ever in any way write a rule which allows the generation of more points, and then also include a rule which allows the construction of things for cheaper. In Dawn 3 we had a rule called "Agriculture" and a rule called "Economy" which each gave additional points to players. These both worked reasonably well, especially Economy, which worked by creating a shared pool of Points by making things which generated Production. At the start of each full turn, this pool would be shared amongst all players at the table, and your share depended on your Economy level. So you could ramp up production and feed lots of points into the pool, and having power making trade routes etc etc, or increase economy to take a greater slice of the pie for yourself.
The problem came with an upgrade called Infrastructure which allowed you to make other upgrades cheaper. This combo'd with Agriculture or Economy spiralling out of control very quickly and we had to basically remove Infrastructure from the game on the spot, but it was too late and the Golden God of Progress was insanely rich by about the Renaissance equivalent. In hindsight this was a noob game design pitfall, we have acknowledged the mistake and learned from it.
Carter Ward
this was my groups initial reaction to the Command Avatar rule. It seemed like a gimmick to make more points.
Jacob Wright
It seems like you already addressed the major issue with Avatars in that you limited it to one per God so they can't be cheesed infinitely.
I like that it allows one cheap action a turn, because it means that a player can feel justified in hoarding points in preparation for something big without having to sit out a turn, which is nice when the dice fuck you over.
Luis Murphy
I've never touched any of the Command rules, they don't make a great deal of sense to me conceptually, but having to pay points to move your 68 avatars would have prevented some of the wilder shenanigans that have transpired in the past.
Christian Edwards
>I've never touched any of the Command rules, they don't make a great deal of sense to me conceptually
Command is the tool for making people do things. You want a city, a war, a temple, a society to be somehow different than it was at the start of the turn? Command.
I take out the cost difference for different players; everyone commands everything at the same price, because everyone is a god in the world.
Liam Hernandez
Apologies gents, I came to the decision that if I'm recounting the Dawn story, I'll have to take my time with it. I scanned in the world map and have it as it stands at the beginning, and will have to do the telling tomorrow evening. (2am here right now)
Dylan Watson
totally cool dude. I'd like to hear the story, but I'd also like to know more about your rules systems iterations.
Carson Myers
Not *played* per se.
I have, however, on many occasions, done like 4-8 turns of dawn of worlds, as the second step in collaborative world building, with everyone contributing to the world equally before a campaign.
The first step involved a little homebrewed minigame where the group invents like half a dozen pantheons of a dozen or so gods, and makes some broad declarations about how the cosmology works.
I don't recall the rules for that though.
But the basic process works well for coming up with the gods, the metaphysics, the world, and the major races.
I remember one that was really interesting.
Infinite flat plane floating on a sea. Self contained demiplane. Dreaming was astral projection to another continent/world. When you died, your soul would respawn on the third continent. Underwater creatures lived on the underside of the floating continents. The sun alternated between being an above water lightaource and a below water lightsource. Liches were typically wizards who left the land of the dead, while still dead, rather than waiting for reincarnation.
Mason Torres
Well. Less "infinite" and more "loops around in ways that don't work with real geometry"
Leo Morales
This fifth iteration has rules for playing Gods of different powerlevels, as has become necessary due to the meta-plot.
Mini Dawns for lesser Gods, Demigods, mortals which have reached Apotheosis, all find it much more difficult to complete tasks and require more points or collaboration to achieve results.
On the other hand, playing as Elder Gods, Archgods or Demonic Gods is on a much larger scale, colliding planets or manipulating entire Dawns.
On a separate note, do you allow Gods to visit the plane personally?
Hudson Ramirez
>On a separate note, do you allow Gods to visit the plane personally?
I went with the assumption that this is what Avatars are for, and that the God's themselves are formless. If a god wants to interact directly with mortals, he uses an avatar, like a god-king, a giant monster, a titan, a prophet, etc
Mason Gonzalez
Are players in charge of a mini and major god at the same time? Is there some balancing for playing as a lesser divinity?
>On a separate note, do you allow Gods to visit the plane personally? If it's that kind of world, sure. Avatars are the usual method (and sometimes we don't even name the gods we play, preferring to be generic cosmic forces and work out the cosmology separately), but we played once in a game where the first thing the gods did was physically locate themselves on the map.
Then someone buried the goddess of a desert tribe in lava and a couple turns later a bunch of rockbots came wandering out of the dunes to fuck everything up.
Kayden Watson
Pic in the OP what program is that?
Chase Brooks
Its a program called Maptool. Some of the terrain graphics you're seeing are default graphics that come with it, others are some terrain made by one of the players.
It's an incredibly versatile program once you get used to it. I've been running 3.5 D&D using it for many years now.
Wow we have been playing the game pretty differently, I understand that apparently our use of Avatars was quite estranged from the original.
For us, Avatars represented anything on the world which could move around or fight.
>Trade Ships >Dragons >Regiment of Knights >Named Character
In earlier Dawns, Gods could visit or live on the planet if they chose, pretty much insta-win combats unless another god or gods intervene. The rules were never really clarified and we ultimately decided not to have Gods appear in all their might on the world anymore. They can visit in the form of something they have created, for example disguising as a human and making demigods.
One God of mine came to visit the world and was almost taken out by a magical hitman sniper team who had been training for years.
A mix of lesser and greater Gods would only occur in a very very plot heavy game. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but normally I think they would stay in games of the same level.
Hudson Mitchell
>For us, Avatars represented anything on the world which could move around or fight.
That's generally how we use them as well. They can be representatives of a specific god, or simply important figures (or families, or other small exclusive groups) in a society. We don't classify them by their ability to move or fight, so much as whether or not they're characters in their own right. If they have a specific agenda, they are avatars.
James Price
Wow, this is really neat. I'm going to post as a GM in gamefinder tomorrow.
Christopher Butler
run it in /qst/, the DoW thread there died because OP is a fag. The whole thing can be done in 4 hours or less if you keep it moving
Joshua Williams
4 hours is pretty optimistic for play-by-post.
Brody Long
If you can actually get some people in the thread, DoW goes pretty damn fast (especially if you let everyone act during a turn whenever they want, not in order). 20 minutes per turn gives an even dozen turns, split between the three ages. With at least 3 players, that's plenty of fun.
Caleb Harris
Good advice, but I'd like to have a little bit more control over who participates. It'll make it easier to record/GM
Henry Kelly
ah yeah, if everyone goes simultaneously, it could go fast, but the game mechanics don't really support that well. Especially when shaping terrain. I suppose in pbp, its still a matter of "first in, first to happen" which helps, especially with a DM controling the map drawing.
I suspect it would break down when you start moving armies and having wars though.
Christian Adams
I saw a Dawn pbp once. It took AGES. Also rip the map which got more jpeg'd up every time,
Jeremiah Howard
Going to post up in the new gamefinder in a bit.
Camden Thomas
Here's a bump from OP. I'll come back around in a couple hours to keep talking Dawn of Worlds, possible revisions, goals of the game, etc
Andrew Jenkins
This is really neat. I'll be using it with my group to build some mythology and geography in our setting.
Are there any problems or house rules I should be aware of?
Andrew Long
...
Oliver Stewart
'Nother bump friendo.
Matthew Bell
>bumping >on page 2
John Robinson
OP here. I was discussing this with a player last, we started considering the game's conflict resolution system.
As written, Dawn of World's only offers a single resolution mechanic and it only applies to armies fighting each other. This is pretty short-sighted, as you might want to have a dice roll for something like an attempted coup, diplomacy between two feuding kingdoms, even a marriage proposal, or the results of a hero's quest to kill a monster or find a lost artifact.
While I had initially wanted some better rules to manage armies and warfare, after a brief discussion, I think the game could really benefit from a more broad conflict resolution system that could handle a variety of situations.
As it stands, the Event and Catastrophe actions are extremely broad and left up to freeform RP. But why those actions are left free-form, and the results of warfare are not free-form, is probably just an effect of bias, that is: a sense of what a civ game should simulate and what it doesn't simulate.
Games like FATE and Microscope offer a lot of alternatives for conflict resolution. If I get around around to revising DoW after my first playthrough, I'll be drawing on those for inspiration.
Dominic Taylor
My 12 year old brother and I have a game going. So far the highlight is a race of halflings that fight the sahuagin on their own turf through use of alchemical breathing masks.
Parker Thomas
Other things include >a floating ship-city of pirate elves ravaging trade routes >mountainous engineer lizardmen riding on mountain goats >Viking Orcs >dwarves riding giant beavers into battle >exiled frost giants camped on the far northen ice sheet >a subrace of sahuagin living on the slopes of an undersea volcano and my favorite: >dragonborn that are literally aliens, trying to discern the motives of whoever sent them here so they can continue their work
Wyatt Foster
How does this work with Hex grid?
Ryan Ward
the rules don't require a grid whatsoever. You could use a hexgrid, squaregrid, trianglegrid or something else entirely.
The rules only obliquely mention 1 square inch, all sense of scale and size is left up the group playing.
Cooper Clark
Fine. Change 'inch' to hex and you're good.
You might want to change the sizing, though, depending on how big your hexes are. I let players change land in multi-hex chunks, to allow them to actually develop a region and not plunk a one-hex desert next to a jungle.
Justin Hill
Bread
Tyler Nguyen
ah shit, not going to let this die just yet.
Another topic my players and I were discussing was the need to create a stable cosmology for the game.
Like, the game assumes the players are gods, but where did they come from? Do they reside in metaphysical realms like Mount Olympus or Hell or Asgard?
If I write a revision of the system, I might include a "preparatory" phase where some basic cosmological questions are answered before the world is born.
Xavier Morris
Well, there's on in /qst/ anyway. SIgh.
Connor Jackson
I find it's interesting to sort tat out in game. After all, what's a god without worshippers?
When you start making races and have them develop, then you can say what they believe is true and what is actually happening. After all, if it's just a one-shot then there's no need to establish cosmology, if it's a world you want to play in it's something that can be sorted out as it's needed, instead of front-loading your worldgen.
Christian Lopez
this was the direction I took for my current game (in the op). Instead of frontloading world-gen or deity generation, I just had everyone pick a name and describe their deity in simple terms. One player named his deity, but wouldn't really tell us anything about him. That was fine.
In general, I want to play the game once through without house ruling or expanding on what's in the pdf too much.
But as far as frontloading world-gen, I think it could be done in a quick short questionaire, suitable for a oneshot.
FATE has a really nice system for generating characters and setting at the same time, in a collaborative manner. I might hijack that system and simplify it for a DoW 2.0 revision.
Michael Thompson
>Well. Less "infinite" and more "loops around in ways that don't work with real geometry" So a JRPG map?
Isaiah Walker
A typical looping jrpg map does work with geometry, it just forms a torus not a sphere. like this animated gif.
not sure if he's implying some other kind of actually nonsensical topology though.
