Brock Savage wrote:
Dude, you run the Hyborian Age using Dungeon World? That sounds pretty cool. Dungeon World has made me a better DM and I incorporate many of its lessons into whatever game I am running.
I do! And yes, there are a great many lessons I will swipe from it, especially asking lots of questions, using the answers, keeping things moving, keeping the players in the narrative instead of the mechanics, using Dangers and Grim Portents to "plot" without having a plot (as in railroad). It has truly helped wean me off the PF/3.x rut I was in. After running a campaign in PF for a few years, I could see that choice paralysis was crippling the game. Even at 5th level. Dungeon World has shown me, through my players, that you don't need to have a million character options to have awesome adventures. I also needed to relearn how to describe scenes in and out of combat without relying on a battlemat--and I was going freakin' nuts designing battlemats. All that work and the players were more annoyed by it then awed.
That said, I already feel that the arbitrariness of Dungeon World starting to chafe a bit. We quickly had to abandon much of the collaborative world- and adventure-building because, go figure, the players want to explore and be surprised, to feel badass when they wreck your dungeon and feel smart if they figure out what you're up to--you know, play. They want enough control of the narrative to establish their characters in the world, but don't want to tell you what's behind door number 2... most of the time.
We're also getting tripped up by a few of the things DW just doesn't do or explain. Its one thing to say X is true because it makes sense "in the fiction," and to "have a conversation" about how stuff happens or plays out. In reality, I think players need to know there is some structure or else it all seems arbitrary and their agency suffers.
So, yeah, TLDR version. Pathfinder and Dungeon World on opposite sides of the scale, and I think joy is in the center, right about where early D&D lies. There's an inner snarkward middle-schooler in me saying "I knew it all along."
