Some thoughts on the Defend move and outcomes in general
Some thoughts on the Defend move and outcomes in general
I have been thinking about the Defend Dungeon World move recently and I read something that changed the way I think about it. I would normally roll+CON and get some number of hold or fail. In a few situations this can be very useful like pulling attacks away from a wizard performing a ritual or a thief securing an escape route. But at best you get 3 hold and the actual timing of when to roll, and weather you can roll again or get to Hack and Slash as well, has always been a little unclear. Most players will just try to Hack and Slash away their opponents as quickly as possible before to much damage is done. Alternatively they create some fictional circumstance to draw attention, like covering themselves in cows blood or making a lot of noise. These are both good strategies but I felt they left Defend a little lame.
I was browsing around in the Dungeon World Tavern and someone mentioned the difference between the 3 outcomes in reference to defend. Normally a 10+ is a success, your character does whatever he set out to do. A 7-9 result is a success with complication. The Defend move is triggered “when you stand in defense of a person, item or location under attack”. So on a 10+ it seems like you should succeed in defending your target in addition to getting 3 hold. On a 7-9 you still defend the target but there is a complication and you get 1 hold to deal with it.
This makes the most sense if you are trying to accomplish something with your defense other than redirecting attacks. Say you want to keep a bunch of monsters out of a room or from crossing a bridge, so you plant yourself in the way. Whether or not they get by you is based more on the outcome of the roll then on how you use the hold. Or you are trying to draw fire, your roll determines if you succeed and your hold helps you weather the consequences. This approach kind of turns Defend into a special form of Defy Danger with CON.
Unfortunately the redirect an attack from the thing you defend to yourself hold option does seem useless in the 10+ success case. You have completely succeeded at defending them so there shouldn’t be an attack targeting them. This may be an indication that I am trying to use Defend in the wrong way.
What do you guys think? Is this the wrong idea or a step in the right direction? Do you feel Defend is already super useful or a bit hard to use? How about other moves with hold options? Is getting less hold or having to spend an ammo enough on its own to count as a success with complication?
I am something of an odd fit for the hobby in the sense that I know very little about geek culture outside of gaming.
I am something of an odd fit for the hobby in the sense that I know very little about geek culture outside of gaming. When I play an RPG, I can’t weave-in references to comic books, Star Wars, and anime like my friends do, because it involves a cultural vocabulary I simply don’t possess.
But that’s not to say art doesn’t have an impact on my RP. Particularly when I watch films, I pay attention for things I can use in my role playing. I thought it might be fun to start sharing some of those notes.
I’m going to start with The White Ribbon. At the outset, I should tell you I’m not giving any spoiler warnings. In order to say what I want to say, I have to ‘spoil’ certain aspects of the plot.
The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon is a German-language film that came out in 2009. It’s about a Protestant village in pre-WWI Germany that has its orderly, oppressive foundation shaken by a series of violent events that become increasingly ritualistic in nature. The director, Michael Haneke, has said it is a movie about “the roots of evil.”
I saw the film when it was first released, and recently got a chance to watch it again. Here are some of my takeaways for role playing:
This is a Monsterhearts story
The children in this movie are monsters. Not literal monsters, but they are meant to be scary like monsters. They creep around in the shadows and whisper to each other. They engage in acts of cruelty. They are violent. But they are also children, and despite what you suspect (or know) about their behavior, you empathize with them, because they are victims of terrible circumstance, and because they are fundamentally incapable of controlling their impulses. It’s some real Monsterhearts-ass shit.
But as in Monsterhearts, the real monsters in the story are the authority figures in the children’s lives. Three in particular (the Pastor, the Doctor, and the Baron), are so monstrous, and exercise a level of control over the children so complete, it makes a certain degree of sense the children would respond with outbursts of violence. The scary thing is when the children become more ritualistic in their behavior, mirroring the way the adult authority figures use oppressive ritual to maintain their hold on the village.
For a great example of a subtle, but intensely evil authority figure, see the film’s Pastor character. This is particularly so if you’re going for a moralistic villain.
The Mix of Tones
I love how the film manages tone. It has a constant, low drumbeat of dread that runs throughout the movie, but the scene-to-scene tone is very spiky.
Here’s what I mean: we know there is something terrible going on behind the scenes. The movie makes near-constant reference to it, without every really coming out and saying what ‘it’ is. It creates a sense of permanent dread; dread without relief (something the movie has actually been criticized for, but which I love). And yet, there are scenes which are light-hearted, and even romantic. The film is very beautiful, and it has a charming love story at its heart.
But there are also scenes that are downright horrific, which spike way above the drumbeat of dread when it comes to darkness, and are a huge tonal shift from the more romantic scenes.
I love this mix of tones for an RPG that has horror as its focus (particularly if you have a few sessions to really let it breathe). I was definitely trying to accomplish this in my last series of Monsterhearts, which vacillated between instances of shocking, bloody body horror, and moments of pure comedy and camp. My underlying ‘drumbeat of dread’ was the campaign’s recurring villain, who was clearly working on something in the background (which I managed through my fronts and clocks), but who didn’t reveal it until the final moments of the final session.
Languid Pacing
The White Ribbon is often criticized for being too slowly paced, but I think the pacing is both beautiful and necessary. It’s an ensemble film. The narrator is ostensibly the main character, but this movie is really the story of a dozen different people. The movie resists the temptation to keep things tidy by only dealing with one narrative perspective, and instead lets each of the key characters breathe a little bit.
There is a huge lesson here for RPGs. My least favorite sessions of the last few years have involved stories with lots of characters in a one-shot. Some games have this baked into the rules, and those games are fucking awful. Other times, we’ve done it to ourselves. We take a small, tight, claustrophobic story and we introduce a bunch of NPCs, or we start moving the characters around too much.
I think there is a tendency in gaming to be intimidated by a languid, dreamy pace. I don’t know what that is about (except to say I am just as vulnerable to it). Maybe it feels self-indulgent to have a slow, introspective scene? Maybe we feel a constant pressure to have everyone at the table involved at all times? Who knows? For my part, I’m going to try to be better about giving a scene (and a story) a chance to breathe a little bit.
We’ve been using these and finding them a really great resource.
We’ve been using these and finding them a really great resource. They are designed for Blades in the Dark but I think they’d be pretty good for Dungeon World as well.
My soon 10yo player keeps introducing legends and prophecies to our simplified PbtA games and I came up with this…
My soon 10yo player keeps introducing legends and prophecies to our simplified PbtA games and I came up with this just now. Do you have any suggestions or know any similar moves from existing games?
When you remember a prophecy, tell it and roll.
On 10+ choose 1, on 7-9 choose 2.
– One of the details is untrue or incomplete.
– The MC can add an extra detail to the prophecy.
– Something is preventing the fulfillment of the prophecy.
Take +1 to all actions that will fulfill the prophecy.
Take -1 to all actions that will disprove the prophecy.
He likes using legends to establish the existence of magical items and a prophecy to say that he was the hero destined to use them or that it was the item destined to solve a problem. It might be better to ignore the prophecies and focus on ways to let him introduce elements to the setting since I think that’s his main motive. I like the concept though and I would like to try it on him anyway.
My Googling has failed me, but I realized that this is the ideal group of people to ask this.
My Googling has failed me, but I realized that this is the ideal group of people to ask this.
I’m starting up a Dungeon World play-by-post and I was hoping to find a way to make those sheets available online. Do any of you have suggestions for good methods?
Hey, all. I’m searching through the DR shownotes but someone might know off-hand: is there an episode that deals with writing your own classes? Haven’t kept up with the show real well and I’m looking for resources to help with my Ehdrigohr/DW mashup.
I am hopeless with voices. I find it hard to make them consistent and remember them between sessions or even scenes. “Staple” accents and familiar voices from movies are also difficult for me to replicate.
Any advice or resources for people who want to improve? I GM several mini sessions a week for my stepson so I have lots of time to practice on throwaway characters.
Pardon me while I rant a bit then ask for help. Maybe in the other order. Are there good cheat-sheets for Numenera combat and experience? Is there a good story/dungeon builder? I’m at my wits’ end.
Rant ON!
I run a Numenera game, and it drives me batty! Completely batty. It promises to be light weight and easy to use, but it is neither. A novice can make a PbtA character in minutes, but it can take (literally) hours in Numenera. The mechanics are vague not abstract. There isn’t a story-building system in the core book, a problem it shares with D&D and its children.
The worst sin in my mind, though, is how easy it is to read the book and absorb almost none of the mechanics. The numbers nerd of my group sat down and scrubbed the book for ways to make her character more badass. She found damage and leveling mechanics that I’d never seen on my three times reading the book. I expect this sort of nonsense from an older game. Those games at least had the decency to admit they weren’t simple, and included cheat sheets and callout boxes and the like.
Fiasco and DungeonWorld now on the list at Owlcon for Saturday listed under Talisman RPG Club. Please stop by if you plan on going, I would be honored if you came and said hello!
For a long time now (ever since the D20 SRD came out in HTML actually) I’ve been wanting to run a game about a…
For a long time now (ever since the D20 SRD came out in HTML actually) I’ve been wanting to run a game about a family of trolls being squeezed between a hostile human empire, and a harsh impenetrable mountain range. However, I’ve never really found the right system to do it in.
So I’m wondering, is Dungeon World the right system? If so, how should I do that? If not, what system would you recommend? The latest idea I had was using Spark, but I feel like the lack of mechanical differentiation between being a troll and just being a regular human would lose something.
