I started this treatise as a means of dumping my exorbitant prep on the web. My gambit would be to finish a campaign and then package the lot so I could wax lyrical on its lessons. Perhaps if the DM's Guild had existed when I'd started I would have made more professional efforts.
However, the great enemy of all tabletop roleplaying defeated many of my campaigns: Scheduling. Keeping one day free a week takes it's toll. Lives change and suddenly Thursday is not so good for Korok the Barbarian anymore.
I'm currently producing more piecemeal prep as Dungeon World requires. I run sandbox campaigns and take it one episode at a time. I'm also twiddling with tools for use at the table - this is what happens when you watch people struggle to play D&D from the hardback tomes. So it seems I will never return and complete those ivory towers I created, but I may as well show you folks around the corpses that Lord Schedule slew. The files are all in Markdown format, you can use something like Dillinger, Mou or MarkdownPad to edit and print their contents. I'd convert them to PDF but it's a hassle to sort out the page breaks. I also apologise for the lack of maps, I drew them on the fly and still do.
Basically Rifts. I'd had fun with portals in one campaign and concocted this odd bounty hunter outfit that was in need of murder hobos to go on missions. A fist full of one-shots. The idea was that it would be inclusive, anyone could join in and we could also visit their world. We never did visit anyone's world. These missions are quite railroady.
Sort of sandbox. I dropped the players off at Fireshear at the top of the map, then gave them a mission to escort someone to the bottom of the map. I chose to prep all the stuff that could occur in the area and tried to wing the rest of it. Which I was ill prepared to do at the time. I hadn't the random tables to hand that I rely on now and I didn't ask enough questions. Yet these little treks across classic D&D territory were quite fun and it was interesting using the Sword Coast as a bible - if exhausting to research.
Discovering mole society, terrorist plots, epic battles, and flight! I like epic campaigns. I especially enjoyed researching flora and fauna to have an impact on missions. I think the terrorist plot got away from me a bit, I wanted something to slow the story down but I kept using the same beat instead of spending time with local politics. A lot of this campaign's drama could be scaled down to simpler motives of individuals and feel a lot more like Mouse Guard instead of D&D.
Were I to have the fortune to run Mouse Guard again, I would run it more in a sandbox style. My lists of bullet points were valuable, but often I let my prep get the better of me instead of letting the players tell the story.
So it goes.
Wasted potential? Not quite. My agenda with prep has changed but throughout I still believed in the name of this blog. Bullets, ammunition. All these shots were fired, my aim has improved.
So in this post, I didn't get it. I didn't understand why I couldn't win in Dungeon World, or how one should ideally manage the table.
It wasn't until trying some othergames that I thought about the dice in terms of telling a story instead of winning. I wanted to run some open table games again and Dungeon World sounded like less hassle than D&D's mountainous paper work. Perhaps I should give it another chance. I would read the rules a little more carefully this time.
One of Dungeon World's principles is be a fan of the characters. What it should say before this, (especially for those coming from D&D) is be a fan of the rules.
Dungeons and Dragons does not currently ask you to be a fan of the rules. Change it up, find the way you want to have fun with it. Pedants may take their questions to Jeremy Crawford, but you are assumed to run a game like Chris Perkins. This is fine. D&D is a deep chest filled with treasure from many kings, take what you can carry.
Dungeon World, somewhat counterintuitively, requires you to pick the whole chest up. Which is weird because actual play is so much more flexible than what D&D is capable of. Players can create rich personalities and histories and there's less reason for the Games Master to turn away their demands. When I first looked at it, I did what any other person would do seeing STR, DEX, ETC, and thought, "oh, like a simple Dungeons and Dragons. That means I can carry less."
Not so. Knowing every move in Dungeon World is essential. It's not just a series of tools, it's a description of all the angles of play. In D&D combat we have a plethora of actions we can apply to a situation, many optional. However, ignoring a basic move in Dungeon World is ignoring a part of a player's character sheet. Just look at the Defend move - never before has dumping points in Constitution added so much to the narrative.
The player bonds are especially understated. These provide points of discontent between characters in the game, describing how much they watch and influence each other's lives. The Aid or Interfere move that uses bonds provides a necessary medium for player versus player conflict. It allows players to get into each other's business and the GM is provided with the right tool to moderate it. You get to explore drama safely.
It took building my own SRD and generator to get the whole picture. I'm painting a somewhat dogmatic picture at this point but when you have mastery of any well designed system it plays out like Bruce Lee recommends below. Your worries are aside and you are free to concentrate on the story without friction from the rules.
The past year has been a long return to roleplaying for me after a decade's break. I can thank mostly D&D despite its pseudo board game-ness being very different to the way I used to play roleplaying games: A freeform, collaborative story. It took re-examining a game I'd dismissed to return to that place I'd left. Paradoxically, the flexibility I sought was not within quantity but quality.
If you try Dungeon World, or even any game, try being a fan of the rules. It can make a big difference to your enjoyment of it.
I've a fair bit to say on this. So I'll be covering the system, and also the 2nd Edition boxed set - of which I have a different opinion. The System:
After a year of playing D&D I reached a point where I wondered if there was another way. It reminded me of when I became disenchanted with martial arts classes. Not because of the arts themselves, but because of the people who usually practised them. Every situation was seen only through one lens; rose tinted by a fine spray of someone else's blood.
Over Christmas the DM of a game I play in suggested I have an enemy brother. I speculated on what I could bring to meeting with this character. All I could think of was perhaps to teleport away after stating my disgust with them and cast a thunder spell to slam the door behind me. Afterwards I would wonder if it was wise to burn my combat resources simply to tell a story. My tools for roleplaying D&D are increasingly nothing but hammers and I'm saddened each time the DM apologises for not giving us enough nails.
I dabbled in Dungeon World but wasn't won over. The One Ring I really enjoyed, but still had enough issues with it to keep looking. I was told of Tavern Tales, but it's not finished, the reviews of it make no mention of actually playing it, and rolling 3D20 a pop for every action strikes me as a little silly. One last recommendation for a rules light game with a focus on story remained...
The Burning Wheel I'm told is an insanely crunchy roleplaying game by Luke Crane. Its rules apparently generate a deep amount of story, but it is not for the faint of heart. Mouse Guard then is Burning Wheel's little brother. It pitches itself in its text at a young reader in much the same way my dad used to lecture me about anything: with total fucking disregard of what a child is able to parse in one sitting. I sat reading the rules, thinking at first this would be simple to explain, and then every few pages or so a new wrinkle would present itself. By the end of the rulebook I felt like I was looking at the bag my own testicles sit in. This is not a beginner's game. My prep for the first adventure (and I seriously insist you prep your own adventure for your first game of this to get up to speed) was replete with notes on rules to introduce as we played. It is nothing like introducing someone to D&D - which simply consists of getting the player to roll The Roundest Die and pointing out some options for them. When one fully understands the rules for Mouse Guard there are at least eight separate steps to any skill test. Not all are relevant at any time, but you need to know all of them to run this game.
One of those steps makes this game excellent. It makes the hassle worth it.
Mouse Guard's skill tests use D6 dice pools. You roll 4+ on each die for a "success". You will need at least 3 successes for a good result. Let's say you are tracking a snake and you have measly rating of 3 dice for your Hunter skill (this is entirely normal for a starting character). You're going to need more. Other players can each give a single die to help - but they must deliver exposition about that help. What would be a single cast of a D20 in D&D before listening to the DM's rhetoric is now a debate. Everyone at the table is talking about how you are tracking this snake. How one mouse is using their Loremouse skill to describe the behaviour of snakes. How another is using their Pathfinder skill to tell the group about how far from the road they need to go to follow it. These rules exist in some minor way in other RPGs, but never with the same urgency. I know for a fact that the next time I play D&D I'm going to invoke the help rule for a skill test, and the DM is likely going to shut me down because they've never seen someone do that before.
There is of course a downside to this. You're going to need a tray to roll into. It also has a lot of book-keeping, with each roll generating an advancement pip on your character sheet. You actively level up skills as you play. I'm not sure whether this is infuriating or brilliant. The players seemed to enjoy it when it paid off though. Things get a step more tricky with the Conflict system - however, I really like the Conflict system.
It's a strange little card game to resolve combat or an abstraction of any large scale "disagreement". A sort of rock, paper, scissors affair where you define hit points for each party's goals and then have at it with skill tests to chip away at them. My favourite example to propose for Mouse Guard's conflict system is a cake baking competition. Yes, the goal can actually be to bake some really good cakes. No one has to die today - but if these cakes don't rise there will be hell to pay. I look back at D&D and I think, there's no way I could attempt a similar thing. What use is Colossus Slayer and Hunter's Mark when you're whipping a buttercream filling?
Like The One Ring RPG, Mouse Guard also has structured uptime and downtime. It breaks up into a GM turn and a Player turn. The first being the traditional gauntlet we all know and the next being downtime for the players to heal and bolster themselves. The players get more opportunities for character development by sabotaging their own rolls during the GM turn. This is a sort of inverse version of the help rule driven by your character's flaws. The two phases strike me as very appropriate in this game. Mice (if you've ever been unfortunate enough to know them as vermin) dash between hiding holes. Structured downtime makes perfect sense for their nature. It's also nice to never have to field questions about when players get to do some shopping.
So yes, disappointingly crunchy rules for what at first seems to be a kid's game. But you can lower the entry point if you're a savvy GM like me. Then work your way up to a rich, story led experience that never gets bogged down with bouts of Numberwang. If you're brave and you want more than bludgeonalia from your system, it's worth it.
If you want some extra help indoctrinating players, you can use this free character creation app I wrote. It's a web page that takes you swiftly through the multiple choice quiz at the end of the rule book and calculates your stats. It will even suffice for creating your own NPCs.
The Boxed Set:
When you hold it in your hands you think, "this is smaller than I was expecting." A comment repeated by my players when I showed it off to them. I ran my first game using the pdf from RPG Drive Thru - invaluable for the ability to Control+F for clarifications. I made my own conflict cards and supplied a hearty quantity of D6.
Luke's unboxing video shows everything you get for your dearly departed dollars:
Let's go through the value of each item as you unpack the layers:
4 player card packs: These are great. There's two packs too many to run a game, but spare parts are always welcome. In each pack are cards for the conflict system, cards describing the bonuses for weapons (rules I left out from our first game, but now much easier to include with these cards) and cards describing conditions - another feature I like about the game (you accrue crippling states instead of losing meaningless hit points). Top marks for these. Only marred by the prohibitive shrink wrap that led to me damaging some of the cards when trying to free them with a butter knife.
20 custom dice: Bean counting is a problem with most dice pool games. Slowed down by having to read each value - not here though as the pictograms are super easy to read. These replace my oodles of D6 for regular play.
GM Screen: *Sigh*. I've yet to see a GM screen with enough relevant information on it for any RPG I've played. Mostly what one needs to know in Mouse Guard are the many steps involved for a skill test. This thing mostly lists weapons rules (covered by the player cards) and factors for skill tests that assumes an absence of basic common sense. It's also made from fairly flimsy card. It will cover your notes, but I've never needed to hide a roll from my players in this system and my notes are on an iPad facing away from the group. Some useful info here and there on it, but it's going to stay in the box.
Update: Okay, I was a bit unfair - the factors for a Test are actually really useful for keeping the game fair. Mouse Guard brings out the munchkin in you because it wants you to do dramatic things to get those extra points. When you do factors off the top of your head you can lose control of the game - I actually keep the GM screen with my play-kit now. It has a lot of useful information for someone who's now read the rules a few times, but no I don't use it as a "screen".
Character Sheets: These are double sided. So you can constantly flip them over during play and lean on them to smudge whatever you've written on either side. There's even a bit for drawing your mouse on that you can ruin this way. I spent seven years in art school and I'm surprised David Petersen (the artist who wrote the Mouse Guard comics) sat idle whilst this went to press. In the box they stay. I recommend printing out the single sided pdf version that's available instead.
GM Sheets: These are really useful. Nice little headings to allow me to jot down all the roleplaying factors for each player. More double sided lunacy but the reverse has little space to write anything precious, mostly being packed with rules reminders. I wish they'd taken the same approach with the character sheets.
Paperback Rulebook: The organisation of the rulebook is fairly sound. Like I mentioned above, it does suffer from minutiae popping up here and there when you read it thoroughly. Something you can deal with by owning the pdf and a reader with a search function. Paperback is never the best, but it has a nice box to stay in and will certainly help during a power cut. It will probably impress those people I meet who praise text on paper and clearly don't read as many books on public transport as I do.
New Rules, New Missions: Some extra rules describing how to acquire a mount (the mice ride hares in the 2nd graphic novel), other weapons and some more example missions and pregenerated characters. A pleasant addition to the core rulebook.
Map of the Territories: Definitely useful. Any mission starting in Lockhaven (Mouse Guard central) will need to refer to this to give the players an overview of their travel plans as well as a look at what a campaign holds in store. Yet again - I have this on iPad so in the box it stays, but a must for anyone operating a campaign without digital aids.
In summary, the dice and the cards are worth the full price alone. They make play so much easier for all involved. Your mileage may vary on the rest, but I'm quite happy with it despite some of my grievances. Definitely worth getting if you plan on running a full campaign of Mouse Guard.
Until the very end, Boromir was wrong about many things. Ironically, in regard to The One Ring roleplaying game, he was right. You're only given the option to walk into Mirkwood. At least that's what the core books give you.
It's certainly not like Middle Earth Roleplaying. It's far simpler to play and definitely feels more Tolkien. I played a bit of MERP when I was far younger and obviously liked the setting so much that I bought many of the source books. In fact I highly recommend the MERP source books - they were an amazing alternative to reading the Silmarillion. Like many of the games I played at the time, the system applied rules liberally. I didn't play its progenitor, Rolemaster, and having heard it's even more chock full of tables I doubt I ever will. A friend I visited recently grumbled that he was quite fond of Rolemaster but unfortunately his GM didn't want to play it anymore. I wonder why...
The lack of magic is glaring. Another player at the table (the DM for our Tuesdays D&D game) had clearly done his homework and knew of some kind of dwarf cantrip. But that was about the scope of it. No pew-pewing through battles. I'd almost say no tactical positioning, but this is actually what stands in place of initiative rolls. Punks at the back, hoods on the right, etc. And there you have your order. This is quite nice really.
The meat of the system is rolling a D12 (with an auto-win Gandalf rune on 12 and an auto-fail Sauron rune on 11 - although this logic is flipped when the baddies roll). You can add to this the scores of some extra D6 that you draw from whatever stat is called upon by the GM (providing you have pips in that stat). You're aiming for a 12-14 result with extra flavour added by the runes on the D12 and by rolling a 6 on the D6s. There's a lot on my character sheet I don't follow. Lots of isolated phrases or words that imply some ability or knowledge I have. It's a concern, but not one that's bothering me because it looks like fluff as opposed to Vancian invocations. I played an axe swinging Beorning with aplomb and let the GM worry about the fiddly particulars.
It has a roll-boosting mechanic called Hope Points. It also has Shadow Points, gained by rolling Saurons or perhaps GM fiat. It gives the game a Call of the Cthulhu feel that's totally appropriate to the creeping madness that claims many of the characters in the Lord of the Rings novels. These I both enjoyed.
I didn't enjoy the experience system. Oh dear. Will anyone ever get experience points right? One gains advancement in certain categories of skills by rolling well. Can you see the problem here? You watch your lucky fellows shoot ahead of you in advancement whilst wondering why you toil at similar tasks to no advantage. Not learning from your mistakes is poetic I'm sure, but not fun. There were some extra experience points elsewhere as well. I suppose to make up for this Who Rolls Wins bullshit.
I've sat through three games, little the wiser about how one would dare to run a campaign of it. But it was nice. It's a relaxing game to play. I recommend playing a game of it if you fancy a step down from the crunch of D&D.
I like how simple the rules are in Dungeon World. D&D aims to have shallow waters which then drop you into the freezing depths of 100ft or more after a few paces. It's a solid aim for a system that wants to be played and scrutinised for a very long time. But it's also an arduous journey if you want to DM it without reaching for the books. It actively fights you trying to master it. Sage Advice is proof enough that whilst D&D 5th Edition has a solid foundation, most people have little idea of what they're standing on.
Dungeon World on the other hand is hilariously simple. It still has a little bit of fiddliness by keeping 1-18 stats for Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Etc. Something familiar for D&D players like me. And then the rest is mostly feats your character can do. In Dungeon World they're called Moves. A Move is the basic currency of action you can do. Like combat, searching, casting spells and chatting up the NPCs. With the downloadable character sheets and a basic grasp of the rules you can experience making a character for a table top roleplaying game in literally five minutes. This is as glorious as it sounds.
I was skeptical about the collaborative storytelling element in DW, I thought it would just devolve into silliness. It turns out I was right to doubt it but for the wrong reasons. Dungeon World lets the players prep for the DM - they can be asked questions about their world and can create a backdrop and links between their characters. It's a change from most roleplaying games as there's a bond with everyone at the table (there's even a Bonds mechanic in the game - just in case the point hasn't driven home yet). It's also incredibly slow, it sets a precedent for discussing the Why over the What for the conversations that follow. Introspection and action are not great bedfellows. But it does create investment, so whilst I'm not a fan of the pace of it I think it's a positive thing to have in a game.
What I wasn't expecting to bounce off was the Apocalypse World System. It puts the onus on the players dice to resolve both sides of a conflict. You make a move: Roll 2D6, add your meagre modifiers and consider the results below.
1-6 You fail. In combat the enemy has struck you, and in other endeavours something else goes wrong.
7-9 Partial success. You hit, but you get hit back. Each move has its penalties for failure and so you accrue one of those as well as performing the task.
10+ Success. Everything is good and well in the world. In combat you can ask for extra damage as well in trade for getting hit back.
All the dice are in the player's hands. It keeps the DM free to simply bind it all together - and why not? They're usually doing the most work.
It wasn't until I'd burnt through all of my spells (opting to forget them till I could pray again for my partial successes) that I realised I was scared of making a Move. Dungeon World has a cute system of awarding you an experience point when you roll 1-6. It's supposed to soften the blow, but what it actually does it make the blow hit harder. If you fail a roll in D&D, sometimes it's bad, sometimes nothing happens. But in DW, bothering to act can be more trouble than it's worth. I'm reminded of the angry father in David O'Reilly's External World, resorting to escalating means of punishment when his son screws up playing the piano.
I explained this Action Paralysis to a colleague who DMs Dungeon World and he suggested our DM was treating it like Call of the Cthulhu, that the manual recommends the DM be a fan of the players and want them to prosper. But I don't see this reflected in the mechanics. What we have is this marvellously simple system that unfortunately operates like a minefield.
I don't think Dungeon World is bad, I think it's pretty good all in all. I simply don't think it's Great. Which is what I was hoping for. A simple alternative to D&D that wouldn't require so much work to run. Instead, it's got this Hard Mode built into its fabric that requires people bring something to the table. The DM has to prod people to make sure they move (there is no initiative order so you can effectively hide from consequences by being quiet). And players have to have balls of steel to engage. You need neither of those in D&D - the mechanics of it nudge people into having turns and let you evade a lot of unnecessary danger.
It's a good game, but good in a Super Hexagon kind of way (disclaimer: I don't actually like playing Super Hexagon, but I get that lots of people like it because it's hard, analogies eh? I liked VVVVVV, but it's less of a common currency title).
I look forward to playing Dungeon World again. Next time with the mindset that I'm entering a tough as nails indie game as opposed to a AAA monster that leaves no player or DM behind.
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Um. My second game didn't go particularly well. I haven't spoken to people from that group since...
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However, half a year later I learned what was really going on with the Powered by the Apocalypse "drama engine" and how it could make my life a lot easier. Take my hand.
It's an episodic crawl through a mega-dungeon. It even has two preceding episodes from one shots that gave me the basis for the campaign. Each week I would write a new episode, trying to break up the format I used the previous week. Then the next week I would go, "fuck it - let's just do this as a dungeon", and it would go down better than the experimental stuff.
Although the experimental episodes let me bridge some very interesting settings. When you give the players an astral starship and send them off into the void - anything you want can happen.
I'm very sorry for the lack of maps. Truth is, I sketch out a sensible bounding box for battles and just roleplay through the corridors. PHB:p182 describes marching order so you can get through skirmishes a lot quicker. For episode 7 there is a flow chart (there's portals involved - you'll need the diagram). And um, for XP I just gave out 300 every week. The sporadic attendance of many meant that shooting up through levels would leave a lot of part-timers behind. I just stalled on XP and bumped people halfway through the campaign to 4, leaving good old 5 for the grand finale. Oh, and I didn't get round to putting the Monster Manual pages in. Sorry. I did write a list of all spells in the PHB that require costly components though. I even put the materials and prices on.
I use Ideament to sketch out dungeon diagrams before writing them up in Editorial - this means my scenes play out more like a choose your own adventure novel than a hex crawl. It's a campaign designed around each episode taking exactly a session to play - which I needed because I always had new players at the table every week.
Now I'm off to try something different. A new day of the week to run the game and a new setting. A black market portal plane through which the players are drawn together as bounty hunters. Less of a continual story, more of a continual setting. Plus a ubiquitous magic item that will help shore up those weeks where only fighters turn up to play. If it isn't a disaster I'll post the material.
Next time I should post some adventure paths that were indeed disasters. I've learnt the hard way what makes a fun adventure. But after I started the South Wing I never had a bad week. Maybe there's something in there you can use.
I've just finished my South Wing campaign. I'll post the paths for each episode once I've put in some page references for the Monster Manual. It was quite the learning experience, and now I'm wiser I'd like to design something better.
At an open table game you need a tool for bringing lots of random players in at any moment. So I want to run a world like Planescape or Rifts. Portals make bringing in new people (especially homebrew weirdos) very easy.
So I had a look at Rifts.
I've played Rifts. I've got the original book and a lot of splats. I got into Palladium games through buying TMNT & Other Strangeness, thinking it was going to be a graphic novel (shrink wrap's a bitch). I bought a lot of splats for that too. I think the main thing was that I liked the worlds, the system never really figured in. I barely asked for skill checks, skipped over fights, mostly roleplaying really. Not a big surprise that when Werewolf came out I jumped straight into White Wolf's system and never looked back.
Now that I played a designed game like 5th edition - I'm having a wholly new reaction to the Palladium system.
How the hell am I supposed to ask for skill checks? There's so many of the buggers. And each new splat adds more. It completely breaks any use of skill checks to control the pace of the story or player's turns.
Each paragraph is Sigmund-Freud-style long. To one extent you're getting rule clarifications. But on the other you're putting fatigue on the reader, so they skip stuff and get it wrong anyway.
I'm wholly a convert to just having one damned experience table. Seeing so many again just made me wonder how I'd be able to get all players on an equal footing so no one at the table feels rubbish. I remember once rolling a character from the Rifts Atlantis splat and my mate rolled a gromek juicer and thought he'd hit the jackpot. Then I showed him that I had mega-damage skin and a truck load of magic and psychic powers. He was so salty.
The Palladium System isn't about balance. I get it. I think it's fine it spawns lots of books, because DMs and GMs need ideas. It's fun that you can roll a candle wizard.
But it really is The Hobbit, An Unexpected Threequel of roleplaying games. It desperately needs editing. I'm happy there's been news that someone's giving it a go.
