The very basics, in case you somehow don’t know
Vincent Baker made a game called Apocalypse World, which became pretty popular with some people. But not everybody wanted to play in the apocalyptic aftermath all the time, so the game started to generate spin-offs. Most of these are half-finished things, but Dungeon World is one of the ones that’s reached a more complete state. In their recent and very successful kickstarter campaign, the creators described it as “a game with modern rules and old-school style.”
So Dungeon World is a game with a lot of familiar D&D style trappings but game mechanics and a whole approach that owes a lot to the story-games movement. That right there might tell you everything you need to know, one way or another.
But if not…
I love DW, but I don’t think it’s perfect. So I want to be a little more personal than I normally would in a review because one thing RPGnet abundantly proves is that even in our little niche hobby, people have a wide range of tastes and preferences. So I’m going to try to show you what the game is, but also to be pretty blunt about my experience with the game and what makes it work for me, in hopes that this helps you figure out whether it will do the same for you—or not.
My background and experience with Dungeon World
I’ve been GMing, off and on, and less frequently playing, for over 30 years now. I’ve seen a wide range of games. In general, my taste runs more toward lighter rules systems. I don’t have the time or brain capacity for anything too complicated. And for the last few years, all of my gaming has been online, mostly through play-by-post here on RPGnet. I hope to get back to at least occasional face-to-face gaming someday soon.
So as both a player and a GM, I’ve had a lot of games die on me. Sometimes I’ve actively killed them. Sometimes I was glad they died. More than once I’ve wondered if I should give up on PBP games entirely.
And I’ve been in a few different DW games online. One I had to leave while it was still healthy. A couple died early on. I’m currently playing in one that seems to still be alive, but is going slow. But the one I’m running is still alive after 6 months. We had to close our first thread because it reached 1000 posts. One of the characters has made it to level 5. And I did a bunch of things wrong and will do them differently next time. But even as I’m thinking about the next game I’ll run with DW, I’m still excited about this one and still hoping it can keep going. I’m dreaming of getting all the characters up to levels 8-10 and having a final showdown with the big bad and finding out what happens.
I should admit that I wasn’t always a DW fan. I remember at around the same time looking at what was probably the first draft of Dungeon World and Old School Hack. I thought DW was uninspired and would go nowhere and that OSH, when more developed, would have a huge following. Boy, was I wrong.
When the DW Kickstarter began, I requested and got a free copy of the beta rules and saw how far they had come. I became a backer, later upped my support level, and am eagerly awaiting my softcover of the print rules (expected by the end of the month). So it’s important for me to acknowledge that I didn’t learn the game purely by reading the current rules: I read the beta rules, asked a bunch of questions and read a bunch of stuff on their forum and on RPGnet and Story-games, read and used the rules in games as they worked toward the release, read the full, finished rules, and read the popular guide to DW.
So I can’t really comment on how easy or hard it is to learn the game using nothing but the rules. My understanding evolved over time and was helped by those online resources.
Overview 1: stuff that’s probably familiar
A lot of the bits of Dungeon World will be familiar. The implied setting is the familiar D&D-esque fantasy world. Depending on your class, you can play a human, dwarf, elf, or halfling, and the class list looks familiar too: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, Thief, Wizard. (The Barbarian is currently being playtested but isn’t in the core rules. I assume it will be available for free, at least to people who buy the game.) You have six familiar attributes, which have a score starting between 8 and 16, and the score gives you a modifier like -1, +2, or whatever. You have hit points derived from your Constitution score and your class, and an armor rating based on your equipment. You’ll also recognize many of the monsters.
Character building is picking a class (only one player per class, at the start: when you decide to play a wizard, your character becomes The Wizard for the game, the archetype), and then mostly making choices from menus. Your appearance and even your name come from a list of choices. You assign an array of stats, maybe pick an option for one of your starting moves (the Ranger has a number of choices for the animal companion, for example), Cleric and Wizard pick starting spells, pick equipment from a menu of choices. You pick an alignment too. You’ll also assign bonds, which is covered below.
The basic division of responsibilities will also look pretty familiar: each player says what her character does; the GM handles everything else. But this is a little misleading, too.
Overview 2: the basic mechanic and the way things typically work
The essential concept of the game is the “move.” For the player, a move is a condition and a rule that tells you what to do in a specific situation. Many moves tell you to roll dice, but some don’t.
Here’s a move with no dice rolling: Make Camp When you settle in to rest consume a ration. If you’re somewhere dangerous decide the watch order as well. If you have enough XP you may level up. When you wake from at least a few uninterrupted hours of sleep heal damage equal to half your max HP.
Here’s a move with dice involved: Volley When you take aim and shoot at an enemy at range, roll+Dex. On a 10+, you have a clear shot—deal your damage. On a 7–9, choose one (whichever you choose you deal your damage): You have to move to get the shot placing you in danger as described by the GM You have to take what you can get: -1d6 damage You have to take several shots, reducing your ammo by one
These are moves that are available to all players. Your class playbook will also give you specific moves unique to your class. Only the Fighter has the “Bend Bars, Lift Gates” move, and only the Ranger can Track. (If you want to try something you don’t have a move for, then it’s basically just up to the GM to call it—and it’s almost sure to go worse for you than if you had the move.)
When a move calls for a roll, like Volley, it says “roll+(something).” Usually that (something) is the modifier from one of your stats, but occasionally it’s something else. You roll 2d6 and add the modifier. Your result is always interpreted this way: 6- is a miss; 7-9 is a partial success or a success with complications; 10+ is a full success.
Only the players roll the dice, and they always roll 2d6 for moves. (Damage is rolled using everything from d4 to d12.)
The game makes it explicit (and reinforces in several ways) that the fictional reality always comes first, before any mechanics. So to do any move, you first have to describe the narrative action that triggers it, and often what move is involved will vary depending on the fiction.
So the basic way it works is fairly familiar: GM describes situation, says “what do you do?” Player describes PC action, eventually triggering a move Player rolls 2d6+something: result may leave player with choices or leave GM to interpret
Overview 3: stuff that may be less familiar
As written in the rules, and certainly as talked about on the web, DW gives the players a lot more say in world-creation than the traditional “GM makes the world.” Many DW GMs go into a new game with little or nothing prepared and build the first adventure and the world largely off of what the players come up with. A normal and explicit part of DW is for the GM to ask questions and use the answers.
So when you make a Fighter and describe your signature weapon, the GM might ask about its history. And because you say it was forged by the Dwarves of the Deep Mountains to help in the war against the dragons, boom, all those things exist and may well become involved in the game.
For some of you, that’s nothing new, and that’s why I said “may be less familiar” up above. See, there’s a lot of stuff in DW that isn’t completely new, but that is new and even radical to some people. To me, it wasn’t so much shocking as a useful articulation and clarification of important stuff. To other people, it’s completely obvious.
The one part of character creation that’s most new is assigning bonds. A bond is a short statement that indicates your relationship with one of the other characters, like “______ has my back when things go wrong.” This means that the game immediately starts with the PCs connected to each other in interesting ways. And some of the starting bonds are really evocative. Others, not so much. But it’s easy to sub in your own bonds. Bonds are used mechanically when you try to aid or hinder what someone else does. They’re also involved in leveling-up: at the end of a session, you can “resolve” one bond that doesn’t apply any more, replace it, and get 1 XP.
And XP gaining is a little different than you might expect. Your class/alignment combo gives you one thing you can do to earn XP, like “Leap into danger without a plan” or “Endanger yourself to protect someone weaker than you.” And at the end of the session, the group answers three questions by consensus, with each “yes” answer meaning an XP. The questions are
Did we learn something new and important about the world? Did we overcome a notable monster or enemy? Did we loot a memorable treasure?
But the main way you get XP, at least at first, is by missing rolls. When you roll a miss on anything, you gain 1 XP. This makes it much more desirable to roll your lower stats and does a lot to take the sting out of the failure.
When you get your level+7 XP, you can level up. This involves gaining 1 point in an attribute and one new move from your class’s playbook. (Several classes have a ‘multi-class’ option as well.)
The biggest differences (again, for some people) will be in the GM’s side of things. The rules do a very good job of spelling out how the GM works, but some of it is hard for some people to get because it rejects some common assumptions from other RPGs. I won’t explain it all, but I’ll try to give you the feel of it.
The game explicitly tells the GM what to try to accomplish through the “GM’s agenda” and what to always do through the “GM’s principles.” This is the kind of stuff that will bring a wide range of response, from “how obvious” to “how revelatory,” depending on what you’ve already discovered or decided about what the GM should be up to. But, for example, the third part of the GM agenda is “play to find out what happens,” which explicitly forbids planning out a storyline in advance. The principles list things like “Draw maps, leave blanks,” “Name every person,” and “Be a fan of the characters.”
The GM also has a list of moves, but they work differently than the player moves. First, the GM only makes moves in response to things the players do. Basically, you make a GM move whenever “everybody looks at you to see what happens.” The moves are things like “separate them” or “show signs of an approaching threat” or “deal damage.” For some people, that idea of a list of things you can do for the GM may be very new. But experienced GMs won’t find a lot there that’s surprising. Personally, I don’t think that’s the point.
Finally I get to why I liked it and how it plays
I don’t think the list of GM moves is intended to be shocking to experienced GMs, though I would certainly think it would help new GMs a lot. But I found it has really helped me. If I feel stuck, or if I’m at all unsure about whether a certain outcome is too much, I call up that list of GM moves.
‘Cause sometimes it gets confusing. A player does something really surprising, and you say, “OK, sounds like you’re Defying Danger with your INT,” and they get a 7 result, which means they succeeded but there’s some complication. But what? Looking over the GM moves list helps me then, because otherwise I might forget that I could “reveal an unwelcome truth” or “use up their resources.” And because the principles remind me to “start and end with the fiction” and “never speak the name of their move,” the players don’t see it as “reveal an unwelcome truth,” they see it as “What do you mean they already have a treaty with the necromancer?!?”
Part of why it has worked well is just that it fits pretty well with PBP and with how I want to run a game. Because there are no combat rounds and no initiative, there’s no waiting for player X to post: you can focus the action on whoever’s active at the moment. Because it’s “fiction first,” we don’t usually get bogged down in the mechanics (though we have sometimes had to clarify things or solve rules questions). Because the players do all the rolling and have access to all their moves, they usually can do a post that’s pretty complete: they don’t have to wait for me as GM to make an opposed roll or set a difficulty or anything.
And because of the basic way the mechanics work, I get to spend most of my energy thinking up interesting dilemmas and complications and then watching to see what happens.
Many little things that just work well have also made the game fun. Each class has its own ways to be cool and its own weaknesses. It’s interesting to see what the Druid will shapeshift into, what songs the Bard will sing, what crazy ritual the Wizard has dreamed up this time. The rules for making monsters have worked fine every time I’ve needed to create stats for a new monster, and while I don’t think the rules for “fronts” are quite perfect, they’ve been very helpful for me as I try to create a dynamic, fantastic, and adventurous world in which bad things will happen if the PCs don’t do something about it, without ever tempting me to write out a storyline in advance.
And the combination of “fiction first” and the flexible and broad-ranging mechanics means it’s easy for me to find a way to resolve anything. Plus, I like that the “official” answer for how anything goes from the designers is almost always “it depends.” Your attack on the goblin might be auto-kill (if it is totally defenseless), roll your damage (if it can’t really defend against your attack), roll Hack and Slash, or roll Defy Danger and then you can attack it, depending on the fictional situation. That works well for me as a GM.
Finally, I have to mention that the section of rules describing the basic moves of the game is awesome because it includes multiple examples of each move, including examples of common or easy-to-make mistakes. I know they borrowed this approach from Apocalypse World, but it’s still praiseworthy, and more games should imitate it.
Of course, a few things bug me
No game is perfect. True, many of the things that I object to with this game are easily adjusted, and to their credit, the designers provide a chapter with guidelines for how to tweak, hack, or overhaul the game. But I’ll point out a few things.
I’m still not crazy about having a separate score and modifier. I know that it’s partly homage to D&D, and the game occasionally makes use of the score and not the modifier (HP are derived from your Constitution score, and in some cases your Charisma score is subtracted from the cost of things). But those rare exceptions, to me, aren’t enough to justify making six extra numbers that don’t need to be there. Apocalypse World works just fine having only the modifiers, and DW should have followed suit. There, I’ve said it.
Some of the starting bonds, especially for the Wizard, don’t do much for me. This is a pretty small complaint since it’s easy to write your own.
I think, though I have yet to get the groundswell of support that I expected, that the formula for how many spells the Wizard and Cleric can prepare is too stingy, particularly at higher levels. The stated formula is (your level+1) spell levels prepared. In effect, this means when you reach level 5 and have access to that shiny new level 5 spell, you can prepare it…and one level 1 spell. To me, that’s unduly limiting on the character, and doesn’t fit very well with the D&D flavor. I expect you all to join with me in demanding a better official formula! (If you don’t, I will still claim that you are supporting me via PM.)
I love the Druid as a class, and I love the Shapeshifting move, but I wish they had provided some additional examples and discussion in the rules about handling this and other specialized moves. This is a fairly small issue, however, because this need is admirably met by the designers and fans who actively post on various forums and in the Google+ “Dungeon World Tavern” group.
I’m very glad the rules on creating and using “fronts” (basically, threats to the world) are included, and they’ve helped me. That said, I think the “fronts” chapter could have used one more thorough revision to make clearer what all these different things (adventure fronts, campaign fronts, dangers, grim portents, dire outcomes) are and how they fit together. The first step of “making a front” is to “choose campaign or adventure front,” but their example doesn’t include this step. I just think the whole fronts thing could be clearer, but that’s a rare problem, and it’s certainly still very useful.
The monster write-ups often depend on the reader already being familiar with the monsters in question. A lot of the description text is really more flavor text. Given that there are no monster pictures, I wish they’d included at least a brief description of what each thing looks like along with the flavor.
The art in the book is a mixed bag, ranging from quite good to cartoony-yet-okay. I know that some of the artists they’d originally planned to work with didn’t fulfill their commitment, and I don’t really expect great things from the art in this kind of small-press game, but I felt I had to mention it. If great art is really a crucial element of a game for you, I don’t think you’ll find it here. Overall, the art is competent to solid. It certainly manages to capture the appropriate flavor, and a couple of the pieces I rather like.
There’s more, believe me
This has turned out longer than I expected, and I can’t believe that I still haven’t talked about the cool roll you make when you run out of HP or the rules for making towns and villages and keeps or the strong extended example of play. So I don’t want you to have the impression that this is an exhaustive review.
I hope it’s enough of a review to let you get a sense of what the game is and isn’t, of why I’ve enjoyed it as a GM and a player and why you might, too, or might not. If you think you might like it from what you’ve seen here, the PDF is just $10, and you can learn much more here or in other forums around the web.
I’m giving the game a top score on substance because it’s rich and works really well in the way it’s intended to work. It’s not for everybody, but if you can buy in to its assumptions and values, you’ll love how it plays.
I’m giving a high score for style because the text is clear, readable, and often entertaining, and the layout is sharp and the art good for a small press.
