Quote from: Silverlion;640782Because I don't like D&D?

Now THIS is an honest answer.

Quote from: Benoist;640802Now THIS is an honest answer.

It's ok. There's lots of people who don't like D&D. That's why they made 4E.

Quote from: Bobloblah;640831It's ok. There's lots of people who don't like D&D. That's why they made 4E.

Yes, I agree, it's totally okay to not like D&D and say "I played Dungeon World and I enjoy it. It's not like D&D and it's a cool narrative game of dungeon crawling in its own right to me".

What makes me roll my eyes is when I read stuff to the extent of "there's absolutely NO DIFFERENCE between Dungeon World and D&D! It totally is a traditional game! It's the same thing, but cooler!" That's nonsense.

Quote from: Silverlion;640782Because I don't like D&D?

Your answer in full (not quoted, obviously) is informative.

I thought Drohem's post and yours made the differences a little clearer, which are more interesting than the similarities.

Quote from: Benoist;640838What makes me roll my eyes is when I read stuff to the extent of "there's absolutely NO DIFFERENCE between Dungeon World and D&D! It totally is a traditional game! It's the same thing, but cooler!" That's nonsense.

Don't think I've heard anyone say quite that, although I've heard a lot of people say they found the game felt very "old-school" in play. Not sure what to make of that, myself. Maybe it just depends on what portion of the experience of playing an RPG one focuses/has always focused on?

What I mean by that is that a lot of the posters here focus very heavily on making every decision from an in-character perspective. Not everyone does that, though, even amongst long time, so-called old-school players. If that was never your thing, you're unlikely to find it jarring when a game like this has OOC tradeoffs in its decision making, and hence, still find the gameplay (portions that you focus on) matches up with your gameplay experiences (that you focus on) in more traditional games.

Silverlion, have you played AW before ?

Do you feel the nature of the mechanics in DW also makes the game flow in full-speed / "go, go, go!" most of times ? (even making it too frantic at some points) ?

Im a AW fan, but didnt play Dungeon World yet. Im curious.

Quote from: Drohem;640723I played in this game as Geggus Copperpot, and he is a Dwarf Cleric of Moradin the Soul Forger.

I agree that, for the most part, it played like a regular RPG session.  It was my first playing the game as well, and I felt disconnect through the first fight.  The GM brought us into the game world in the middle of a fight, which was a great opportunity to highlight how combat worked in the game.  However, there was not a lot of structure to how the combat flowed from the perspective of traditional mechanics like initiative or a turn order.  After speaking with the GM after the game session, I learned that the combat is suppose to be more descriptive and reactive so next time I'll be better equipped with knowing how it's suppose to go down.



This was the most interesting point of the game for me, especially how it affected the dynamic of combat.  So my guy is a cleric with chain mail, a shield, and a warhammer and I think that he can probably stand up in a fight with the guards we were fighting in our introduction to the game world.  The seemed like 'typical' low-level guards so I figured that I could help the thief and fight them off.  It turns out that combat is fairly serious in this game because of the partial success thing...

On my cleric's first strike on a guard, he rolled a partial success which meant that I hit the dude but also exposed my cleric to the guard's retaliatory strike.  So I rolled my cleric's damage die of 1d6 and another player rolled the guard's damage die of 1d8, and I rolled a '1' and guard rolled a '7' for damage.  My cleric as 2-points of armor and takes 5 damage, which knocks him down from 21 HPs (max) to 16 HPs.  

This immediately caused me, the player, to realize that the mechanics of combat could quickly get my character killed if I pressed him full-bore into combat.  So I played it 'safe' after that and my cleric decided to flee and avoid these guys would be a good bet.  The party starts to bug out of the building, and thief takes to the roofs and the druid turns into a squirrel.  My dwarf cleric decides to climb on the roof tops and follow the thief.  We are spotted by the dudes chasing us, and the group gets separated.  The thief continues on the roof top with bad guys chasing him, and my cleric gets back down into the streets of the market area.  

A new bad guy, all in black with TWO daggers, comes after Geggus (my cleric), and tries to capture him.  My cleric resists and flees through the crowd trying to get away from the bad guys and the new all-black bad guy.  He fails to escape detection, so he stops in a doorway and casts Magic Weapon on his warhammer and gets a partial success.  I choose to loose the spell for the success.  The all-black dude shows up and talks with my cleric and tells him to surrender without getting hurt.  The all-black dude's swagger tells me that he's not really scared to square-off alone against my dwarf cleric.  

Suddenly, Thelir the elf Druid, as a fox, rushes in and attacks the all-black dude with the Defend Move and stops him from hitting my cleric.  I rolled a full success for my cleric's warhammer attack and rolled 7 damage with the extra d4 of spell damage.  This knocked out and/or dazed the dude so my cleric just took off running and Thelir came with him.

We hooked up with Liam, the Thief, a little bit later and fled the city and our hunters therein.  He had his own harrowing experience with escaping from the guards via the rooftops of the city.

It was a cool first experience to game system and its dynamics.  Now that I know what to expect and how I am suppose to interact with the system and GM, I think that the initial disconnected and lost feeling will evaporate quickly.  I was genuinely concerned that these opponents were fully capable of killing our characters and/ or capturing us so I had that vicarious thrill and exhilaration of 'Oh shit!  We gotta flee!' moment and feeling that my character had.

Fucking great action you had there. I wish I was in it.

And I agree the "weak-sucess" (hard choice) is the real gem here.

Quote from: FASERIP;640839I thought Drohem's post and yours made the differences a little clearer, which are more interesting than the similarities.

Particularly since those are the key things that turn a lot of more trad-minded players off.

1) "Hallmarks?" Well we were given a map and allowed to name stuff, and we were given a choice as to why we got together in the first place.*

There were some questions about the backgrounds of the characters we filled in and such.

As for "shared narrative?" not really, it flowed like a most games in terms of content/play structure, but in terms of how that content moved from point to point it transitioned far more readily. PC/NPC does A others react and make rolls to resolve that, for good or ill. There was no redirecting the scene or anything like that.


2) I've not played Apocalypse World. I have looked at it, read some bits on it, but the sex moves/party interaction elements didn't work for me when reading about them so I skipped it--despite being a fan of Post-Apocalyptic gaming. From reading AW elements online compared to reading the actual book of DW and actual play of DW it looks like DW takes a step more traditional in handling of things than AW. At no time were our characters expected to have sex to recharge anything. Nor were our characters driven to have truly opposing action.

Mind you we have a Thief, and like many classic D&D esque Thieves he gets himself in trouble for things the other two characters facepalm at.

As for frantic? I think it picks the pace up quite a bit, but not quite too frantic. Perhaps in more sessions it may be the case, but in this instance (a running fight and escape from a city.) It didn't feel that way.

 On the other hand it doesn't feel like the game will have "downtime" sinks like some versions of A/D&D.

Mind you, I happen to like downtime sinks. Tonight I played in a Pathfinder game and we spent time decompressing from last adventure by working together to make a sword--for a commission for the PC blacksmith/rogue , before going to a tavern sing-along, and then stopping a serial killer. Add to that several PC's spent several "out of game months" making magic items for ourselves and our party members. (Minor things like scrolls, potions, pearls of power.)

Dungeon World doesn't cover such things of course other than moves like "Recover" and "Make camp" and those things do need a little more time to feel out in play. Sometimes its fun to go to the next adventure, and sometimes you want to enjoy the ill-gotten gain.

Quote from: K Peterson;640797Did your session contain any of the hallmarks of a storygame? Dramatic, scene-editing by players and GM, alike? Focus on the development of a story in-play mutable by GM and players? Shared worldbuilding? Player-permission required for character death? Are these standards or options in the RPG?

None of those are part of either AW or DW. GM has the usual attributions there, and the players control PCs actions, just that.

The part of selecting consequences from a partial success may be the most "out there" thing, but is no big deal, and is not a dissociated mechanic, as it is a description of the PCs action and its consequences.

Quote from: Benoist;640838Yes, I agree, it's totally okay to not like D&D and say "I played Dungeon World and I enjoy it. It's not like D&D and it's a cool narrative game of dungeon crawling in its own right to me".

What makes me roll my eyes is when I read stuff to the extent of "there's absolutely NO DIFFERENCE between Dungeon World and D&D! It totally is a traditional game! It's the same thing, but cooler!" That's nonsense.

Well, of course it's nonsense to pretend it is the same thing, because nothing but D&D (or maybe a retroclone) can be the same thing. Just like you cannot say that an adventure played in RQ feels the same as in D&D.

But what it has is a completely trad feeling. You do the exact same things you would be doing in any trad game, with identical procedures. It is just a light-rules trad game with a very good set of GMing advice, that you can port to other games. It's not the first game where the GM makes no rolls, also.

I have the feeling that the enthusiasm with AW and DW is more related with the indie community giving themselves permission to like a trad game because it has been designed by the right person. The same that happens with Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel and so on.

Actually, it's quite funny: I'm prepping a Sorcerer game to play 1-1 with the wife and I cannot for the life of me figure how anyone can pretend that this game plays so differently from any other game as to pretend it's a new kind of game. Again, good GMing advice doesn't make a whole new game.

On the other hand, I am reading Fiasco because one of my players wanted to give it a try and asked me to help him get a game running, and it's definitely not a roleplaying game in the traditional sense. No one can pretend that Fiasco is a game like D&D or Vampire or Cthulhu.

Actually, it doesn't look like very fun to me, but that is an entirely different matter, based mostly on tastes (I love to see movies about low-life people ending in disasters, but I am not interested in playing them).

Quote from: Silverlion;640789Of course. Most Indie ideas are a bit older. They took a while to to trickle down it seems.  For example my own High Valor offers concessions on a tie and it came our in 2010!

Yeah, I really must check that out, it sounds interesting.

As far as I can see AW's main quirk is the partial failure table and that players (or the GM) get to narrate the results from a list of options - would that be accurate? Other than that it's not really different to many other games, once we're ignoring the sex moves.

Well, just to be clear:  I didn't say it's completely like a traditional game, but rather that once you get the collaborative stuff out of the way then it plays out very similar to a traditional game as far as the flow of the game.

The collaborative stuff was done in our first session prior to beginning play and only lasted for about 5-10 minutes and consisted of about a total of 10 questions; several questions for each character and then a couple questions for the group.

The GM provided us with a section of a hex made with geographical features and (mountains, rivers, forest, plains, and etc.) some sites (city, ruins, and etc.) marked on it, but not named.  Some of the questions for the characters revolved around naming some sites on the map.  It was pretty cool how the map panned out with just a few questions.  On the section of map that we could see it showed us a shoreline with two small islands offshore, and one of the islands was completely forested.  The Druid immediately named the island and claimed it as a strong druidic site and elven homeland.  This was pretty cool and made sense geographically.  

I selected a city and in answering a question named a cave complex nearby that is rumored to be a sacred site to dwarves because Moradin supposedly obtained his pure water for forging divine weapons from fresh-water springs deep in the earth and cave complex.

The Thief's questions and answered outlined a huge plot and drama with several organizations; and due to his contribution we started the game in a fight with some dudes from his drama, LOL!

I'm not sure if this is DW or the GM making it up on his own, but apparently there had been a fairly recent deicide that killed off many of the deities of the game world and so I had to answer the question 'why did Moradin survive the deicide?'  This was pretty cool and got me thinking about the game world, its deities, and the fundamental impact that a deicide would have on the world.

The general questions for all the characters and players also helped set up some of the premises of the game world for the GM, and also established the Bonds between the PCs.

This whole process took about 10-15 minutes and flowed naturally.  It didn't feel forced or disconnected really.  We were just talking and brain-storming ideas, and then cherry-picked the ones we liked.  Once that was done, we went straight into the gaming action and, thereafter, the game flowed like any other game I have played over the years.

Quote from: silva;640843Do you feel the nature of the mechanics in DW also makes the game flow in full-speed / "go, go, go!" most of times ? (even making it too frantic at some points) ?

'Frantic' is a pretty good word and also kind of describes the lost feeling I had at first in the combat scene.  The GM was hustling the scene forward by constantly asking us how we're reacting to his Moves.  After discussing it with the GM after the game, and reading the DW PDFs I have, I now understand that's the heart of the game and combat- kept things moving forward with intensity.  Now that I understand this concept I think that the rushed and frantic feelings will melt away in further play.

Now the whole 'weak-success' thing is the unique and interesting thing about the DW game.  However, in actual play at the table, it didn't seem foreign, jarring, or storygame-y to me.  The back and forth between the players and the GM was not really all that different than I have experienced in any other game at any other table.  In any other regular game, the GM narrates the results of combat rolls and this played just the same to me.

Now, to be honest, I was very conservative in this game because it was new and I didn't know what to expect and, consequently, I placed the bulk of my expected narration into the GM's lap.  Naturally, he picked it up since it was the first game and carried the majority of the narration.  He would as me some pointed questions and then cue the narrated results from my answers.  However, the next time we play I will be more interactive and more forthcoming with narration on my end for my Moves and their results.

As a GM, I kind of like it when players are allowed to have a hand in making the setting like that.  It gives me fun and unexpected things to work with, and helps me feel like I'm discovering the setting just as much as they are.

Quote from: Drohem;640954why did Moradin survive the deicide?  

So why did Moradin survive the deicide?

Quote from: Technomancer;640968So why did Moradin survive the deicide?

Moradin survived the Deicide because he is strong, smart, a survivor, and the master of the underground realm.  He is an Alpha.

Quote from: Drohem;640975Moradin survived the Deicide because he is strong, smart, a survivor, and the master of the underground realm.  He is an Alpha.

In other words he hid in a hole in the ground until the whole thing blew over?

Quote from: Drohem;640975Moradin survived the Deicide because he is strong, smart, a survivor, and the master of the underground realm.  He is an Alpha.

That sounds really cool in my head in Sam Elliott's voice.