I always here only two things about Dungeon World:
>Oh it's fantastic. The best game every. All narrative and no crunch. DnD is shit compared to it.
Or I hear:
>Oh that game is shit. Its so simple that there's no options and the game gets redundant. Don't play it. It sucks.
So, I must ask, as someone who's interested in trying it: is this game excellent or shit?
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its just meh. not a lot of options and gets bland pretty quickly
>muh narrative
bump
It's neat but my players like having more options.
On a related note, Shadow of the Demon Lord has a level of crunch that seems to suit them, it plays fast but and is easy to learn. I don't see it discussed here often though.
If you want a narrative-focused campaign, then it's great, but the actual game part of it isn't very engaging. I will say it got me to play a class I would never play in DnD. Fighters are pretty generic and boring in DnD, but I ended up playing one in DW because the signature weapon intrigued me.
Basically... It's easy. That's all. It's a very easy game that requires little input from the GM to work. Just that he arbitrate and respond to players and tell them what dice to roll. It requires a modicum of creativity to respond, improv style, but other than that... That's it.
Where it gets frustrating is when the GM tries to make something more of the game instead of letting it be what it is in its simplicity. Like I said, it's a low-effort game for the GM, and you can almost play it without one, so it can be frustrating for GM's that love worldbuilding or major story arcs.
Additionally... it paints in too broad a stroke. Sometimes you don't need complex options and choices, you just want to pick a Race/Class combo, and fill in the character during roleplaying. This game is great for that.
Other times, where you want a bit more of the mechanics to bite on, this game just sucks...
Overall, this game demonstrates just how diverse the board's opinions on RPGs are, namely your preferred ratio of "Role-Playing" to "Game."
My advice? Ignore us, ignore Veeky Forums, sit down and read the rules, and make a personal decision on whether you actually like it, and maybe run a few games with it and see for yourself, or better yet, some of the other PBTA systems. There's ones out there both better and worse than Dungeon World.
Personally... I hate DW, I like more "Game," but that's just me.
It decent. It arguably has a few mechanical imbalances in how the classes progress, and some of the mage's spells mesh a bit poorly with the rest of the systems and what the druid actually does is anyone's guess.
The reason Veeky Forums "hates it" though is because of a bunch of trolls latching on virts extended ego campaign.
D&D is a miniatures combat game with a tacked on skills and item system.
The rogue/thief class didn't initially exist, things like hiding or picking locks were just straight d20+modifier against the DM's DC. Some grognards of old complained that rogues ruined D&D, because hiding was a thing that EVERYONE could just DO. "I hide in the corner" and you were hiding in the corner; if someone came around the bend, you got a surprise round. No "I roll perception at +7 versus your stealth at -1".
The purpose of items and gold was so you could build a castle. Fighters got, as a part of their class abilities, men-at-arms and knights who would swear fealty to you. You could then be attacked by dragons or other warlords, and you'd have to pay your soldiers by the month with the money you made from delving dungeons. Spells like Tenser's Floating Disk, stuff like donkeys and carts, and carrying capacity were the second half of the miniatures combat game.
Does that resemble the type of games that people play nowadays? No, not really. People either want to murderhobo or they want long, fantastic storylines reminiscent of LotRs or Lion, Witch, & Wardrobe. That's why no one buys carts anymore, and why people skip counting arrows and ignore encumbrance.
So really, modern D&D is missing half a game, it's only got miniatures combat. People want to roleplay for the other half of the game, but no edition really supports it. It's just a thing you can do, if you choose to do it.
Dungeonworld dumps all that. It's barely even a miniatures combat game; I honestly think it works better as theater of mind. It requires very little commitment from the GM, aside from narration and to be the voice and player of group's obstacles. Everything you do in DW is essentially based on role playing your character and their actions. There is a non-zero group of people who think that's the fuckin' bee's knee's.
DW has its failures and weak points, like every other system, but overall it's well designed and easy to fix. If you want to have a more casual and relaxed communal story type game, it's amazing.
However, if you want to crunch some numbers, build an engine of destruction, and collect some sweet magic items, there's 30 flavors of D&D to enjoy. DW's existence doesn't impinge or overlap with D&D, in my opinion.
I've never run into these mythical "muh options!" players, but then I tend to play with a bunch of normies who are just happy that all of their abilities are printed right on their sheets and they don't have to remember what half a dozen situational +1 feats do.
Advanced World of Dungeons is much better, imho. It's simultaneously simpler, has more options, and a better attempt at making an old school D&D style game with the PBtA engine
SotDL is the ideal replacement for 5e.
Link to the pdf? It's the first time I'm hearing about this.
/thread.
behold reddit spacing
As a player, it suffers from muh narrative bullshit, rendering any decisions and mechanical considerations moot. It's an exercise in negotiating with the GM for outcomes, occasionally propelled by dice.
It might net a somewhat interesting story, but that's all it's about. There is next to no game here.
As a GM, it's soul crushingly dull. You have very little to do beyond telling the players what to roll and providing flavour and prompts with no underlying meat to them.
Overall it's shit. It's a shit game, because there barely is a game. It's a shit AW hack, because there are vastly superior ports of the AW philosophy to a DND style game (see Fellowship), and it's a shit narrative aid because its mechanics to nothing to propel the story.
0/10 do free-form rp instead or play an actual game
As someone who likes it but also understands its flaws?
It is neither.
People who tell you it's shit probably don't understand it well enough to DM it (it takes a lot of work to understand how it actually works, and until then it seems a lot simpler than it really is), or simply dismiss it out of hand either because it's not apocalypse world (thank god I say, but to each his own), or because its developers are SJW hipster cunts, or because it's lumped in with apocalypse world as a "storygame" or whatever.
People who tell you it's excellent might understand it well enough to DM it, but have had too of the game's Koolaid, in part because there are some clever things about how its gameplay and system is structured that allow it to be a great theatre of the mind game (this is its greatest strength), but mostly because spending so much energy learning how to understand something "properly" almost feels like joining a cult.
The truth is, however, that the game has several incredible ideas - that it is very bad at conveying,
and many very questionable implementations that ultimately undermine most of that anyway.
Examples to follow.
...
This cap is always so hilariously nonsensical. Doubly so since it's not actually satire.
Compare these examples.
Genius in my book: The game doesn't need great stealth rules or GM guidelines for making traps fun and engaging, because those things end up "happening on their own" if the GM is simply following the rules strictly (and they ARE meant to be followed pretty strictly by the GM.)
Idiocy in my book: The game THINKS it doesn't need turn order because of some mitigating factors.
Mainly [1] attacks come with significant risks and costs compared to other games so making an attack is a bit like giving an enemy a partial turn,
and [2] The DM is supposed to move the spotlight around, and to keep things dangerous.
It's more nuanced but that's the trimmed-down gist of it.
The problem is, the way the rules are set up the game does not make clear that monsters get to actually take their own actions. And this is mostly fine at 1st level because monsters effectively act almost simultaneously with the PCs (as descriptions of what's happening before, during, and after player action, effectively)
But because said PC actions come with rolls, and said rolls have specific numeric thresholds that never change or scale with anything (6- is bad, 7-9 is success with bad stuff, 10+ is total success. Always.) level-ups change the play dynamic very quickly (usually by level 3) so that PCs are constantly successful, and monsters very rarely get to do the 6- consequence, which was their bread and butter.
At that point, the monsters really can't get a foot in the door, and the challenge of the game breaks down almost entirely.
Giving monsters a "turn" helps, but the problem is still major.
TL;DR. There are like two or three other serious issues like this, some of which also fuck verisimilitude really bad (like the GM having to spawn ogres or bolster the armies of Mordor as a direct consequence of a PC failing to spout lore while in a safe location.)
DW is great for a oneshot or short campaign if you can find a GM who really understands the rules.
This is kind of just opinionated garbage. Already at the "the game doesn't provide guidelines" bit in section 1, it's flat out lying: that is actually an optional rule that is included in the DW rulebook.
>But because said PC actions come with rolls, and said rolls have specific numeric thresholds that never change or scale with anything (6- is bad, 7-9 is success with bad stuff, 10+ is total success. Always.) level-ups change the play dynamic very quickly (usually by level 3) so that PCs are constantly successful, and monsters very rarely get to do the 6- consequence, which was their bread and butter.
>At that point, the monsters really can't get a foot in the door, and the challenge of the game breaks down almost entirely.
>Giving monsters a "turn" helps, but the problem is still major.
Monsters probably should have a "difficulty" of some sort. I know the game doesn't "do" penalties to rolls usually, but the monster never really getting to affect you if you don't roll really bad just doesn't work out well.
Also, DW and PbtA games actually work perfectly well as d6 vs d6 games if you lower the thresholds by 7 if you want to please grognards that don't like only the players rolling.
Whoever wrote this genuinely doesn't understand how the game works. Some of the points are potentially valid (like the lack of difficulty variance) but other stuff in there is just based on a total misunderstanding of how the game functions differently from D&D (the opposed rolls bit)
I concur. In fact, the fix i use in my DW hack is to
[1] Put monsters in "Basic" "Expert" "Master" and "Immortal" categories. Expert monsters apply a -1 to moves against it, master monsters apply a -2, and immortal monsters (who should be extremely rare) apply a -3.
[2] Do a sort of pseudo turn order. Essentially, whoever acts gets to do a certain amount of stuff and then they get an "exhaustion token" and once everyone has tokens, tokens are cleared and play continues. I also give the monster "group" an explicit turn where they do a soft or hard move depending on the circumstances at that moment (e.g. set up a danger that someone might have to defy, or straight-up deal damage to someone for being prone near them)
>[1]
Yeah, that's what I meant. You may also want to add some sort of mook that you get +1 against. (and if you do d6 vs d6 you can just use it as a modifier for their roll).
>[2]
Not a bad idea. I feel like there could be some sort of tactics involved here, maybe with the player deciding who comes next after his turn, and some actions being more/less potent depending on the number of tokens in play.
Even if the point about there not being a difficulty variance is true, I wouldn't exactly called it "valid". There's no law of god that says that all pnp games need difficulty variance. It's just another system mechanic, one that DW opted to not include for whatever reason.
Well, monsters are allowed to act. The book is pretty clear that if players dally, the threats become more immediate.
Furthermore, players can't opt out of their turn really. Someone always have to be rolling, which means the players can't stop time from ticking.
The most immediately intuitive interpretation of the core rules still leaves us with a situation where, if player characters describing their actions, monsters never act independently.
Which would be fine if the game didn't scale the way it does.
>Idiocy in my book: The game THINKS it doesn't need turn order because of some mitigating factors.
That might actually be my favorite part of DW. I tried running my first DW combat by the book, expecting disaster. I got a much more dynamic combat. Everyone can act as the action unfolds, build on top of monster and other player actions, pitch in with new ideas etc. Removing time where players sit and wait for their turns is a stroke of fucking genius IMO, keeps everyone engaged.
>The problem is, the way the rules are set up the game does not make clear that monsters get to actually take their own actions.
Too fucking true. So many important bits of information, like monster moves and how they work, are buried in convoluted writing and incredibly poor layout that makes even the simplest rule hard to find and interpret. The game desperately needs a second edition that clears up the vagueness and poor organization of the current book.
>But because said PC actions come with rolls, and said rolls have specific numeric thresholds that never change or scale with anything (6- is bad, 7-9 is success with bad stuff, 10+ is total success. Always.) level-ups change the play dynamic very quickly (usually by level 3) so that PCs are constantly successful, and monsters very rarely get to do the 6- consequence, which was their bread and butter.
My solution has been to really up monster moves and consequences. A monster move give the GM carte blanche to really go to town on the characters, as does a 6-.
Also, follow the fiction (don't you love when DW fans say that as an answer to any question?). The golem is a threat because you cannot just say "I hit it with my axe" - you are never going to put a dent in solid metal with a fucking blade. Find some other way to damage it.
>desperately needs a second edition that clears up the vagueness
I feel exactly the same. Every now and then I wistfully stalk the internet for hope, but so far I've come upon nothing.
Well, the system scales to a manner. Tougher monsters can soak more hits and the GM should also be scaling the challenge by adding more, tougher monsters to the mix.
This practically results in more rolling for the players, which in turns translates to larges odds of failure even though the players are technically more competent.
A small problem here is that some classes are a lot better at not getting hurt by bad rolls than others. Fighters are real rapetrains really and gods forbid that the paladin ever gets his hands on a divine avenger.
its setting is so dark it becomes juvenile at some points, but the fact that it isn't always absolute retarded evil fuckery makes it a tad hard to find consistency.
the system is really neat though.
>behold reddit spacing
Do you also get triggered when someone grabs an image from google that has tumblr in the filename?
>Whoever wrote this genuinely doesn't understand how the game works.
Pretty sure virtualautism wrote that. He likes to screencap his own "epic" posts and spam them whenever possible.
Yes. I've seen it happen.
The Druid is truly anyone's guess...
I GM'ed DW once and it worked. Mainly I needed a game that we could start playing immediately without spending a session on chargen.
Everybody immediately understood the rules (except for the Druid...) and we played fast and loose. It was a blast. But it was a one off session and I don't know how well it would have progressed.
Does anyone know other games that do what DW does well? I tired reading up but it didn't convince me.
It's garbage.
Not because it's "too easy" or has "no options". It's just a ludicrously incompetent copy of Apocalypse World.
Dungeon World is what you get when you think that Apocalypse World is neat but have no idea how any of it actually works, rip out all of its core concepts and cram in random D&Disms and other assorted crap.
>Does anyone know other games that do what DW does well?
Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires. It's AW's official fantasy variant and comes without the incompetence.
I think the whole Fronts thing handles expanding to a short campaign pretty well.
>its mechanics to nothing to propel the story
What are some games that do this well, in your opinion?
Sometimes I think the Veeky Forums DW people (there was another similar thread to this a couple days ago with some great input) should make their own rebuild or version 2 of it.
Then I realise the haters would shitpost it into oblivion and I'd have to do it alone.
Dungeon World is awesome, it's the game you imagine when you are first pitched the idea of a tabletop roleplaying game - creating evolving stories together as a group. It is wholly customisable, so ignore anybody citing 'no character options'. D&D is just a tactical wargame with fantasy flavour, and it turns out that is boring for a lot of people who want narrative-driven gameplay.
Not that user, but Apocalypse World.
I did not read the entire thread but i will share my thougts.
Dungeon World is a hack of Apocalypse World to play dungeoncrawl in an old fashioned way. Or that is what it says to be. Much people thinks thar is a similar a D&D but aside of the cosmetic part is a really different game style.
D&D is a game with strategic components. Resource management is a thing in D&D, if you fail at that, you are dead. Old h, School D&D is better in a location based sand-box style, while 3th, 4th, 5th edition and his clones are better at develop campaigns with story-arcs.
Dungeon World is a really diferent game: the resource management component is close to zero. Is a game of cinematic action, not strategic. And is a better game for improvisation, not so good for follow a pre written history.
The problems begin with people trying to play Dungen World a la D&D or viceversa. Just play each game in his strengths, Do not force them to do what they can not
My personal issue with Dungeon World is the random sacred cows snagged from D&D's pasture that don't fit in with the rest of the animals on Apocalypse World's ranch. It uses a very loose fast-paced system that has "SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS ALWAYS HAPPENING" in huge fiery letters above its head as a base... then has combat be focused around getting your opponent's numbers down before your numbers go down. I just don't get it. Additionally, things like using D&D's six attributes vs AW's five just because you can is minor but rubs me the wrong way, as does the general presentation of it.
tl;dr if you try and emulate oldskool dungeon crawling with a system meant for DRAMA and NARRATIVE, you're going to end up with a misshapen lump.
>Just that he arbitrate and respond to players and tell them what dice to roll. It requires a modicum of creativity to respond, improv style
That's how I DM 5e!
The sad truth. When I was forced to DM 5e I just told them the monster died after about 5 turns of combat. I didn't even look at the dice when I rolled attacks.
>behold reddit spacing
What the fuck even is this meme?
The game has pros and cons. Some already mentioned.
Pro: Game encourages making choices based on what is happening in the story or the situation. Then you identify how the mechanics can allow a player to complete their desired action. Whereas in a game like pathfinder, you are encouraged just to look at your character sheet and choose which mechanic you can use in that situation.
Pro: Game is easy to setup.
Pro: Game is easy to introduce new players to RP.
Pro: Game allows for easy improv, story development, and allowing players to mutually contribute towards the direction of the story.
Pro: Game has many character abilities or mechanics that require creativity, choice, and thought, rather than just a modifier to a roll.
Pro: Combat is fast.
Pro: The cover art is great.
Pro: Good instructions and philosophies for GMing.
Pro: Good mechanics for worldbuilding.
Con: Game is very limited. Due to the dice system, you can't really give characters too many abilities or increase their ability scores too much otherwise they can never fail a roll.
Con: Game needs more structure. There is no initiative, turns, etc..., so players can feel left out.
Con: Puts a little too much pressure on the GM to be able to figure out a fair result to a failed roll.
Con: The rest of the art sucks.
>Puts a little too much pressure on the GM to be able to figure out a fair result to a failed roll.
This is always difficult when the character fails a wisdom or int check.
It's hard to make up a consequence that isn't complete bullshit or irrelevant.
>Additionally, things like using D&D's six attributes vs AW's five just because you can is minor
It's not minor. D&D's attribute just flat out do not work in the context of the PbtA system.
I ran Dungeon World as a year-long campaign during college after I realized my newer players weren't quite clicking with the crunch-heavy systems I usually ran. I had been running it for one-shots at club events before that, and with it being my first PbtA game I really liked how easily it ran. Now that I've used it for a more long-term game and played a lot of other Apocalypse World games in the interim, I have to say my feelings on it are pretty mixed.
Grafting hit points and damage die onto Apocalypse World is the exact opposite of intuitive. Most of the time in Apocalypse World, you'll have one or two clocks that represent entire groups of enemies in the conflict, and dice rolls resolve entire sections of a combat "scene" at a time. In Dungeon World, every individual enemy has their own hit points and it turns combat encounters into a bunch of individual exchanges of damage.
Speaking as someone who really likes the way games like Apocalypse World or The Sprawl play, combat mechanics in Dungeon World are largely at odds with how the rest of the system wants to play. It doesn't help that most of the other weaker areas of the game are also the things that feel like they were arbitrarily grandfathered in to attain a "D&D feel." (Numerical attribute scores, by-race class restrictions, etc.)
I like D&D and I like Apocalypse World, but the problem with Dungeon World is that it's trying to by "D&D by way of the Apocalypse World ruleset" rather than "Fantasy Apocalypse World"
Yeah I've cheated at games too in the past and always felt shit about it. I hope you repent and improve your ways.
That's just being lazy.
Except they deliberately marketed it as OSR-by-way-of-PbtA, saying that it was the game that captured the way you remember old D&D. Koebel and whatshisname want you to make the comparison to D&D, that's why it's literally a game about going into dungeons as a rogue, a wizard, a fighter, and a cleric.
>ratio of "Role-Playing" to "Game."
I agree with most of your post but this meme needs to die. "Game" doesn't = mechanics. A game doesn't actually even need any mechanics. There are word games, a game of I-Spy, a game of pretend. And what is a Roleplaying Game if not a game of pretend?
That's what a roleplaying game is: a game where you roleplay. It can be done entirely without mechanics. You can I could roleplay as an Elf and a Dwarf in a bar right now, freeform. It might get retarded really quickly but it's still a game.
So if anything, mechanics are a thing that a roleplaying game might include, rather than being an integral part of the concept of a roleplaying game.
Some retarded shit from highschoolers on /v/ or /b/. It's what all the kool kids are saying when they don't like a post, now that fedoraposting is going out of fashion.
>A game doesn't actually even need any mechanics.
I would argue just the opposite; a game needs to have some kind of conditions of play by definition. Even the game you cited have mechanics, we just don't traditionally label them as such (I Spy has a turn order, ritual words, etc). Even freeform roleplay is "mechanical" insofar as the participants are agreeing to conduct themselves within the game.
Why is it that I never heard of this other on 4 chan - sigh
Anyone got the pdf so I can try it out?
What other PBtA Fantasy games are out there?
DW is probably one of the shittier AW hacks. Basically just bolting some D&D rules on to the flimsy "Yes but..." game system. If you're trying to get your normie friends into roleplaying but they're struggling to put together a D&D character I suppose you could just hand them some playbooks and tell them to pick a name but you could also do that with premade characters.
Blades in the Dark is fantasy, though it's more about playing criminal assholes in a fantasy world. I don't know much about PBtA games as a whole, but I really like it how the base mechanics are pretty light but there's still some nice fiddly bits with gang building.
because you never leave your house
You son of a bitch
>not using clover or some other viewer
Pleb
The problem is that the only circumstance where that does anything, is mostly when some trait of a powerful monster actually stops a player character from using a move like H&S under certain circumstances (like 16 HP dragon et. al.)
While the circumstances (like the kind of monster you are fighting) _do_ also affect how outcomes of moves play out, it's almost entirely delegated to the 6- result, and because the difference from a +2 to a +3 (and occasionally +4 due to various circumstances/class moves/whatever) is so insanely colossal, the 6- result almost immediately become extremely rare.
The 7-9 result is mostly shackled by the specifics of the move itself, which has the odd side effect of making it less "interactive with the fiction", and 10+ results often don't care much at all about who you're facing.
Because so many of your rolls are gonna be 7-9s or 10+es, and because so few are 6-es, you'll get a lot of situations where, in all the middle-ground situations where you aren't fighting a 60-foot-tall Actually-Literally-Lucifer with immunity to all physical attacks or something, the monsters just don't get to act enough in combat to be a threat.
And that actually happens, and is a huge huge problem, even if you don't even play with a fighter or thief or other super damage dealer. I've had it happen with a part of a bard, cleric, ranger and wizard, clear as day even when I was giving the "monster side" a free soft move every few "seconds."
The game just stops behaving well once people get those 18s, and once they get access to sources of the occasional extra bonus. It makes for very boring combats where the only ones doing anything are really the players, even if the monster is super gimmicky and takes a special trick to kill and all that.
I've played both with an open mind, and I had to conclude that Apocalypse World is a terrible unfun mess, and every point where Dungeon World differs from it, it is better by a country mile. DW has gameplay where AW has nothing but "mother-may-i?" and wank, every time.
Why people give AW so much credit, I'll never know.
Fuck AWs horrid attribute system to death.
kill yourself
>DW has gameplay where AW has nothing but "mother-may-i?" and wank, every time.
Where? Do you mean HP?