FLASHSALE! : Dungeon World

Dungeon World is a game by Adam Koebel and Sage La Torra, and is a hack of the genre- defining Apocalypse World by D Vincent Baker. It is a game defined by the tropes of classic fantasy role-playing games, mostly Dungeons & Dragons, but cares less about number-crunching and rules-lawyering, instead focusing much more on fiction and collaborative storytelling.

The game is designed to be framed as a conversation, where those at the table discuss what they most want to see happen. The first session of most Dungeon World games will begin with a group discussion of their world. Players bring up their character ideas and how they’d like them to fit into the world as a whole. In the Spout Lore actual play podcast, the group didn’t have a Wizard character, so it was decided that there were no Wizards at all in their reality, and why the Wizards vanished has become a key plot point.

When play truly begins, Dungeon World shines with its simplified rule set and use of broad “Moves”. A Dungeon World Playbook, the game’s version of Classes, is a streamlined package of themes and features commonly associated with certain fantasy archetypes. Everything a character does is described by a “Move”. Every move comes with a fictional trigger, which is up to the players and Game Master (GM) to discuss and work out. In Dungeon World, a Fighter can take down a gang of ten bandits in a single roll of “Hack and Slash”. Sure, she might take some damage too, but that whole engagement is dealt with more in the fiction than it is mechanically. The GM may even decide that, at this point in the fiction, watching the Fighter fail wouldn’t be interesting, and so the narrative is handed over to the Fighter and she is allowed to describe how she defeats all the bandits. In Dungeons & Dragons, this same fight would take ten rounds of combat, at least. Every bandit would get an individual turn and their own dice roll for their single shortsword attack, slowing down play greatly.

Dungeon World excels further by having improvisation baked into its mechanics. There is no way the GM can prepare for everything the players and game will throw at them, but the freedom of Dungeon World to improvise and abstract allows the story to continue smoothly. When their players search a Wizard’s study for treasure, the GM needn’t worry about deciding exactly what was in there and what it all does, they can just give the players “Wizard’s Trinkets, 5 Uses”.Whenever the players think one of those items might be useful, they can mark off one use and describe the item they pull out. It simply isn’t interesting to have a whole list of random items and to search through them every time you need to solve a problem. This situation happens all the time in Dungeons & Dragons, with its huge lists of mundane items, each with specific effects that inevitably have to be looked up online or in the Player’s Handbook.

Jason Cordova once said of Dungeon World “we privilege the words we speak at the table”. In Dungeons & Dragons, you privilege the words that are written in the book, and as much as the Dungeon Master can take creative liberties with those rules, the game is so maths- and mechanics-heavy that diverging from the beaten track can often cause problems. I hope you feel persuaded to give Dungeon World a go, particularly if Dungeons & Dragons has frightened you off in the past. Best of all, whilst you can buy the full Dungeon World rules as a hardback book, all the playbooks and basic moves are available online as a free PDF. Once you have that you only need some dice to get started!