Dungeon World Revisted Review
Kevin, CJ, Troll, and Allegra sit down to review the final version of Dungeon World. Spoilers: We liked it, and we have OPINIONS on bonds.
Relevant Link
Crunchy Bits
- Intro by
- Outro music by
Podcast: |
Kevin, CJ, Troll, and Allegra sit down to review the final version of Dungeon World. Spoilers: We liked it, and we have OPINIONS on bonds.
Podcast: |
Nice review! I have a couple comments: 1) minor kinda nit-picky correction: Apocalypse World has FIVE stats (cool, hard, hot, sharp, weird) but Monsterhearts has 4 (cold, hot, dark, volatile). 2) you guys have a LOT more general “PBtA” game experience than I do, but when I ran AW briefly I thought Fronts were VERY useful, not just as “newbie” help. They were great for ensuring that I kept the setting dynamic and changing on its own and didn’t fall into the easy trap of allowing the PCs to be the only force in the world that actually changed things. 3) While they work differently, I got the idea that XP from Bonds was supposed to happen at a similar pace to XP from Hx in AW. I wouldn’t expect to see a PC roll an Hx over more than once every few sessions, and that’s about how often I imagined you’d usually see XP from Bonds. Again, I’ve never run OR played Dungeon World yet, so if if you actually found it a problem in actual play, then I guess it obviously can be a problem… I just never assumed Bonds were supposed to be a significant source of XP, but more of a guide for PC relationships.
Brian, I wonder if a slightly tweaked Hx system, where you change the events that cause the Hx to raise/lower to make it more adventuring party centric, would also be a good way to go.
Just got a chance to listen to this. I’ve run Dungeon World a couple times for my family (kids are 5 and 7, the 5 year old plays the most hammer crazy dwarf I’ve ever seen) and they are not really focusing on bonds that much. But I’m wondering, would it work to steal something from The Shadow of Yesterday, and use the key buyoff system? Something like: If you address a bond in a session, you get 1 xp. If you resolve the bond, you get an additional 2 xp, and get a new bond. Obviously you’d need to adjust the amount to not break the game, but it includes the benefit of having long-term bonds that you address constantly, while also giving an incentive to have the character change and resolve the bond.
Shawn, I really like the Keys from The Shadow of Yesterday, that might be a good way to go. Although, it might overlap with the Alignment XP, which is kinda similar.
After we recorded this, I talked to Adam and Sage at GenCon about Bonds. They basically said “Don’t worry about them, they’re icing. The majority of your XP should come from failed rolls and the 3 questions.”
So, that’s cool!
The more I run Dungeon World, the more I like it.
Remembering failure XP isn’t really a problem for my group, but that’s largely because we let it turn every failure at the table into a reason to celebrate. Whenever someone fails a roll, we’ve all gotten into the habit of raising our hands and crying out, “XP!!”
We are a very silly group.
(And it’s always awesome to see the light in a player’s eyes the first time they fail in DW and I say to them, “You fail. Congratulations!”)
Great review of the new version.
Here’s a link to a random Bonds generator:
http://takeonrules.com/2013/01/02/random-bonds-generator-for-dungeon-world/
That actually requires you to roll dice – excellent! This might help your players create good flavorful bonds with each other…
The question about how many bonds is answered quite nicely by Philip Burge on the DW Google+ site DW Tavern: