The inventory system in HBW is on my list of things to tighten up. Like, it works, and I mostly like how it plays, but it’s a little too crunchy for the game’s goals.
How do you play Dungeon World?
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I take a few things from Perilous Wilds, but it’s not an explicit drift or hack, or at least not consciously.
I honestly mostly just run it by the book. I think Bonds work fine but I’ll tweak those to Keys for running on the Gauntlet because folks seem to prefer them.
I feel like it works pretty well right out of the box, but I’m pretty conservative when it comes to trying to hack stuff too much, in part because I’ve spent so much of my life running intro stuff for new players in a store/con setting, where it’s always been important to teach the basics before we start going off-book.
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@Haladir How does a 6- go with Embrace Your Trouble? I know the GM is supposed to make a move that follows and it’s usually a Hard Move. I guess I should ask what a Trouble is first.
After playtesting it for a few weeks last year, we decided that the Trouble mechanic was more… um… trouble than it was worth, and dropped it. That DW campaign ended in April 2019, and I haven’t played DW since.
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My answer is basically also this but for Episodes 3-108 of Crudely Drawn Swords - I don’t think we were really playing the game for the first couple of episodes- certainly I called the first move we made completely wrong which no doubt put a lot of purists off, but I feel like from there on we picked up into a playable and fun campaign that has kept our attention ( and our listeners’ attention ) for the last five years or so. Funnily enough we’re about to start using The Veil Fantastic to dive into another realm altogether but aside from a couple of short sessions we’ve managed to keep the campaign running pretty well for that time starting mostly off the core book and bringing in moves from other places ( and a lot that we’ve written as we went along ) and more recently playbooks from Class Warfare.
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So, despite being introduced to RPGs in 1981, I’ve only recently gotten properly into running them. Largely thanks to DW being a cocktail of “I can handle this” and “this is brilliant.” I’ve run a handful of sessions using a combination of DW, Class Warfare, and Perilous Wilds. I’ve also found the DW Guide extremely helpful in terms of grokking how it works. Then I listen(ed) to a fair few podcasts, both instructional and actual play. I’ve listened to quite a bit of “Discern Realities” and faithfully followed “Friends at the Table” and others. At the risk of sounding… something, hands-down my favourite DW podcast comes from the gentleman above me in this feed. (I’m assuming that’s Ben Moxon of Crudely Drawn Swords.) The show is both a really helpful guide to running DW and a really entertaining story.
As for what I’m hoping to do with DW: I’m a Conan fan, and I’ve long wanted to do something that feels more sword & sorcery than high fantasy (though my current DW game is more the latter). I’ve finally gotten into Elric, and am now seeing the potential for a more magic-intensive brand of S&S than Howard’s. That’s more about accepting a larger palette, versus rejecting one for the other.
So I’m using Class Warfare to conceptualize/reskin appropriate S&S protagonists and thinking about how Fronts work in that milieu. I’m thinking about perhaps doing away with Campaign Fronts and focusing on Adventure Fronts exclusively to try and 1) acknowledge the picaresque narrative and 2) account for the fact that we’re all busy professionals with families, graduate coursework, and other things. So adventures into which a rotating cast of characters could drop into and out of is (I hope) just what’s needed.
Stuart (no, not CDS Stuart; a different Stuart)
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Are you aware of The Age of Conan and the Hyperborean Age? They are two PbtA fantasy game drafts that you can probably still find… I remember thinking they seemed pretty solid.
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It is indeed, thank you!
I don’t tend to use Campaign Fronts but I do sort of have that idea mentally mapped out, a lot of what I do is just having a lot of notes and remembering what direction I think things might go. I use Adventure Fronts to codify things I might need and they’re a really good tool for that. In particular because laying things out in that format helps me see what NPCs I’m likely to need ahead of time. I don’t do it all the time and I have definitely fronted stuff out that I ended up just dropping, but it’s a good framework.
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Thanks Paul. I wasn’t aware of one of them, but I did have the playbooks from the other (though I had completely forgotten that until you mentioned it). So thanks, twice over! I’ll take another look.
As I say, I’ve been reading Elric at long last. And it occurred to me that he often behaves very much like a cleric in the D&D sense. A heavily reframed cleric, certainly. But appealing to a diety (Arioch) and calling in eldritch airstrikes…
I don’t think I’d render Elric as a DW cleric, to be clear. And, as I said, we’re using Class Warfare to try and model the broad competency of S&S characters anyway. But it was reassuring that the game generally would handle S&S (as I understand it).
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Thanks Ben! Yeah, I love the idea of Fronts. It’s just the right amount of organizational tool for my mind to handle. In my brief forays into GMing in the past (Fudge and AFMBE), I got too tied up in the minute details, trying to be prepared for everything that could happen. That was just nerves and trying not to be caught flat footed. Since then, I’ve had a decade-long career as an academic counselor in higher education, which has given me ample experience in not having all the answers and needing to think on my feet. So I’m a lot more comfortable now with the level of prep framed out by Fronts. At the same time, it’s not absolute improv, which I wouldn’t be comfortable with either. Your point about showing what NPCs, locations, etc. you might need to have percolating somewhere is well taken. (Plus it’s not a half bad way to spend some spare time, formulating some NPCs, locales, and so on.) Thanks for the advice!
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