Okay guys, way too much tangency in these threads lately. Lets focus on the rpgs and not on the political/linguistic discussions. Take it to The Purple.

Edit:  Was making a response, but when I posted it the mod told everyone to stop in his post.  So I had go back to erased the message because I wanted to respect the mod's wishes.

Yep. I like Dungeon World a lot; it's fast-playing, rules-light, and doesn't get in the way of the GM and the players playing the damned adventure.

But there are members of the community who just don't get it, and want to stifle that under more rules and more bullshit. It comes to something when here is one of the better places to discuss it.

The worst I saw was a "how do I dungeon world" thread elsewhere where a poster was looking for rules on when people got to speak and what sorts of things they were allowed to say. No. Just no. Roleplaying games are clearly not for that individual.

Quote from: The Traveller;726138Sure, without rules there wouldn't be a game, that goes without saying, it would just be people sitting around having a conversation. However as far as RPGs go the rules should exist to enable the imagination, not restrict it, so in certain cases less is more. I wrote a little on the topic of the purpose of rules here.

I guess a lot would depend on your playstyle. I'm used to just taking what the players want to do and running with it. They roll a dice, barely fail, they slip down the cliff a few dozen feet but don't plunge to their dooms. The same roll, succeed well, they nimbly scamper up and nobody heard a  thing. I'm playing with the players as part of the group, not in an adversarial or god-mode role.

My attitude is, I'm playing with the rules I'm playing with for a reason.  If a ruleset gives a binary result, I'm going to treat it as a binary result -- success or failure.  I can put a gloss on it, I can describe how it's a success or failure, but I think it's poor form to muck around with the fundamentals of the system.  That's not to say I don't house rule, or that I'm limited in imagination, but I have a massive game library and I like fucking with systems, so if a system doesn't give the outcome I want, I find one that does.

In this case, Dungeon World, in practice, results in action moments where outcomes are (at base) a third of the time either flat failure, partial success that in practice escalates tension, or total success.  That mirrors a lot of con movies and heist movies for me.  Compare that with, say, Exalted, where PCs are expected to succeed much of the time, and the question in practice is how well, in comparison to another person who's also expected to succeed to some degree.  Or to OD&D, where the bulk of the action is combat, and you can get by with "I hit/I fail to hit," and then "how much damage do I do?" or "Do I save versus this effect?"

I like systems.  I'm a system monkey.  I don't view them as replacing imagination, because there's more imagination involved in coming up with compromises in DW than there is in straight out mediating success/failure -- I view it as enabling a wider amount of imaginative outcomes.

Quote from: Ladybird;726158Yep. I like Dungeon World a lot; it's fast-playing, rules-light, and doesn't get in the way of the GM and the players playing the damned adventure.

But there are members of the community who just don't get it, and want to stifle that under more rules and more bullshit. It comes to something when here is one of the better places to discuss it.

The worst I saw was a "how do I dungeon world" thread elsewhere where a poster was looking for rules on when people got to speak and what sorts of things they were allowed to say. No. Just no. Roleplaying games are clearly not for that individual.

Let me get this straight ... Someone should play Dungeon World the way you like or "roleplaying games are clearly not for that individual."

Wow.  I can see what the OP was talking about.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;726191Someone should play Dungeon World the way you like or "roleplaying games are clearly not for that individual."

Wow.  I can see what the OP was talking about.

Yeah, that's not even in the same time zone as what Ladybird wrote.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;726119Which part is causing the trouble, that we're doing Locke Lamora/Ocean's 11 or that I think DW handles it better than D&D would?

Assuming that I think DW handles that kind of play better is the issue, I think that DW's three possible results to most tests works better for con games like something out of Leverage or the Gentlemen Bastards.  DW veers toward "Success/Success with Compromise or Condition/Failure" which suits that kind of play better for us.  Also, its social conflict rules, like Parleying, give us a much more useful set of outcomes.

YMMV, obviously.  But the resulting game has been much more fun for us than if we'd played some flavor of D&D, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a better system for it.

Fair enough. I do end up houseruling some degree-of-success metric into just about everything I run.

Quote from: The Butcher;726193Fair enough. I do end up houseruling some degree-of-success metric into just about everything I run.

Yeah, and I'm not adverse to house ruling, no matter how much I might be a system monkey.  And also, in practice, systems may be more complicated than just their resolution mechanic -- I think, for example, that OD&D's focus on binary success outcomes is made more complicated by things like a damage roll, which in practice means, "I succeeded, now by how much?"  It is, in effect, a measure-of-success system, it just spreads it over two discrete rolls.  The places that people complain most about, IME, like save-or-die effects, are areas that don't, in practice, spread it around like that.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;726186My attitude is, I'm playing with the rules I'm playing with for a reason.  If a ruleset gives a binary result, I'm going to treat it as a binary result -- success or failure.  I can put a gloss on it, I can describe how it's a success or failure, but I think it's poor form to muck around with the fundamentals of the system.

It's not really a system fundamental if nothing actually breaks when you change it though, it's just part of the system. This is the idea of dependencies I outlined in the thread linked earlier.

Besides, no system can explicitly cover all eventualities - sooner or later you're going to have to wing it. Moreso for DW than a binary system in fact, since the game doesn't and can't have tables for every possible action.

So you can see why people might be a bit baffled at the assertion that D&D is less well suited to such a campaign than DW.

Quote from: Veilheim;725963Okay, look.  I like Dungeon World.  I do.  I really think it's a fun game with some great approaches.  I love that its very hackable and you can do a ton with it pretty easily.  I enjoy running it, I like playing it...  To me, it's a great little system.  

BUT OH MY FUCKING GOD, the community surrounding DW (particularly on G+) is full of absolutely insufferable Gen-Y'ers who are convinced they and they alone can define what good right fun and bad wrong fun are.  I watched it happen again tonight.  But, of course, were I to call it Hipster World, the RPG, I'd be tarred and feathered over there.

So, instead, I just came to the "safe" game place on the internet where it's okay to say less than completely PC comments to get it off my fucking chest.  

Thanks.

Hm. Sounds like you don't want to talk gaming, but politics. This might be a better post for Pundit's forum.

I maintain a strict 'no politics or religion' rule when I run games, and I request such when I play. If these people are trouble, don't participate in their community.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;726080I'm enjoying the hell out of our Dungeon World game right now, but mainly because it's being used for something we couldn't rightly use D&D for in any of its incarnations.  (We're doing Locke Lamora/Ocean's Eleven heist/cons in a city very similar to Thieves World).  I engage with the fanbase only a little bit, but haven't noticed any problems different than the kind of zealousness that goes with any other system.  

Then again, I think most or all fan bases have their immense share of tools, and maybe I just auto-filter.  I certainly don't consider Dungeon World's to be as problematic as Exalted or Shadowrun's.

When I went over to the sorcery.net Exalted channel (where Holden hangs out), I found the fans there to be rude and insufferable. I don't hang out there anymore, much preferring Dan Davenport's #rpgnet channel over on magicstar.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;726200Hm. Sounds like you don't want to talk gaming, but politics. This might be a better post for Pundit's forum.

I maintain a strict 'no politics or religion' rule when I run games, and I request such when I play. If these people are trouble, don't participate in their community.

Which is why I got political, but back to the topic at hand.

It just every time I look at dungeon world if felt like we did this before.  It felt like dnd which I know that is the point, but we have OSR books.  What does dungeon world do to make itself different?  Other than a different system not much.  It is a generic game that requires a GM to create a setting for people to play in.  Which yet again OSR games pretty much did that any way.  So you have a game trying to be dnd when their are other games that had done that already.

Quote from: Snowman0147;726203It just every time I look at dungeon world if felt like we did this before.  It felt like dnd which I know that is the point, but we have OSR books.  What does dungeon world do to make itself different?  Other than a different system not much.  It is a generic game that requires a GM to create a setting for people to play in.  Which yet again OSR games pretty much did that any way.  So you have a game trying to be dnd when their are other games that had done that already.

DW isn't anything hugely new. Best way I can describe how I think of it is an analogy:

RPG rulesets are tools. Some people are MacGuyver and they can build anything no matter the tools. The tools make a difference, but the person(s) involved in the game are so damn awesome that the effect of the tools are small.

That's a real outlier, though. For most people, the tools they use are an important part (not the only important part) of what they make. DW isn't some entirely new tool or something. If I or anyone else pitched it that way, my apologies.

DW is like a circular saw that can be set at angle. If you're a skilled woodworker with a miter block, it's going to save you some time, maybe. But if you've never been able to pull off a good miter before, you may react with "holy crap look at what I was just able to do!"

(You can probably tell at this point I never took a shop class. And the analogy is wearing thin.)

Anyway, it's a tool, and like all tools it'll be of varying usefulness to different people. For some people it may even be anti-useful, getting in the way of their usual approaches and methods.



As for the people in the G+ Community: I have no idea. For a while I kept up with every post and tried to drop in, but now they're too numerous. Because of our/the games background we sometimes get people with baggage (expecting STORY or whatever). Because of the open license, sometimes we get people making stuff we don't particularly like. For me, those are both downsides to keeping discussions wide open. We have a kind of hands-off approach to a lot of things, since we don't view ourselves as The Official Source of Truth on Dungeon World. We're gamers who put together this system and any knowledge we have of it is hard-won from lots of play and experimentation. That means that anyone can go through the many stages of experimentation and being wrong and saying the wrong thing to come to their own understanding of the game.

I guess what I am saying is you offer me a sandbox, but I already have a sandbox.  Sure different system, but they both offer the same thing.  Hell I don't mind doing a lot of modifications and reworking the system.  In fact I love to do that.  It is just to me a sandbox is a sandbox.

Quote from: Veilheim;725963(...) of course, were I to call it Hipster World, the RPG, I'd be tarred and feathered over there.

Hipster World Engine... I like that.

I'm fine with people playing whatever and however they enjoy playing, but the smug pretentiousness of extremist "indie" game fan boys I find really off-putting.