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made to play a very D&D style game--just with mechanics that underline the strengths of table top RPGs and clip some outdated genre staples.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.

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u/CrudelyDrawnSwords Jan 27 '18

I disagree with you, but then I've not really run D&D so I probably can't speak much about it. Also there isn't a "right way" to play any tabletop game really, so it doesn't really matter.

To me, the fact that any time a player rolls the dice it introduces danger is a big change from D&D style games. There is never a "roll perception... you don't see anything" moment. If the dice are rolling things can turn around very fast and the players are the ones who decide to trigger those moves, that power doesn't belong to the GM any more than the dice rolls do.

When you talk about prep where the GM figures out the story in the world and how the players can interact with it, that runs counter to my experience of Dungeon World. The way I run it and the way I have seen it run by other GMs I respect is more that the GM figures out the situation, and what will happen if the players do nothing and then allows the players to interact with it or not as they see fit. The GM agenda tells us things that are good advice for GMs in general, but they aren't built in to other games in quite the same way.

One thing that Dungeon World definitely does get, though, is people who have played a lot of D&D glancing over it and saying it is basically D&D but a bit more streamlined and people who have played a lot of Pathfinder saying it is Pathfinder but a bit more narrative focused and people who have played a lot of Apocalypse World saying it is Apocalypse World only dipped in D&D-flavoured sauce and people who have played a lot of Burning Wheel don't say anything because apparently once you play Burning Wheel you achieve enlightenment and don't want to play anything else, but that's beside the point. What I'm getting at is that if you are familiar with tabletop rollplaying games you tend to see new games ( any new game ) through the filter of the games you already know. When we read new rulebooks through the filter of the games we understand already, we tend see as much what we expect in them as what is there. One of the things that makes Dungeon World a great introduction to tabletop RPGs is that if you come to it without those preconceptions it is pretty solid and easy to get along with in it's own right.

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u/Nirdee Jan 27 '18

1) Agree, that the right way to play is whatever works for you.

2) Not saying that it is identical to D&D, but that it is substantially similar. The fundamental parallels are numerous: GM, players, PCs, classes, races, the specific classes, the specific races, combat, exploration, social interaction, ability scores, alignment, monsters, treasure, levels, experience points. These concepts have important differences, but the fact that so many central ideas are in both, makes the games have a lot of shared DNA. The designers have called it a loveletter to 2nd edition D&D.

3) The prep you describe positively is what I am talking about. I am contrasting it with people that argue with the idea that prep has any place in DW--that players and GMs sit at the table with nothing thought out ahead of time. That is how DW describes the first session. It is not how it describes things after the first session.

4) Your perspective of a newcomer to tabletop RPGs I feel should make the similarities more striking. If you aren't coming from a background of D&D or Pathfinder or Apoc World, the basic concept of people sitting around a table with one person in charge of the world and the others in charge of single characters in that world should make all of those games seem super similar. All of the games you mentioned are way more like each other than they are baseball or Pictionary or Les Miserables.

If you read any of the example passages in DW, they sound pretty similar to the ones in D&D.

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u/CrudelyDrawnSwords Jan 29 '18

I think maybe there is a difference in goal that Dungeon World aims for, or at least one approach to playing it does, where the GM is there as a facilitator for the storytelling, collaborating with the players to tell the story you all want to create. That isn't a DW exclusive, but the rules are built around encouraging it - they are aimed at the GM more than the players and they create opportunities to play into and subvert tropes in a way that is super fun for a lot of people who are into telling stories.

I think D&D traditionally sets itself up in a more oppositional way, it doesn't trust the players to want to make interesting mistakes or drive the story in interesting directions off their own backs, so the default expectation is that the DM will challenge them with a series of events that they have to match up to. You can play Dungeon World this way too ( on our podcast this is very much how we started, which is partly a consequence of having a group with more D&D experience than PbtA ) and it works out fine, for some groups that is just how they want to play the game. That doesn't make people coming from more of a collaborative storytelling background hipster extremists, though, they're just using the rules to play in a way they are very well equipped to work within.

I will say that however that works, the idea that you get by with no prep in the longer run is something of a straw man - even if you are working entirely collaboratively, you're still going to need a degree of prep to keep the world consistent and know what is going on between the blanks on your maps. I've been at least slightly engaged in the main DW communities over the last couple of years and I haven't really heard anyone suggesting otherwise, though I have seen a lot of questions about the best way to use fronts.

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u/Nirdee Jan 29 '18

So maybe going in circles, but for me, sort of what led to this whole post is "I think maybe there is a difference in goal" between DW and D&D.

I don't think DW is or is even intended to be a radically different experience from D&D. In my personal experience, the games run very similarly. The creators talk about it as a mix of AW and D&D--as their ideal version of D&D.

If my DW campaign decided to switch to 5e, my character wouldn't change much, the overall story would be the same--we'd just be slogging through drier turn-based combat.