The Feeling of Dungeon World

Hirelings to Heroes

My good friend Tom. recently kicked off a Dungeon World campaign. I’m a player in it. It’s got a very particular flavour and premise that places the players in the position of being the hirelings of the “real” adventuring party. And so it was at the start. But, before we had a chance to yell, “WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLESHY BOI MAN THING” the tables were turned and the PCs had to dig deep and find something heroic inside themselves or have the entire group die horrible deaths in the depths of the first dungeon. I would like to give a big shout-out to Tom’s awesome in media res beginning in a massive organic mouth with eyes on the inside and little flesh monsters. It rocked.

My character is Craobh Beag (pronounced something like Kreev Byug), a Kyrfolk (think minotaur whose bull half was a Highland) druid. Had a lot of fun with the shapeshifting and his generally chaotic nature. You can check out Tom’s post about how they built the world we’re playing in here.

Old School?

But what I want to write about today is what the game evoked for me. As a player of a certain age, my first introduction to RPGs was the red D&D boxed set back in the late eighties. This was fairly normal at the time, as I understand it. It really was magic. I don’t remember too much of the mechanics of playing that game. My memory is reliably questionable. But I have a distinct memory of the feeling of it. The wonder of imagining my little dwarf swinging his wee hammer at monsters in some unnamed dungeon, having real adventures! I’d played choose your own adventure books like Fighting Fantasy and Zork before but this was entirely different. There was no way of save-scumming by keeping a finger on the decision entry page so you could go back if you didn’t like the outcome. The consequences felt consequential and the world was wide open. No limits!

When I think of old school games, I think these are the feelings they should elicit. Fear of threat, concern for real consequences, appreciation of truly impactful decisions, a sense of freedom in an open world and an enjoyment of the fantastic. I want to be fearful for the life of my character. I need to know that the decisions I make can have a truly terrible or wonderful impact on the world in some way. Now, there are a lot of differing opinions out there as to what constitutes an OSR principle. Some of them involve the inclusion of resource management, others disregard that as non-essential but insist that they should be ‘rules-lite.’ Anyway, let’s take this list I lifted from Wikipedia that comes originally from Matthew Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008.)

• Rulings from the gamemaster are more important than rule books. Concoct a clever plan and let the gamemaster rule on it.
• Player skill is more important than character abilities. Outwit the enemy, don’t simply out-fight them.
• Emphasize the heroic, not the superheroic. Success lies in experience, not superpowers.
• Game balance is not important. If the characters meet a more powerful opponent, either think of a clever plan or run away.

I think we can see that these four pillars of OSR games cover a lot of the feelings I want to get out of them. A sense of the fantastic is noticeably absent. But that might be something specific to me.

Dungeon World (2012) by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel supports this type of play so well. It ticks all these OSR boxes! Now, obviously, I have only played the one session of it so far, but I have to tell you, the first of the stars I sent to Tom after that session was this:

right at the top I have to say that this is the closest I feel I’ve gotten to experiencing the feeling of playing old school dnd in a very long time. Despite the system being slightly different, it’s close enough that it feels familiar. More importantly, it’s the overall atmosphere [Tom] has created with a pretty traditional dungeon scenario with puzzles and traps in a recognizable fantasy setting. It really brought me back.

It’s an odd duck, Dungeon World. It is very much a PBTA game. You have bonds and moves and holds and degrees of success/success with consequences when you roll your 2d6. But you also have D&D’s core abilities, alignment, HP and magic spells. You even have classes like Dungeons & Dragons. The standard races are human, elf, dwarf and halfling (Tom has tweaked the list of available races or cultures in their campaign. Once again, you can read more about that in their own words here.) So, this is how it retains the flavour of D&D without the ruleset. LaTorra and Koebel could have made a dungeon exploration game that was far more Apocalypse Worldy. I mean, do you really need the D&D style stats? No. Is alignment necessary? No. But we are trained to understand that the fiction presented by those things is reminiscent of a particular type of game that we want to experience the feeling of again. Well, that goes for those of us who have had that feeling before. For others, who maybe never played anything but PBTA games and are loathe to dip their toes into OSE or DCC or even actual D&D, it offers them a chance to do that.

So we were on a storm-wreathed cliff-side, and we were being led by a ghost dog we had just befriended. The ghost dog walked through the air to the other side of the cliffs as though the rope-bridge was still standing. But the bridge had been cut in the middle. Still, we knew the undead doggie was trying to direct us to where we needed to be, so we used a combination of moves (shapeshifting into a forest bird), equipment (lots of rope, which our paladin ended up losing as a consequence of his actions) and luck (mixed success) to make it across to the other side (even though the self-same paladin decided it would be clever to tightrope walk across and nearly plummeted to a nasty death as a result.) This one scene involved most of the pillars of the OSR that I quoted above.

Old as new

Sometimes I find I just have to write about games like this, that are brand new to me, even though they have been out for over a decade. I’ve done it with OSE and Dragon Age too. This might seem a little redundant to some, but the way I look at it is that, if it’s new to me, it’s new to someone else too. I have to remind myself that somebody discovers OD&D every day. I only first tried a PBTA game about three years ago. When it comes to RPGs, there are trends and movements and there is always something new coming out. And there are quite a few people publishing articles on them. But I don’t think that any reason not to write about games like this that I am enjoying and enthusiastic about right now, no matter how old.

Dear reader, we have literally, only just begun our Dungeon World adventure and I am hoping to write more about it and the other games I’m currently involved in over the next few weeks. There are so many! I am looking forward, next, to discussing Trophy Gold, run by Isaac, and a new project/event that Tables and Tales is cooking up too. So stick around for more!