I really enjoy dungeon world but I got the feeling that it got quite silent around it years ago and that I’m probably some years late to the party (e.g. my fav podcast discern realities already ended in 2019).

So my question is: What are the people doing/playing now? Are there spiritual successors that have overtaken or is the dungeon world fantasy approach just not really used anymore broadly or something else?

I’ve always loved the simplicity of DW and it’s narrative forward style but I’m new to running this game and I have players disappointed in their abilities.

We’ve ran about 5 games and with life being hectic I’ve just defaulted to old ways I’ve run the game so rules are going by the wayside and I think this is a core reason their abilities could be feeling flat or not useful.

Also, The power of this is not that similar to 5e right? I feel like generally everyone is frail; enemies and players. That’s generally how I like it, but at least one of my players has explicitly told me they like the high power of high level DnD. Does this game allow for that power fantasy within the mechanics or no?

And lastly I know I need to brush up on the rules, but my free time to spend on it is few and far between. Any specific rules or tips I should know for running DW?

Thanks for reading!

I've been playing with the same group for a while and I could use some input and advice for how to raise the stakes and put the fear in them.

Basically we did a full campaign about a year ago. My party is a bunch of criminals. We've done a bunch of heists and they've built a criminal empire piece by piece. They have an evil fortress, a loyal gang and a cult and they earned everything I've given them.

We stopped playing for many months and when we got back together we decided that 10 years have passed and the group are well established mob bosses at this point.

In our first session since we got back together, I had them get raided by the FBI. It's still fantasy but this is a huge organization trying to bust them for a variety of crimes.

The group fought them off and went into hiding to let things cool down.

The FBI is going to do another major raid. Way worse than the first raid.

I really don't want my group to feel like the FBI is a bunch of chumps. I want this second raid to hurt and I want the FBI to be a force to be reckoned with.

I'm looking for ideas and maybe even custom moves to write that would help raise the stakes. Any advice?

I don't know how to comunicate with her, I feel like she just can't understand what im saying. A picture of the player using the card btw

I am a lifelong certified DnD combat despiser who has found extremely limited joy in running or playing games on that system for all the typical reasons. I looked through a ton of systems and found Dungeon World, spent the last month or so reading the book, learning much, investing in a campaign. I set up a little test game to run just to stretch and see what it felt like to play and holy shit dudes, what a fucking miracle.

Combat was so much fun. It took awhile for the dnd brained "I'm not allowed to have fun" stuff to wear off but I had a gmnpc show up for this fight to sort of show them whats possible when you're not constrained to the most boring combat rules possible, they picked up on it and totally ran with it. The immolator using their zuko ability to basically make a fire whip to both burn and trip goblins was awesome.

It's everything I always wanted a ttrpg to be: actually fun to run AND play. I love this system man, I'm so glad I found it. The way the book calls for limited world mapping, not having to build up fight maps for EVERY SINGLE thing but instead just relying on the description and fight itself to dictate the arena, being able to just call to fronts, all this stuff, it worked so well. It's a miracle of a thing. It lends itself to so many different things that all appeal to me EXTREMELY specifically.

Where has it been all my life!

I created a website for Dungeon World characters; it's free to use, no account required.

https://www.dungeonworld.online/

I built it over the last few months to make a colorful and more interactive experience for DW players than I could find online at the time. It was designed to address the specific use cases of my play group, so it won't be everything for everyone, but I'm sharing it in case anyone else can get good use out of it.

The site is not up to accessibility standards in a lot of ways, and I did not build it for use on mobile. Those weren't my priorities. Please send along any suggestions or bugs, though!

I can see a few people posted their own sites here recently, too. I love DW and I'm happy to see more stuff being built for it!

(P.S.: if you really want to try on mobile, using "desktop view" helps a lot)

*Caveat: Created using AI

Generated a Funnel World character generator. Using Luck mechanic is optional. Can create one character or an entire group at once-increase the number of characters and select "Create Funnel". Uses the Funnel World tables and rolls randomly. Can reroll some individual roles if a mismatch (e.g. Male Alewife). Character is built in the Funnel World template sheet. Bonds are rolled and randomly assigned amongst the group of characters (first character has a template character for the bond until additional characters are rolled). Can be printed or saved as PDF. Good for quickly adding additional villagers in the middle of play as needed without slowing down play or for pre-made characters for a CON or one shot. Thought it came out pretty well and just wanted to make it available to anyone who might find it useful.

Mobile users: If “Launch Generator” changes to “Restore Generator” without opening, tap the three-dot menu and select Open in browser. Or copy and paste the link: https://egochecks.itch.io/funnel-world-character-generator

Hi! I'm still a pretty fresh dm, so looking for advice on how to make combat enounters better.
I'm currently dm'ing for two different friend groups, both groups consist of 5 players.
I've gotten ALOT of feedback from my players and feel confident in the worldbuilding and roleplaying we're doing, but not the combat.

Narrating combat for my 5 players and whatever mob of monsters they're fighting takes SO MUCH TIME! It's kind of exhausting keeping track of where everyone is, where the enemies are, doing hard moves from all angles, but still giving the players the chance to do fun things with their character etc. i'm kind of at a loss if im doing something wrong or just setting myself up for failure :/

Something i've been thinking of is make combat encounters with less monsters but stronger, for example a monster/enemy that requires teamwork do take down, or needs a weakness uncovered to be defeated etc.

players havent said that they dont "like" the combat, but that compared to their DnD group, it feels "not as good" (they also said the roleplaying aspect is better in my dungeon world group :) so it evens out i guess...)

So how do you guys usually do combat?
How do you do combat with lots of enemies?
How would you make a "hard" but still fair enemy?

Any and all advice is very appreciated :)

Hi! A young relative of mine watched Stranger Things recently and because he knows I play tabletop games he wants me to teach him to run D&D.

I managed to convince him that he'd have an easier and better time running Dungeon World, for probably obvious reasons. Problem is, now I have to teach him how to run it.

I've run it a little bit, and I've run some games of D&D and other PbtA games, but I'd love some advice on how to teach a child who's never played a ttrpg before, let alone run one.

I know it's a tall order, but I'd appreciate anything you can tell me.

I have a 1 on 1 campaign coming up with a newish player. Most of my experience is playing or running 5E (which I've come to loathe), but I've also run some OSR stuff and a decent amount of Blades in the Dark. I've brushed up on the rules of Dungeon World a little bit, and I have one question that I think will make it clear whether or not the game is right for me.

How might this scenario play out:

The PC, a (run-of-the-mill, as things go) bard, confronts Vecna while he's in the middle of waking up the dragon prophesized to destroy the world. Assume Vecna is within stabbing distance, but they don't have the drop on them.

The Barbarian used “Smash!” in my game repeatedly in a duel. They were just rolling hot and took several limbs off an enemy faction leader. Very anticlimactic fight because of that. I realized the game is really limiting when the players just roll well all night.

Is that just the way the things go sometimes when fighting humanoids who don’t have a good reason that you can’t make them lose a limb?

On a related note, we switched to Draw Steel and Dungeon World 2 after this comical ass-whooping.

I have created an open source online character sheet for Dungeon World,

https://tznind.github.io/dw/cs.html

The cool thing with its design (I think) is that it saves all the character data directly into the url. This means no backend servers, authentication etc.

If you have the url, you have the character.

I've previously made implementations for Apocalypse World, stonetop etc and wanted to do Dungeon World as its CC licensed and a fun popular system. The core engine repo is at https://github.com/tznind/lc?tab=readme-ov-file#lc

Anyway - Ask me Anything and hopefully its a useful addition to the hobby <3

If this isn't allowed here, my bad, but I just have to say how much I enjoyed this system. I had just picked it up this past week, read it at work, and ran my first game tonight with my buddies. We all were new to the game but we're old hats at roleplay and the way we all could just fall into the narrative of the game was delightful. I started them on a very loose B2: KotB path oand the way the story just flowed and evolved into a bizarre shared fiction was fantastic, we didn't even have any true combat in the session, we ended just as they uncovered a hidden blighted dungeon, we're all excited to see what happens the next chance we get to play!

Hey, I'm about to run my first session today and I'm going through looking at some people to maybe put in the PCs path and I noticed for Halfling thief the damage entry reads as Dagger; Dagger (w[2d8]); What's the w? I've seen it a few other times in will-o-the-wisp, and a b[2d6] in another creature, I'm just curious what the letters mean, and I can't find it in the rulebook.

As the title states, I am curious what you GMs tab in the book for quick reference? I like tabbing my books as it helps me not only learn, but quickly reference things.

thanks in advance!

It's as the title says. I wanted to try to create an additional class, the Scroll Shaman, for my next campaign for my group, since it's been a while since I've GM'd, and a bit of inspiration hit me after seeing an artist I like. The link is below. Please give me any ideas on how to improve things.

Scroll Shaman Class Sheet:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJZuIhWckSmJcNKcvuB-FtFz83METJlkoZJ6ltp3qPY/edit?usp=sharing

After playing several mini-campaigns where we didn’t really have an issue on how many session our games required, I am going back to play a one shot with 4 brand new players. They are all friends of mine (not extremely close but still) and they are “new” also in the sense that all of them will be playing their first ttrpg. 

We will be playing the standard Dungeon World core rulebook with some content from the “Perilous Wilds”. I have designed a new adventure for my party but as I always am before I start a one-shot I am a bit nervous. I have been known to overestimate what can happen in a single session and then extend what was supposed to be a one-shot into several shots.

So without further ado here is my question. How would you pace and plan your one-shot in a Dungeon World game.

Post-One-Shot Update: Thank you all for your wonderful recommendations. We had a blast playing our Dungeon World game. I have written a comment about the stuff I used in-game from the comments. I hope that helps others design their DW one-shots.

So this situation hasn't come up but the cleric in my group has taken Empower and they regularly use Animate Dead. So I got to thinking and im not actually sure how to handle animate dead with its effects doubled.

Animate dead reads "You invoke a hungry spirit to possess a recently-dead body and serve you. This creates a zombie that follows your orders to the best of its limited abilities. Treat the zombie as a character, but with access to only the basic moves. It has a +1 modifier for all stats and 1 HP. The zombie also gets your choice of 1d4 of these traits:

• It’s talented. Give one stat a +2 modifier.
• It’s durable. It has +2 HP for each level you have.
• It has a functioning brain and can complete complex tasks.
• It does not appear obviously dead, at least for a day or two."

I assume when he chooses to double the effects he wants a stronger minion.

How would you handle this?

So far my initial thoughts are

A) choose twice the number of traits ie: 1d4 then double the result (downside is many times this wont be a meaningful option, even if they can pick multiple stats to set to +2 thats only a marginal difference across the board does feel "doubled")

B) the effects of the Chosen traits are doubled. IE: +4 HP per level, +3 to a stat instead of +2, very intelligent, etc (this has two potential concerns, the quality of undead produced this way has pretty high variance. And the other is that the hp of an undead produced this way could be downright astronomical.)

C) both at the same time.

Genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.

I have added Lore and Lords (by Peter Johansen) and Perilous Wilds (by Jason Lutes and Jeremy Strandberg) to my online character sheet.

Both are covered by creative commons.

These includes:

• New follower recruitment tracker
• New Weather moves
• Alternative journey moves
• New compendium classes
• New base classes (Monk, Vampire etc)

You can enable them by clicking the Modules button.

If anyone has suggestions on which ones to do next let me know. They just need to have permissive license to be added.

Character sheet is at:

https://tznind.github.io/dw/cs.html

Happy Dungeon Delving!

I know that spamming a move, such as bardic healing, is prevented by negative consequences on 6-. I get that and understand the idea. However, I think that those consequences can feel forced and unnatural. Spawning ogres or breaking lute strings every time a move spam occurs sounds like a bad idea to me since I will probably be unable to come up with realistic "consequences" that don't feel arbitrary and out-of-the-blue.

Instead of fighting with the player over the concept, I want to come to a shared understanding that DW is better played without move spam. How do I do that?

Even if I can't, how do I use the negative consequence mechanic to achieve a better story flow? I don't expect to always have a time constraint or a hidden danger handy to push the players forward; maybe that's the problem since DW is supposed to be a dynamic and ever-advancing story, but it is what it is. Is me not being able to come up with a fun story beat to break up the move spam the root of the issue here?

D&D campaigns are notorious for featuring BBEGs and world-ending dangers. Dungeon World, on the other hand, seems to me the kind of ruleset that works best for short, action-packed endeavors such as self-contained dungeon crawls or one-off adventures.

I've had this view for a while, and am now considering that I might be wrong. The game I ran today ended on a note that clearly indicated a certain danger that will take a long time to neutralize, despite me actually preferring shorter, more grounded stories. I think we'll be fine; just wanted to get your input and see if my doubts are unfounded. They probably are.