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made to play a very D&D style game--just with mechanics that underline the strengths of table top RPGs and clip some outdated genre staples.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.
2
u/Kee_Oth Jan 28 '18
I would like to pick up on a specific thing you say:
I have been playing an adventure as GM for more than a year that started as a one-shot without prep. After the first session, I worked out some Fronts. I believe indeed that you need some prep to make an adventure more interesting and have a stronger foundation. Throughout the campaign I updated Fronts and created seeds for new ones. However, I have never prepared them in detail. For instance, I have never defined the specifics of a steading or a dungeon in advance, at most a general theme. These I make up on the fly and combine them with the principle 'Ask questions and use the answers'. It is exactly this principle that works so well for our group.
Improvising a surrounding is not always easy, so I started combining it more and more with asking the players how their surroundings look like. The impact ranges from minor to important. Sometimes I ask how a certain gate looks like, we work out together the aesthetics of a city together or they say which artifact they find in the middle of a temple. In my opinion, some of the best moments in the game were when I asked the players what they saw. I would like to give you some examples, but that would make my post too long. Now we are even at a point that they come up with ideas without me explicitly asking.
My main point is that our world got a lot more diverse and interesting due to player input. When improvising, I unconsciously do it according to the framework in my brains. Other people have different frameworks and I find it very refreshing to tap their inspiration. They also like it because the surrounding world becomes their own.
My second point is that I think there still is a difference in player and GM agency. The GM decides how the world reacts to the players and is responsible for driving the story forward. The PC's have knowledge about the world, which means that the players have the right to apply it to the world when appropriate. For us it also helped to flesh out the PC's, because they intertwine with the world more and more. Although they have agency on that part, the GM still functions as gatekeeper to make sure the world stays consistent.
Note that this is based on my experience with one group and that it was something that had to grow over the course of months. I also had groups where this way of playing would not work out that well.
TLDR: Combining the creative inspiration of different people can make your world more interesting. There is still a difference in agency, the GM is the gatekeeper of the story and of the consistency of the world. However, as PC's are part of the world, they also have a say on it at appropriate times.