Dungeon World’s Secrets Revealed
Meanwhile, this little guy caused a total party kill. Baby Orc by MicreroFurioso2. Horde symbol © Blizzard Entertainment Inc3.
The orc sneers at you from the doorway and struts into the room a bristling mass of muscle and sinew and a giant barbed metal blade. Those barbs, you realize with a shudder, will turn inside out anything the beast manages to hit. You had defeated his goblin servant easily enough but this orc is obviously a skilled and experienced fighter. What do you do?”
“Uhh, I Hack and Slash1?” says the player.
“Ok,” says the GM. “Roll for it.”
“I rolled a 9, with my bonus it’s an 11. I deal… 6 points of damage, piercing.”
“Ok, you slip past his guard and connect, kill him where he stands.”
“Allright! Man, that was easier than the goblin, he didn’t even touch me.”
Dungeon World’s Mechanics Are Broken
That was a fictional account of a Dungeon World session but it does resemble those I’ve run. Dungeon World, played by numbers alone, relying on dice and stats, is a fundamentally broken game. The game is one of shared fiction and most importantly, fiction as mechanic.The most basic combat move, Hack and Slash1, doesn’t consider how dangerous your opponent is. You have the same chance to hit, and be hit by, a lowly goblin or a ferocious dragon.
The game is not, however, a game of dice and stats. This is the beauty of the game that makes me love it so much even as I play it poorly in practice. The game is one of shared fiction and most importantly, fiction as mechanic.
Fiction as Mechanic: The Missing Piece
Fiction as mechanic is something that I grapple with on a theoretical level and fail at during actual play4. It is something that I wish to improve and by doing so I’d like to share my theories with my readers so we can improve together.
The mechanics of the game are not actually broken. Fiction is the mechanic which “fixes” the rest. The game is designed so that the players and GM can make fiction impact the game in a deeper way than would be possible by having a completely balanced rules system where descriptions are only “fluff”.
Dungeon World is in this way a very meaty game for Game Masters. It challenges us to compensate for those “broken” mechanics and it isn’t always obvious how this should be done.
So, to help me and to hopefully help you, my reader(s), I’m going to be writing a number of articles on applying the principle of Fiction as Mechanic in Dungeon World. I will focus primarily on specific applications to reduce things into bite-sized chunks.
The first of these articles, using multiple Moves1 to add difficulty to tasks, is already in the works. I’m also planning a number of articles on combat with specific monsters as illustrations on how to incorporate fiction into the game.
Is there something you are struggling with in Dungeon World? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can come up with a solution. You can also check me out on Google+ or Twitter.
1) Moves and the Hack and Slash and Defy Danger move are rules from Dungeon World, a roleplaying game by Adam Koebel and Sage Latorra. Dungeon World ©MMXII Sage Latorra and Adam Koebel. It was released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You can find more about the game on Dungeon World’s Official Website.
2) Baby Orc art by MicreroFurioso used without permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. You should find the original here and his main Deviant Art site here.
3) Horde symbol is © Blizzard Entertainment Inc. and is used without permission.
The group I played with played it “as written”. This meant every task had a 6:1 chance of success – because that’s what it says on our character sheets (that’s the actual probability of 10+). It’s like putting a loaded gun on the table and whenever I talk to anyone else about Dungeon World they say they never fired the gun. I raised my concerns about this during the second game we had and now it looks like I’m not playing with that group anymore because I ended up being disruptive. They honestly think that being in Dungeon World is like being Jar Jar Binks. You’re a total fuck-up that accumulates grief with every move, even when you slightly win.
Here’s the problem when your rules are broken: No one I’ve ever played an RPG with knows all the rules. They look at what’s in front of them and go with it. There’s a loaded gun on the table – it’s going to get fired.
If what was written on the character sheets and move sheets didn’t imply a disaster at every turn, then things would have gone better. I would still be speaking to people from that group. Instead of being some asshole complaining that the GM isn’t pulling their punches. Instead of sounding like a baby.
Whilst everything else about the game was a lot of fun – I can’t recommend the system itself. It’s rigged for failure that is mitigated only by the GM. And if the GM skips a punishment I feel patronised.
I can understand your frustration. I still feel fond of Dungeon World but I’ve moved on to other games. It sounds like you were not the GM and the GM missed the bit where you only ask for a move when it is warranted by the fiction. If you look at the hack and slash as something which always happens as a result of a fight then the game breaks down. Sounds like you were right to wonder whether the game you were playing was supposed to be fun.
Wow, this is such an unfortunate story to hear. Whoever first read the rules in this way must have had an overly large impact on everyone else, because by definition 7+ is “success”, it is simply “success with complications”. And it’s very clear that many of the complications that the GM is supposed to introduce (via his Moves) are not necessarily “bad”, they’re just interesting.
Still, even armed with that approach to the game, if players come to the table wanting to kick the crap out of everything and have no real conflict or surprise, then DW is never going to be a good game for them.
Tyler did you ever post your followup articles? You seemed to be on to something interesting here…