dungeon world - - the Lichen Forest

So I'm now also game-blogging at myconidfighter.tumblr.com - - check it out sometime. I think the tone of that blog is going to be a bit more showcasy, and a bit less thinky, given that there isn't much of a story-games community on Tumblr as of yet, as far as I know. It's no G+, to be sure, so I'm not expecting reblogs and in-depth discussions. Hm, maybe I should just post on G+...

Anyway, last night was our first session of Dungeon World. I didn't know what to expect, but quite inadvertently we did some amazing stuff. We're using the Dec2011 preview version of the game, so our experience is probably a mashup of older stuff and things yet to come, but at least we have the v2.0 monster-making rules on hand, which tamps down the insane damage output a bit.

Anyway, so these rules don't have strong guidelines on prep; the first-session advice is basically "start with a tense situation. You'll build on it." Honestly, this really is about all you need - think about that alongside the Bonds questions (which illustrate connections between PCs) and you should have some vague ideas about the setting and about what could be going down in it.

In this case, I thought about their Bonds for a bit, and then resorted to targeted questions - - I asked the Wizard, Osmolord, to tell me, "What were you looking for in these woods, anyway?" He told me, "A place of power." That felt like a sufficiently Wizardly question; glad I asked it.

Then I asked the Ranger, Aranwe, "What's a creature that threatens these woods?" She told me, "That giant demon from Princess Mononoke, the one covered in worm-things." So I looked it up, tweaked it a bit in my head to make it more nature-y, and decided that when it attacks stuff it leaves sprouts and spores behind.

Boom! Gametime. The players have been sent to explore the ruins of a village destroyed by the monster. There is no sign of the villagers whatsoever; only furniture, tools, and the foundations of the houses remain - even the thatch in their roofs was gobbled up by the creature what did this.

So they take a sample of the spores and go back to the ranger's house, which she decided - very much on the fly - to be a cozy, dry cave underneath a big tree in the forest. There's a bio-luminescence theme in the forest, so I decided that elves use jars of water so they can bring glow-foam (glowing freshwater algae) home with them.

The spore sample caused the glow-foams to all freak out for a hot minute and glow bright red. Further study merited a visit with a local sage, Celion the Elf.

Celion had few answers, but he suggested that the reaction from the glow-foam could suggest that a) the spore-source is unnatural and evil and b) maybe it comes from the River of Lights?

So now that's a thing. The players spend the night at his place, and they fail their Make Camp check, so I decided to be a bit of a softie and have Celion's tree-home come to life and walk around while they're sleeping. They wake up just as it's starting to settle into a new spot, some miles west of where they started.

They bid a frightened, confused Celion goodbye and head to the River, where they capture one of the weird glowing jelly-creatures that lives in the water (very Miyazaki, imo) and see what happens when they place it (in a bowl of water) next to the jar with the monster-spores.

It freaks out and tries to claw out of the bowl, its little tendrils twitching in fear.

They relent and separate the two receptacles, but now they really think something ugly is going down. They send Aranwe's hawk-friend Apollo down south to try and spot the monster while they, up north, check out the River of Lights some more, and try to find its source up in the mountains.

That's about where we ended, and I left out some detail so as to present a more streamlined narrative.

Mechanical thoughts:

-Making monsters is a blast with the v2.0 rules! They still do too much damage, but maybe I just need to reframe my expectations of level-1 characters.

-I totally forgot to make the Wizard roll to cast his spells. I'm still giving him the XP, though, as he did use Intelligence (which was highlighted).

-I haven't quite figured out what kind of communication ability the Ranger is supposed to share with an animal companion (can they talk, or does that require Wild Empathy?), but the Command move (much like the Apocaworld Driver's relationship to his car) lets the Ranger get big stat bonuses by incorporating her companion into the action - for instance, you add its Ferocity to your melee rolls when you fight together - - this led to a sweet +4 bonus on a Discern Realities check!

-It looks like it'll be slowish going with XP and leveling. I think combat is probably going to be a good source of XP, though, and honestly I didn't mind the current (non-BBC) stat-highlighting procedure, but it may end up being useful to explore other options.

-The fact that casting a spell counts as a move means that you can highlight your magic-stat and reap lots of XP that way. It is a bit of a risk, of course...

-If anything, I think the Fronts are more comprehensible to me now than they were with Apocaworld, partly because I'm putting less pressure on myself and partly because I'm more familiar now, but also there's an element of "duh, of course!" when designing Dangers. I do miss the more abstract/conceptual options AW presents, but I'm okay with having the human Mayor count as a planar force - construct of Law on the basis that his impulse is, indeed, to "eliminate perceived disorder".

-I'm trying rilly hard not to get ahead of myself with Campaign Fronts and Dungeon Fronts (I don't quite understand these yet - - I think the latter carry the presumption that play will be dungeon-centered, but that's a big if). Basically, I think DFs are for contained or limited-area threats that are directly challenging the players because of their current situation, while CFs are for broader "motive forces", like the movers and shakers of the setting or the world.

I think the best, biggest asset to making Fronts in DW is the very simple, focused ethos behind them: what would happen if the players weren't around to be heroes? Since DW characters are supposed to be problem-solvers, this makes it very easy to have thoughts like "the elves and humans would go to war" or "the Mayor will declare martial law" or "the monster will destroy most of the farming villages before it can be killed".

In AW, I found it more challenging because I didn't inherently see the players as being good guys - they were just around, and even though RPG expectations and even genre expectations were a factor, I didn't point the NPCs quite directly enough at the players in conflict. I eventually got the hang of it, but there was definitely some disconnect early on, with NPCs just doing their thing and almost ignoring the players. But that's going too far (for my purposes) in the direction of creating a world that exists for its own sake, and not enough of creating a world while exploring what the players are up to.

I think that once my AW players started to feel like it was their world to conquer, things got much more interesting, but at first I was acting like the players would break the setting if it tried to come up and talk to them. I feel a lot more competent with it now, and our DW game will get to reap the payoff on that. Session 2 is tonight, and we have a third player joining us! What will he play, I wonder?

Apocalypse World, session 9ish::

so Diamond the Chopper leads his gang and his friends to the city of Bluesquare, to confront his employer, the warlord Havok.
and by confront i mean kill. there's a big old battle in and around the town hospital - - we see some fancy gunplay, diversions, and decoy tricks from Rue the Gunlugger. Diamond drives his gunjeep right into the hospital lobby, and runs dudes over like Brock Samson.
Boo the Brainer (former Angel) uses a six-gun and a little psychic force to corner Havok in the darkened upper level of the hospital, where zhe shoots him and his bodyguards dead.
it doesn't really sink in until they're burning the corpses of Havok's crew that anyone thinks to ask, "So, did we kill Havok back there, or what?"

i laugh (they've been hunting this guy for like 6 sessions, and then he dies almost off-camera) and nod my head.

somewhere in there, Diamond opens his brain to the weird to find out how the good townspeople are holding up after all the carnage, and he rolls like a 3. he pops, taking 1-harm (ap psychic silent). he becomes semi-vegetative for a little while, very suggestible but generally calm and mindless for about 30 minutes or so.
around that point, what's left of his gang appoints itself a new leader named Clarion (sarcastic blond dude). the gang goes home to Adobe.

anyway, it's a few days later and Diamond is living down in the city instead of up in the fortress. and he's ok with that. returning late one night, the gate-guards pretend not to recognize him, and he doesn't get mad. an anthropologist in a scramblesuit (he is known as a Shifter) comes by to interview him about, you know, stuff.

Diamond's player, Biff, has taken upon himself to become a sort of commie paladin - - he never starts a fight, he set up communal medicine and food supplies in Adobe, and he ruthlessly crushes saboteurs and opportunists. now that he isn't in charge, he's trying to fill out every last improvement slot in his playbook before he's forced to retire, and he plans to watch the new boss (that Clarion guy) like a hawk until then.

i'm so excited about our apocalypse world game!

- Diamond, the Chopper, just picked the advance "get a holding (detail) and wealth", meaning that sleepy, spy-ridden Adobe Town is gonna become a bustling city soon, and that's the coolest!

- Biff, owner of Diamond, is gonna take over as MC sometime soon. I get to be a player soon! yayyyy

I need to decide between:

Battlebabe

Driver

Hocus

Not sure which I want. Maybe make a sample pc of each and see what the haps.

- Vega, the Operator, has joined our ranks. She's an ex-Hardholder hoping to get back at her former lieutenant, the infamous Lord Havok.

more to come! this game rocks :)

tales of Apocalypse World: Red Front

I used to think that a couple of my AW players were being really passive in our game, but I was reading this thread about passive players, and it occurred to me:

- my players seek to avoid conflict, yeah, but they're doing it because it's true to their characters. It's kind of impressive: the tunnel-rat Gunlugger only leaves his hidey-hole if anyone bothers him, and if they do, he shoots them dead with his 4-harm high-powered rifle. The Angel, who wears a scramble suit and does hir doctor's rounds for the town every single morning, wants absolutely no trouble or discord with anyone, ever. Zhe makes no enemies, holds no grudges...

In short, they're both a real test of my ability to tease out scarcities that matter (so there's conflict), but it could be a lot worse: they could decide that I'm trying to give them "cues", and then they would try to follow them.

It actually came up kind of directly, the other night: Rue the Gunlugger's player, John, joked that obviously Boo the Angel should follow the biker gang to the local warlord's citadel, because, "It's the RPG thing to do, right? Go check out the big city, you know, explore a little?" Still, he did mean it in jest, and when Boo's player, Valery, just laughed and carried on trying to avoid any conflict with the townspeople, it was clear that she felt no such pressure, or at least was resolute enough to ignore it.

I love playing with people who don't have mainstream-RPG baggage ^___^

[AW] Adobe Town, session 3 highlights

Highlights from tonight:

1- Diamond the Chopper, plus most of his gang, bring a shipment of salvaged steel parts to the stronghold of his master, Havoc.

They enter the gates, set aside their weapons, and bring the shipment to the ... garage. Havoc has claimed, and kept up, a McMansion circa 1995, complete with two-car garage, linoleum flooring, and Redskins commemorative plates on the mantle.

So, a bunch of hard-bitten, neofeudal bikers, chilling at a couple of card tables, checking out the particle-board cabinetry and chintzy wallpaper. Loving it.

2- So, three farmers from the Mudflats creep up into the huge concrete drainage pipe where Rue the Gunlugger sleeps. They want revenge after he pointed a gun in their mate's face the other night, over a matter of someone treading barefoot on a misplaced hypo.

Rue wakes up in their grip, gets his machete free of its sheath, and kills the first of them. The others scream and run, and he picks them off with his rifle.

More farmers come to investigate, as does Diamond and his gang. There's a bit of a standoff, but as soon as the village elder Do gets a good look at the bodies, he screams and cries for vengeance. One of the farmers, a fellow named Rum, breaks and runs, while the rest charge the bikers with staves and scythes in hand.

Diamond's gun is knocked away, but he grabs a club from a farmer, and starts giving as good as he gets. Rue lets off a couple rounds to scare the lot of them, and the elder gets them to back down in the face of overwhelming arms.

Boo the Angel pops in to tend to the dead, and manages to bring one of them back to life and health. While the cowed farmers are carrying their friend home, Rum (remember him?) comes running back with a six-gun in hand. Diamond grabs iron and tells him not to shoot, "What's done is done. You've no quarrel with us now."

Rum shoots anyway, and notches Diamond's armor. The Chopper shoots back and blows off the man's shootin' hand, which sets the crowd on him all over again until the elder Do clubs two men with his staff and screams, "No more blood, you fools!"

Boo goes and sees to Rum's bloody stump, and a second, final truce is reached, at last. Phew!

Ode to an Apocalypse World NPC

To Mimi.

Mimi, you crazy, crusty-haired junkie. You threatener of men's balls, you dropper of needles where others will step on them, barefoot.

I love you, dude. Don't change.

Love, your MC

OSRAW! Fight that troll, Willow!

Had a good conversation, post-game, last night with George. He's critical of Dungeon World, feels like it's not quite there (or maybe he'd be more strident about it than that!), and one of his particular criticisms was an issue of scale:

In a game of Dungeon World we played at a Jeff-con, the party's bard managed to use a move, Fascinate, to bewitch a frog-god and convince it to follow him to the ocean, where he would threaten to force the god into the sea and kill him (amphibians breathe through their skin; the GM ruled that gods are no exception here) unless the frogman armies left the city alone.

So, from a D&D/OSR perspective, the idea of threatening an amphibian enemy with salt water is pretty badass. Everyone at the table agreed it was a really cool plan, and the GM ruled accordingly.

The other side of the OSR viewpoint could be/would be, however: how the heck did a level 2 bard manage to use his magic on a frog god, just like that? I mean, whatever, but the status of god would matter more than the status of frog, just like how some kinds of undead are harder to repel than others.
Even if it'd be amazing to see the party cleric repel a nasty mummy-king right into a bonfire and watch him light up like a thing on fire, there's still that part of the fiction that says, "Yeah, but, isn't this adversary pretty powerful? Couldn't his incredible evilness deflect the power of this dime-store holy symbol?"

That gets me thinking about the role of levels in Dungeon World - pretty much any charm-related/mind control spell in any incarnation of D&D is going to address the monster's level or hit dice. Player-characters get stronger based on level, not just in terms of benefits like attack bonus and hit points, but intrinsically - the saving throw rolls get better over time 'cause of some inherent excellence that develops with leveling up.

In Apocalypse World, advances can sharpen or broaden a character, and they eventually lead to a character retiring from play. You can't get more than 10 advances before you MUST take the advance, "Retire your character (to safety), and create a new character to play."

Dungeon World has rules for going up to level 10, and it has some moves that don't scale at all to level (such as Fascinate). I think that a direction should be chosen - are levels going to matter a lot more, or are we going to use them only for the vibe they give? I think either option would be cool, but at this point it feels like one of those is not happening. I wasn't particularly bothered by it in play, but it's an interesting notion: there are certain things that low-level characters can do just as well as high-level characters. That definitely grinds against the spirit of D&D. If I have to gain 10xCurrent Level experience points to ding, it'd be nice if it counted for a bit more.

I think the scaling issue could be fixed just by including info about levels, for monsters or for PCs, in a lot more moves.
On the other hand, what if "level" is just a misnomer, just a colorful term, and leveling up is really about gaining more abilities, not necessarily more powerful ones. But, in DW, that does depend on the class: any of a bard's moves can be bought any time you level up, whereas the cleric has some moves for levels 2-5 and some for 6-10.

At the same time, this is all entertaining a particular argument. How I really feel is that it's way too hard to level up in D&D, given the benefits that affords you, and especially when compared to AW.
It might make more sense to flatten the xp requirements for leveling, just making it 10xp/level, or some other flat but high-enough amount that it doesn't happen too fast but you do get to do it often enough that it feels actually possible.
Pre-3rd edition D&D is clearly a game about having almost nothing to work with and getting through a tough spot regardless. The level-up rules are a carrot for extended play, but really, I've never actually played in a D&D game long enough to go up a level. Especially in its OSR incarnations, D&D play seems to mainly be about having the pluck, courage, and sheer good fortune to make it through some really tough scrapes intact.

I don't know if a game like AW, with all kinds of ways to improve your character and to show off your powers, is really suited to capture this particular form of D&D. I think that a sweet fantasy adventure game is perfect for AW, but more for capturing what folks like me wanted D&D to be (a way to live out 80's fantasy flicks and Dragonlance novels), not what it actually was.

My recommendations: flatten the xp advancement, put in stuff about retiring your character, put in stuff about the intended scope or length of a campaign (somewhere between a 2-hour epic and a season's worth of TV), make dungeons a part of play and not the point of play (think Moria in LotR, rather than the module adventures of yore), and dispense with the whole monster-level-thing.
If we change up monsters like that, then various benefits of leveling wouldn't make sense anymore: HP gains, bonuses to the attack roll, or really any improvement that doesn't come from stat gains or new moves.

The other road (keep levels and the design ethos they bring to the table) is totally fine, of course, but I think DW is currently in a sort of middle ground where neither approach is really being explored enough. I think DW is an awesome project, and I want to give it another shot before I put any work into making OSRAW (Old School Revolution - Apocalypse World).