Into the Dungeon World (Patreon)

Last weekend, I attended BFGCon, a small gaming convention in Frederick, Maryland. A friend turned me on to the con and so we spent a weekend hanging out, talking about games, playing some games, and more. As a bonus, I was more unplugged from the Screaming Abyss of social media.

One of my best takeaways from the weekend was the experience I had playing Dungeon World. I backed the Dungeon World Kickstarter way back when, then got the book, paged through, and put it away for years.

When I started paying attention to RPGs again in a bigger way, one of the creators I started following was Adam Koebel, co-creator of Dungeon World (along with Sage LaTorra). I watched games of Apocalypse World (which is the originator game in the specific design tradition of which Dungeon World is a part), and more. I'd become more and more curious about Dungeon World, and this weekend I finally got to play the game.

Dungeon World brings the 2d6, trinary result state resolution system to Old-School Renaissance-style D&D. The game design is meant to evoke the style of play from 2nd Ed and earlier (really 1st ed and earlier) D&D, but to do so with more story-focused systems.

The biggest one of those systems is the resolution mechanic. Using 2d6 instead of a d20 means you have a bell curve of results that tend to more frequently produce a 7-9. And in Dungeon World, a 7-9 is a Mixed Success or Success With a Cost/Consequence.

The Mixed Result looks like this: "You hit the enemy with your magic missile, but the magical energies in this canyon are mercurial. You have to push yourself to complete the spell, and so you expend that spell and don't have it anymore until you memorize spells again." 

or this: "You run through the room as the cave collapses around you, but you take 1d6 damage on the way as boulders pelt your back."

or this: "You realize that if you want to pick this lock, it's going to break your tools. You can open the chest, but then your set of thieves tools will be incomplete and you'll need to replace them."

I Really Like This System. It's constantly letting players and the DM raise the stakes in the scene. Success With a Cost is almost more interesting than just normal success, and it's definitely more interesting than the "nothing happens" of failure.

Because even failure is different in Dungeon World. A failure might not be as simple as "You miss" like it would be in most versions of D&D. It might look like "Your arrow flies true, but the orc chieftain's hide armor gleams with fire, and your arrow burns to cinders before it impacts. The chieftain raises a horn made from dragon claws and summons reinforcements. You're surrounded, and a volley of orcish arrows rains down on the group. Everyone takes 1d6 damage."

The game conveys the flavor of a certain type of D&D, but it doesn't have to be *only* that flavor. I'd been thinking that Dungeon World was maybe more limited in what it could do, but I think that while it is *specifically* designed for a certain range of play style, it is probably a lot more flexible than I thought, and that with some experience and some effort, I could use Dungeon World to tell heroic fantasy stories more the way I want to tell them, where the system wouldn't serve as a constraint in some of the ways I find standard D&D to be frustrating (the strong focus on tactical combat with a million mechanical options, unsatisfying resolution mechanics, etc.)

So now I'm excited to look through Dungeon World again and imagine those possibilities. I'm not sure whether I'll be using Dungeon World for Speculate, for games with local friends, or something else, but that session let me realize that I'd been selling the game short and need to re-consider.

If you're interested in Dungeon World, here are a couple of useful resources:

The Dungeon World Guide by Eon Fontes-May and Sean Dunstan

Dragonslaying on a Timetable: How To Run A Tight 4-Hour Dungeon World One-Shot by John Aegard