Category: The Gauntlet: How to Suck Less

Last night I ran my first session of World of Dungeons for Cave of Monsters (formerly the Portland Gauntlet group) running the “Frozen in Time” DCC module.

Overall the session went well. I set the tone initially as 70’s Wyrd Fantasy (Heavy Metal, Fire & Ice, etc.) and the players really took to their roles as stone-age adventurers. I really loved how WoDu pushes the players to make interesting and inventive choices and allows me to bring those choices into the game. Probably my favorite example of this was when one of the players searched an overgrown garden for psychoactive substances. Rolling a 10, the player sat back and enjoyed their mysterious resin. Another player, deciding to try a puff, rolled a natural 2 (which house-ruled as “critical miss”, to get some added OSR flavor into the game). That led to a highly entertaining psychedelic meltdown scene as the neolithic tribesman described their horrifying visions.

My one issue with the system is the 6-9 result. While I was able to work out good results on the wins and loses (often handing off narrative control to the players), I had a hard time with the middles.

I get the overall idea (you win, but there’s a cost). What I had a hard time with was coming up with non-mechanical outcomes on the fly. I could lessen the damage, throw out -1 forwards, or lower the impact of success, but that didn’t really seem evocative. What I couldn’t seem to do was come up with interesting Catch-22, or Hobson’s choice style outcomes on the fly.

In Dungeon World this is often built into the moves, but I’ve only ever run that system once, so I don’t have enough experience to effectively bring that over into my game.

We’ll be running again in a few weeks, and any advice is much appreciated.