An Evening with Friends and Dungeon World

Periodically, I pick up a rulebook for a tabletop roleplaying game and imagine myself running a session, like the old days. In October of last year, I was inspired to pick up Dungeon World, and I remember finding it very interesting. Yet, like most of the RPGs on my shelf, it was filed away without being played. It was instrumental in my making Kapow during last year's National Game Design Month, but it never actually got to my table.

There's something mysterious and alluring about tabletop roleplaying games, and despite some reflection, I'm not entirely sure what it is that draws me to them. Certainly, I spent an enormous amount of time planning and running such games in my youth, all the way up through undergraduate, but then it took a precipitous drop from my time and attention. My relationship with tabletop RPGs is a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that the pandemic gave me a weird sort of inspiration to get a group together to try Dungeon World. I could play with anybody, regardless of distance, using online tools that I really wanted to learn anyway as I get ready for a mostly-online Fall semester. We used Roll20, which was impressive although awkward in many places. For what it's worth, about an hour in we gave up on the integrated peer-to-peer voice chat and just set up a Google Hangout instead.

I thought it would be a fun bit of reflection for me to go through the DungeonWorld agendas,  principles, and moves for GMs and see what I hit and what I missed. DungeonWorld was released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so I don't feel bad about including these rulebook excerpts here. You can even crossreference my notes against the relevant part of the book online if you can handle the ads. Of course, if you like what you see, buy the book to support the creators.

Another bit of preface before I get into the details. I didn't talk to the other players about whether I could write publicly about them and the game. I won't mention the players by name; I'll be referring only to their characters. There won't be enough here that you could reconstruct our story because these are just my notes. My goal in sharing here is not that you can rebuild our adventure, but that you can see how I think through what happened and compare it to other experiences. Getting into it, then, it's sufficient to know that Serah is a halfling druid, Brandon is a human ranger, and Tristan is a human thief of the con-man persuasion.

Agendas

Portray a fantastic world

I think I did good job here. Since I didn't know what kind of characters the players would make ahead of time, I couldn't prep something attuned to their particular skills. Instead, I drew upon the Eye of Clune dungeon I had designed two years ago for my kids. It, in turn, was inspired by design advice from Runehammer / ICRPG.

Fill the characters' lives with adventure

I made sure to ask a lot of questions during character creation. Although none of the players mentioned this, I think it was more questions than they expected, but it served exactly the right purpose: building up a world around the characters that was filled with potential adventure. It was just one session, so I'm not sure if I "filled" them with adventure, but the possibility is there.

Play to find out what happens

I had created the dungeon ahead of time, and although they surprised me with some choices, it was still kind of pre-made. I don't wish to sell short their innovations within this space, but I also think it's the case that once we went past character creation, I turned a bit more toward a "I am the GM who made the adventure" mode, not asking enough questions that could have given them some agency. For example, they were attacked by harpies, but it didn't have to be harpies, and the cave was set in the side of a cliff by the canyon, but it could have been anywhere. I'll say more about this in a discussion of the principles.

Principles

Draw Maps, Leave Blanks

My memory of this principle was that it was metaphorical, but re-reading the principles this morning, I see that it is literal. We played most of the game without a map, but when there was some confusion about what I was describing, I sketched it on the board. In our post-game debriefing, one of the players mentioned this as a good move and encouraged the use of the map. During preparation, I had decided against predrawing anything in part because I didn't want to fall into the quagmire of assets and fancy dungeons, but I definitely think my player was right: a simple sketch of the room shapes made a huge difference. In retrospect, we should have done this with the town, the cliffs, the river—just laid out roughly how pieces fit together. On the other hand, we could call this all a blank that we can fill in next time, if we play again.

Address the characters, not the players

When I think back to the tabletop roleplaying games of my formative years, I cannot remember if my DMs or I did this, but since returning to the hobby with my kids, I've definitely done my best to follow this. None of the players commented on it, but I did notice that some preferred to refer to their characters in first person and some in third, which was interesting.

Embrace the fantastic

Like I mentioned before, I think I did a good job here with the setting, the mystery. ICRPG calls this the DEW: Danger, Energy, Wonder. It's this kind of thing that excites me about creating more stories.

Make a move that follows

I think I did a good job chaining the pieces together into a believable fiction. There was a logical structure.

Never speak the name of your move

I mentioned to them that I made moves, but I never told them what my moves were, only that they were "hard" or "soft." I had printed up a list of my moves to have on hand during the game, but I never referenced it. There were just a few spots where my improvisational system was shutting down, perhaps from fatigue, and maybe having the list on my table would have helped inspire me faster to come up with something to do when they failed or got a middling success.

Give every monster life

The aforementioned harpies were guarding their nest, which I think I described in a believable way. They weren't interesting but one could see how they fit into the ecosystem. The adventure didn't have many other monsters, not in the conventional sense. Maybe I should have added more "live" things that had their own agendas: everything else, like the magical hallway creature and the skeleton guards, where really reactionary.

Name every person

The only people besides the players who came up were those mentioned during the backstory. Too many of them went without being named. I'll have to remember that so we can fill in the blanks with some kind of flashback or retcon should we have a chance to play again.

I'll mention that I took a bunch of notes on paper, and I thought about putting them into a binder or something. However, I think what I really ought to do is put them in my GM Notes in Roll20.

Ask questions and use the answers

As mentioned earlier, this went really well during character creation, but I think it fell off a bit during the adventure portion. Here's an example: the druid came from the river and could change form into river animals, but we never established the climate of the river. At the end of the adventure, the druid wanted to turn into something big and strong, but what was that? A hippopotamus? A musk ox? We even said out loud that we never really established the climate, but I did't ask them to specify. In retrospect, I should have (although in my defense, it was already about an hour later than I said we'd run, so I was trying to help us wrap up).

The easiest part of this principle is asking "What do you do?" to the players after making a move. That was easy, and falls right into my normal mode of running a game.

Be a fan of the characters

I think it was clear to the players that we were all telling a story together and that I wanted them to succeed, although this wasn't explicit. However, being a fan of them also caused me a bit of systemic consternation. There were a few points where the players described their characters doing something really interesting, really fantastic or heroic, and my instincts were to want to give them some mechanical benefit, like D&D Advantage or ICRPG Hero Coin—something tangible they could turn in later for a benefit. Indeed, during our debrief, I mentioned this specifically. After doing a bit of reading and thinking about it this morning, however, I think this was my defaulting to a D&D/ICRPG view of the game rather than a PbtA one: I probably could have used my moves in ways that rewarded them for heroism and cleverness in a more subtle way. Maybe I did and didn't think of it that way at the time? This is one area, clearly, where I'm still seeking to understand the system.

Begin and end with the fiction

This is another case where everything made sense in the game, but the context was, by necessity, a bit small and impersonal. That said, during the End of Session move, the player had interesting interpretations of their bonds' resolutions. Also, after a little thinking, they came up with an insightful answer to the question of whether they learned something new or important about the world: they learned that the old secrets that they discounted may actually be true. That's a nice hook!

Think offscreen too

I really didn't do this at all. There was an important opportunity that I had missed here. Early in the adventure, the ranger was separated from his companion, which kind of left him without one of his major class bonuses for the whole adventure. I could have taken an opportunity to "move the camera" to show what his animal was doing while they were down in the cave, whether it was worried or in danger or simply at peace. I imagine, though, that this particular principle comes into play more when there are developed fronts.

GM Moves

Use a monster, danger, or location move

Harpies attacked, traps triggered, a tremor started—this is an easy one.

Reveal an unwelcome truth and Show Signs of an approaching threat

I put those two moves together because I'm not sure I've distinguished them adequately in my mind. When I thought of cases where I did one, it could have just as well been another. Perhaps what this really means, then, is that I really did the latter and not the former.

Deal damage

We did a bit of this, although I kind of forgot about debilities: there was a good case where I could have done that instead of a d6, in retrospect.

Use up their resources

I did not do this at all, not through the GM's power over the world. They were in a dark cavern and they used up adventuring supplies as torches, but I never invoked this in response to something they did. Re-reading the move's description, it mentions that the "using up" need not be permanent, the example being a sword flung across the room. That's a good aspect that I had not considered, although thinking back on the story, I'm not sure if there was an opportunity for this or not.

Turn their move back on them

This seems like a good place to use those tricky 7-9 results. I am not sure I did this move explicitly, since I reached almost exclusively for Offer an Opportunity with a Cost. I think perhaps this tells me that I could sometimes make the world simply turn their move, without my having to present them with a dilemma—which, as mentioned, sometimes was hard to come up with when it felt warranted.

Separate them

I did not take this move as part of my actions, but they ended up separated several times due to their own actions. When I was involved, it was part of giving them a choice: you can climb down to safety, but it will put the rest of the party at risk, so do you save your own skin or warn them of the danger?

Give an opportunity that fits a class' ability

Honestly, I was expecting a more stereotypical adventuring party, not a Druid, Ranger, and a Thief. I did not think about this being a move I was taking, although they were able to turn the situation into places where at least the Druid and the Thief could really shine. Maybe if I was quicker on my toes I could have set up situations for the others? It is something for me to consider, though again, I wonder if it would be easier after sleeping on the party composition.

Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment

This did not come up. I love the idea of it, but it never really crossed my mind.

Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost

The idea of "success with a price" is part of what intrigued me about the whole PbtA movement. Maybe I need to actually scale back my use of this move, but I think the players did enjoy all the choices I offered. (At least, it looked like they were enjoying the choices, which were almost all of the "save myself or the party" variety.)

Put someone in a spot

Now that I look at the list, maybe this is more of what I was doing than offering an opportunity? I nee to think more about this taxonomy perhaps.

I should mention that I watched quite a bit of a Dungeon World one-shot on Roll20 that was led by one of the codesigners of the game. I was actually trying to figure out how best to use Roll20 when I watched the video, but it was also enlightening to see how Adam Koebel ran his game. However, because the GM never speaks his move, it's hard to see how he's deploying the rules vs simply improvising. I wonder if anyone has tried, as a sort of qualitative evaluation of a session, to code his actions as moves to see which he is using. I need to hold on to that idea for next time someone asks me to supervise a qualitative games research project.

Tell them requirements or consequences and ask

This is probably the move I should have pulled out when a player failed a roll and I wanted them to succeed anyway. Again, it has shades to me of the other two, and it's not completely obvious to me that I can see that I did or did not blend this with those other two. As such, it's not completely clear to me if it would be valuable for me to disentangle them or not. (But, you know, finding these cases is the point of this reflection, so this is progress.)

Dungeon Moves

I can keep this section short. I didn't really account for the dungeon moves as different from the GM moves. I suppose this points to the fact that I should have had that list of moves front and center to help me navigate my options, or perhaps it points to my having a bit of a linear, pre-built adventure for them instead of something more reactive.

Wrapping up

As I've worked on scheduling and prepping for last night's game, I also found myself wondering whether my kids could play this game. The older ones would do fine, #3 Son might get it, but #4 Son is still pretty young. He could not read his own sheet, and I'm not sure that a 5-year-old's "Yes And" is quite like a 13-year-old's. I'd hate to cut him out, though. I admit, I was kind of shocked to go back and look at the post I mentioned earlier, about the Eye of Clune adventure. That wasn't last year, it was two years ago. The littlest guy did not play with us as he was only three, but #3 Son played, and he was only five. #4 Son played our games of Kapow back in November, but in sort of a made-up sidekick role. Anyway, I'm torn: I like the idea of building a world together, but I'm skeptical of the boys' ability to have it make sense and be fulfilling for everybody. I suppose part of my point here is to say that I was really grateful to be able to play with some adults who were willing to work together on a world and a story without fighting with each other or picking their noses.

That's it for today's blogging. Thanks for checking it out. My next step along these lines is to re-read the chapter on Fronts and try my hand at those. If you have any insights to share about the system, observations about the game, or responses to my reflections, please feel free to leave them in the comments.