So what’s all the fuss about? I purchased the book in the second wave of availability to find out just that. What I found was a game that plays a lot differently than standard D&D rehashes, but still cleaves to the old-school flavor and fun. My guinea pig—ahem, playtest volunteers and I had a great time trying it out last week.
The package:
The book itself is noticeably red (think “Redbox”, at least that’s what it put me in mind of), an unassuming paperback of just over 120 pages. The art is black and white. While not stunning, it is appropriately themed, featuring illustrations of standard D&D archetypal characters and monsters. The layout is competent and straightforward enough that when I needed to find something quickly on game night, I was generally able to. (Also, it’s a short book; even at 120 pages, it’s not dense.)
The first 80 pages are standard RPG core rules: Mechanics, character generation, character classes, equipment, spells and abilities, GM advice. The last 40 pages consist of a sample adventure, The Bloodstone Idol. I never use pre-generated adventures but this one was quite useful as it helped me understand how an adventure would be prepared for such a non-traditional type of D&D inspired game.
Also included in my package was a white envelope with paper handouts called “Playbooks”. These are essentially reference sheets and character sheets for the GM and players. Since the core mechanic of the game are character actions called “moves,” and there are several different kinds of moves, as well as class-specific types, it was necessary to have lists of the moves readily at-hand for the players.
The game:
Dungeon World puts a premium on thinking in terms of the collaborative fiction at the table. To make life easier for reviewers, the authors ask, “Why play Dungeon World?” They answer the question thusly: First, to see the characters do amazing things. Second, to see them play off against each other. Third, because the world has so many places to explore.
I like those answers! The game takes them seriously, and the sets a GM agenda and set of principles. The most important of these is: Always fill the characters’ lives with adventure. The GM section emphasizes that the game is about the characters and their actions, and that adventures are not a set of planned encounters or pre-destined storylines. The adventures rotate around their characters and once a character enters into a “front” where dangers await, the locations and monsters and magic will react to their actions.
Now we have all heard this stuff before, right? Most games claim to be about filling characters’ lives and players’ imaginations with wonder, right? So what makes Dungeon World different?
The rules actually support this direction by keeping almost all GM moves as responding to character actions. Of course the “fronts” are designed in advance, with a framing threat the characters will interact with, complete with vile monsters, hidden agendas and wondrous items and magic. But once the characters enter the adventure fronts, the stories are driven by their actions and the GM reacts to their actions, driving the adventure off of their moves.
In a nutshell, the core mechanic is character “Moves” such as “Hack and slash”, “Volley”, “Make a Saving Throw”, etc. When attempting a move, the player will roll 2d6 to determine success. A roll of 10+ is a clear success. A roll of 6-9 is a partial success—the character has succeeded, but the GM will respond with something bad also happening: A foe doing damage to the characters, damage or loss of weapon, a stumble or trip, etc. The GM does not actually roll dice in the game—rather they respond to the character’s actions and the corresponding rolls. It took me a while to get my head around the concept of not rolling dice—this may be the first session where I as a GM have never rolled dice to determine monster attacks or the like.
Character generation:
The characters are the standard archetypes of old-school D&D: Fighter, Wizard, Thief, Cleric. As you would expect, they each have special moves based on their classes and races. (You can play Human, Dwarf, Elf or Halfling, although not all races were eligible for all classes). Abilities were the traditional D&D scores, with a pre-defined allocation for quick setup, or the option of rolling 3d6. Once generated, the modifiers are what’s important, as the mods will be added to the 2d6 roll to determine move success.
While the characters are not as customizable as D20 and later models, the game advises the GM to restrict one character of each class to the adventure, making each class more special, and making each character essentially unique.
To add some fun, the classes come with options for looks, class moves, spells and, for the fighter, a set of custom weapon properties. Explaining the basic rules and creating characters for the first time (and consuming about ¾ of 2 extra large pizzas) took me and my three players about an hour.
Alignments follow a simple Good – Neutral – Evil paradigm. (All except the Cleric, who must choose Good or Evil; a nice touch, I thought.)
One distinctive feature of the character generation process is Bonds. Each character starts with up to 4 bonds with other characters—simple statements such as, “I wish to convert X to my god” or “I have prophesied that Y will be the subject of great events.” This adds a little flavor to the game and helps fill in some background and motivation at the start of play.
Advancement:
It wouldn’t be D&D(ish) without experience points, levels and advancement, right? At the start of the game, bonded characters will highlight scores for each other (i.e., Halwer the Wizard will highlight Hob the Fighter’s Wisdom and Hob will highlight Failwel the Cleric’s Con, while Failwel will highlight Halwer’s Int.) In addition, the GM highlights one stat for each character.
Making moves based on those stats then mark an XP for the character. XP is also earned through the some of the core moves and alignment / class goals the characters have built in. The breakpoints are relatively low with each level requiring 10 xp times their level to advance. (i.e, 10 xp to move from first to second, 20 to move from second to third, etc.)
Gameplay:
After some initial setup and flavor text, my intrepid adventurers approached the lost temple and began their adventure. The game played fast and easy, needing no grid or miniatures, though I did use my map-grid once or twice as scratch paper to do a quick visual.
The action flowed very well. I found that it was easier than I had anticipated to react to my player’s rolls, finding all sorts of interesting ways to temper their successes when their rolls called for it. (At one point, the bad guys shredded the net that they had been momentarily caught within. Another time, the characters successfully disarmed a trap but unwittingly made so much noise that they alerted the guards within the temple.) The encounters were a little unbalanced in the characters’ favor, but that was mostly due to my GMing the game for the first time, something I could easily fix now that I have run it once. We were able to complete a short, self-contained adventure with four combat encounters in about two hours. (It was a little rushed at the end as the startup had taken slightly longer than anticipated).
Feedback from the players:
Positive: They liked the quick and easy free-form flow of the game. They enjoyed the actions and the way the game responded to them. Character generation was fairly easy, and with some familiarity would be even easier and faster. In general, two of my three players enjoyed and would be happy to play again, at least on an occasional one-shot basis.
Negative: They all mentioned the experience mechanic as their least favorite part of the game. For a game that has the goal of being immersive and driven off of character actions, the experience mechanic seemed to artificially drive players to pursue some actions at the expense of ones that might have flowed more naturally from the roleplay or challenges.
I’ve since heard the creators are looking at revising the experience system to deal with the above concern. That’s great news as we all thought this was the biggest flaw in the game.
All in all, for me the XP was no deal-breaker—it would be easy to remove this mechanic from the game entirely with little damage to the structure of the Moves. My players were unanimous in preferring this if we played again.
Summary:
All in all, the ruleset does what it sets out to do in a fun and innovative way (well, innovative if we consider that it openly uses Apocalypse World as its direct, credited inspiration!) I had a blast running the game for the first time, and I know it will be even better as I learn the rules more.
Considering the hiccup with the XP mechanic, I give the current game as written a 4 out of 5 for substance.
For style, I give it a 3 out of 5 as the physical product is serviceable. While the sheets are good, they might stand a little improvement. Also, in places, the book could be a little clearer about the differences between this and other traditional RPGs, such as stating at the beginning that the GM will not roll dice! This seems to be easily addressed in future revisions.
All in all, we agreed that it would be a fun game to play again for a beer-n-pretzels session and I look forward to a more refined ruleset and some fun sessions of Dungeon World!
