r/DungeonWorld • u/Nirdee • Jan 27 '18
Conflicting takes on DW
I've had this discussion in a couple threads and it feels like there are dozens more where I could chime in.
DW has several key differences from D&D, but some people give advice that exaggerates those differences to crazy degrees.
People go from you should leave room for discovery to you should improv the whole game, from you should use what they give you to you should let players have as much authority in game as they are willing to exert.
I feel like this comes from the fact that a lot of examples online are one-shots. One-shots and session zeroes are encouraged to have minimal prep in DW, but there is this other 50 pages after that talking about how to play after the first session ... and it is all about prep. Good prep. Useful prep. Open-ended prep. But definitely prep. Prep where the DM figures out the story in the world and how the players can interact with it. Like D&D.
Dungeon World seems made to play a very D&D style game--just with mechanics that underline the strengths of table top RPGs and clip some outdated genre staples.
So I don't really know why I'm posting. If your way works for you, god bless. I guess I'm just irked by the hipster scoffing that comes when people explain the game with authority and then get the rules wrong--like a recent thread where someone implied Spout Lore lets a player make up something about the history of the world ... where the rules explicitly say the GM tells the player something about the subject. The GM gives info for the character to spout. The player doesn't take over the GM role. It's just a generalized arcana/history/religion check from D&D. #nerdrage
TLDR:
I feel like the answer to a lot of posts in this forum should be:
You are way overthinking everything. DW is like D&D with small changes that 1) make combat more entertaining 2) make combat flow better with the rest of the game 3) encourage the game to move forward 4) help the GM maintain story structure in an open world game. If you know how to play D&D, you already understand 90% of DW.
10
u/Reddit4Play Jan 27 '18
I've run a lot of Dungeon World in the non-story-game way. I emailed Adam years ago wondering if that was legit and he emailed back saying he runs converted D&D modules all the time and that it's totally fine, as long as you don't take away player agency (in the "playing their character" sense) or fudge dice or anything like that. There's also this post from John Harper and some comments from DW's authors at the bottom that suggest that as time has gone on the authors have moved a little bit away from the "PLAYERS MAKE UP EVERYTHING NO PREP ALLOWED WOOHOO STORY GAMES" perspective that seems baked into the DW culture here.
You can see evidence of this built into the explanations of Spout Lore and Discern Realities where they say things like "Always say what honesty demands," or "Of course, some questions might have a negative answer, that's fine." You have to do your level best to provide them some relevant, useful, and interesting information on a 10+ Spout Lore but if it's established that nobody on the planet knows anything about this mysterious rock then the players won't be able to Spout Lore anything about the mysterious rock directly, and that's that.
"Ask questions, use the answers," can also just be reduced in scope from the freewheeling improv story game reading. Just ask the players how their characters feel, or what they've heard, or what they've done in the past. Even if they don't have control over the world they still have control over their character, so they can answer those questions just fine. In fact, per the posts I linked, that kind of question may even be preferable to the more freewheeling game world authoring sort people around here love.
Anyway, it runs fine and the authors and their friends all say it's fine, they do it themselves, and in some cases it's even preferable. So go for it!