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Attention! OD&D / AD&D fans, this one's for you

Grunker

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Most people here will know I am no fan of AD&D - in fact, I very much have an active dislike of the system.

However, when coupled with my love of rules-heavy systems such as Pathfinder, my distaste for AD&D often gets misinterpreted as a dislike for the style of roleplaying common back then - a style where the focus was on player inventiveness, interaction and group co-creation rather than everything being defined by a vast amount of gamified rules. To the degree that I do sympathise with OD&D fans' criticism of modern D&D (despite disagreeing vehemently with their defense of the actual AD&D system), it's that I agree that the success of 3rd edition kind of smashed most of the mainstream systems development for this older style of playing.

So it's not that I don't like playing these more player-driven, open-ended games, it's just that I never felt AD&D really facilitated that style of roleplaying very well. When AD&D worked it didn't feel much like it was the actual rules doing the heavy lifting - it was the players.

But recently I finally found a system that really pulls of the OD&D style of roleplaying excellently in my opinion:

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Dungeon World is quite brilliant. It bases everything from character customization to combat and exploration around a very simple set of basic rules that combine oldschool D&D tropes with some ingenious ways of facilitating player description of actions as being the driving force behind interactivity rather than just what you've written on your character sheet. Basically, a short list of "Basic Moves" covers pretty much the bulk of what might require a roll in the game, and Class Moves cover a short list of special things you can do. In Dungeon World, when you attempt something that needs a roll, 80% of the time you describe what you want to do and then figure out the relevant rule, rather than the rules determining your actions.

When you level up, you just bump one of the core six attribute by a single point and select a new move. This sounds excessively simple, but the moves are quite varied and really expand your character's options. I am playing a Barbarian and could, for example, select a move that allowed to me break free from any restraint (physical or mental), though with some caveats. Or, I could take an ability allowing me to sacrifice to the old gods for knowledge. Or an ability allowing me to shrug off a blow, but at the cost of a continious penalty to other actions.

While this may sound like your standard RPG fare (i.e., how is this special?), everything about my character is written on a 2-page character sheet, including every class move I could ever gain. In my current group (made up of GM, Fighter, Barbarian (me), Templar and Wizard), we have yet to have to look up anything in the actual book - everything we needed to accomplish exactly the same style of play that OD&D offered was written on our sheet or on the single A4 page we printed out that describe basic and special moves.

Here's my empty character sheet before I started writing on it, along with the moves pages - i.e. the entirety of the 4 pages I have needed to consult so far:

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Those 4 pages have lasted me over the course of three sessions now, and while I'm sure there's gonna be a point where I need to look something up, 4 pages over three sessions is quite remarkable. Especially considering the complexity of gameplay we've actually been experiencing.

Despite initial concern that these simple rules would hinder our experience in terms of this feeling like actually playing OD&D, Dungeon World hits the nail so heftily on its head that I'd say playing it is like experiencing what the creators of D&D - Gygax included - always intended the game to feel like. Everything here just works: exploration, combat, disarming traps, stealing, loot, communing with eldritch entities, getting lost in dungeons, and, well, role-playing, is tied to the same basic system, but leaning heavily on player creativity means you don't feel constrained or lacking options. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yet the game is still tied strongly enough to actual rules, roles and set abilities that you don't feel like you're just making everything up as you go along either.

If I had to voice any criticism, it's that the XP system is a bit weird and weapon tags and types are too vague.

At a price of just 10 bucks though, I really recommend it to anyone who like oldschool Dungeon Crawling. The one thing it won't give you though - fair warning - is a million splatbooks with items, prestige classes, tables for randomization of your campaign and so forth. It's as much a step in the "freeform" direction as 3.5 and 4th edition was a step in the "rules-heavy" direction, so if you need your magic weapon to come from a set treasure list upon defeating a Black Dragon, Dungeon World won't be for you.
 
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TigerKnee

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Did Grunker really just learn about Dungeon World recently?

Most of the additional material for DW seem to be new classes - and this is a game that really does lend itself to having very varied classes due to how its system works.
 

Grunker

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I knew about it for a long time, but only got a chance to play it recently and my expectations were met as well as exceeded!
 
Joined
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I am curious which tags you found vague, Grunker? I recall them being pretty definitive in DW.

DW is in itself a hack of Apocalypse World, which is an indie RPG by Vincent Baker for post-apocalyptic roleplaying. That game contains some of the best GM advice for running narrative-focused games, but knowledge with AW is not necessary to play DW. AW has been hacked many times since and the resulting games are broadly called World games.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that combat in DW has no turns but instead relies on narrative flow. This makes it very hard to GM, especially if you've only ever played D&D, but eventually things click and I don't see myself going back to D&D combat any time soon.

Two things are worth considering. One is that the system is best tailored to high fantasy, so if you are interested in other genres you can either hack the game to taste or perhaps look into another World game. Personally I ran a dark fantasy campaign inspired by Age of Decadence using DW (modified in places) with a fanmade expansion Grim World.

Another consideration is the bloating of player stats. In most World games character's abilities tend to diversify instead of improve, DW has some moves that make PCs a little bit ridiculous. Of course no one would expect or want perfect balance from games like these, but if you want to throw a monster at the party's paladin that will make them pause and think for a second instead of instantly evaporating, perhaps consider these house rules I found on /tg/:

OFFENSIVE MOVES
Moves that give you +xdx damage now give you a flat bonus equal to their maximum value divided by 2, rounded up. For example:

1d4=2
1d6=3
1d8=4

DEFENSIVE MOVES
Moves such as Bloody Aegis, Armor/Shield Mastery, and others that allow you to shrug off a hit like a fucking methfiend on PCP and Bath Salts only halve the damage, after armour.

So if you are hit for 9dmg and have 3 armour and pop a Bloody Aegis, you take:
(9-3)/2=3 damage

Personally I moved to World of Dungeons as my system of choice. It is an even more rules-light hack of Dungeon World found here. I think it is a superior base for homebrew systems as it lacks the design flaws found in DW, but if you want to play a premade game, you can't really go with any of the World games.
 

Grunker

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I am curious which tags you found vague, Grunker? I recall them being pretty definitive in DW.

To expand on this, it's more that some tags are very well-defined (like forceful - it allows me to knock people off their feet, turn over objects, stuff like that) but that others seem like flavour (messy, which beyond being gory needs a lot more player creativity to make actually useful). So it's more of a case where I wish they had expanded the list a bit and made at least one or two examples of practical application for each.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that combat in DW has no turns but instead relies on narrative flow. This makes it very hard to GM, especially if you've only ever played D&D, but eventually things click and I don't see myself going back to D&D combat any time soon.

Yep, we were skeptical at first but it works pretty well. In practice you often end up taking turns in most cases, but then break those up when it matters. I'd say this system is actually much easier to GM than most I've played because it outsources some of the work to the players.

Thanks for the house rule suggestions as well, it seems my intuition was right: one player made the comment that he liked DW because it couldn't be munched, and I was like "eh, picking up Merciless followed by Viper's Strike or a similar combination seems preeeeetty busted."

But then, those are so rare and so easy to houserule, if it ever becomes a problem we'll just do that. I'm not sure I agree that "take no damage" perks are necessarily a problem though. The Barbarian's can only be used once until you sate your appetite, which is self-balancing, and having your armor destroyed seems like a pretty OK penalty for the Fighter one?

Again, if it becomes a problem it is so very easy to edit.
 
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Joined
Nov 29, 2016
Messages
1,832
I am curious which tags you found vague, Grunker? I recall them being pretty definitive in DW.

To expand on this, it's more that some tags are very well-defined (like forceful - it allows me to knock people off their feed, turn over objects, stuff like that) but that others seem like flavour (messy, which beyond being gory needs a lot more player creativity to make actually useful). So it's more of a case where I wish they had expanded the list a bit and made at least one or two examples of practical application for each.

Yeah, the issue with tags is that some allow too much interpretation. Its good that they are more interesting than "deals +1 damage to undead" but at the same time I think consistency is very important. With messy, I interpret that every time this weapon is used in combat something needs to be ripped apart, be it a piece of equipment that the struck target is wearing or parts of their body. Barbarian's class moves basically turn you into Gatsu.

Nice thing about tags like forceful and messy is that you can tweak their effects depending on the narrative. Like if you are hitting some trashmob you want to die quickly, maybe these tags bisect them and send their bits flying, while a bandit might be knocked down and lose their arm, a knight knocked against the wall and their shield broken, an armoured boss rapespider might very well just be staggered for a few seconds and have a piece of its chitin dislodged to expose a weak spot.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that combat in DW has no turns but instead relies on narrative flow. This makes it very hard to GM, especially if you've only ever played D&D, but eventually things click and I don't see myself going back to D&D combat any time soon.

But then, those are so rare and so easy to houserule, if it ever becomes a problem we'll just do that. I'm not sure I agree that "take no damage" perks are necessarily a problem though. The Barbarian's can only be used once until you sate your appetite, which is self-balancing, and having your armor destroyed seems like a pretty OK penalty for the Fighter one?

Again, if it becomes a problem it is so very easy to edit.

Yeah, the nice thing about DW is that it gives you some ability to build mechanically interesting synergies while at the same time keeping things simple. Not sure about the Barbarian but the Fighter and especially the Paladin are pretty problematic. The latter has moves that will allow him to very quickly have the best melee damage output AND resistances, making Fighter kind of lame from a mechanical perspective (and also because his sole character revolves around his weapon, which is really boring - D&D 5e for example had a much more interesting fighter concept with superiority die representing different tactics and what not.) The reason why damage ignores are problematic is because the monsters in the game are pretty squishy, especially when considering the bestiary in the book where the monsters are rather underfed even when considering the game's own monster creation rules. Big monsters have lethal attacks and narrative power (this 16 HP dragon writeup is a frankly overused but helpful example of how to run combat in this game) but shit HP, so giving any player the ability to completely shrug off hits will pretty much reduce them to an inconvenience.

Speaking of, I forgot to mention a few more things!

1. Barbarian and Immolator were added after the game's release. Barbarian is fine in my experience, but Immolator is a widely regarded as being terribly designed. Personally I banned that class
2. Stay away from the 2ed character sheets for they are plagued by misprints. I even played in someone else's oneshot who had a 2ed book and it was missing a crucial part of one of the basic move. Just use the SRD: https://www.dungeonworldsrd.com/classes/
 
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