Author: RomanTorchic
About The System
A medieval fantasy dungeon-crawler made with a similar philosophy to OSR games – an attempt to capture the “Classic D&D” feel without D&D’s crunch using the simple, open-ended, and fiction-forward PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) engine. Dungeon World is a VERY simple game mechanically. Beware, though, if you’ve never played another PbtA game but are familiar with D&D or similar games, you will have to unlearn a lot. Dungeon World lacks a combat initiative, skills, codified movement speeds, etc. in the D&D sense, which might present a barrier to those who come to the game assuming it will play like Dungeons and Dragons – rather than the myriad PbtA games that share most of Dungeon World’s mechanics.
Complexity: (★☆☆☆☆)
System Strengths
Simple mechanics that are easy to pick up and play. Dungeon World uses PbtA’s typical “roll+mod” system, meaning you roll 2d6 and add any appropriate modifiers. A 7+ is a “hit,” but only a 10+ is likely to do exactly what you wanted without a cost or consequence. On a miss, 6-, something always goes wrong. Anytime you’re rolling dice, unless it’s for damage, you’re almost certainly using this system. Once you know your Moves and your ability modifiers, you’re ready to play Dungeon World.
Mechanics that follow the fiction. The characters in Dungeon World, both PCs and NPCs, are not limited by what is written on their character sheet, only by the fiction and the narrative agreed upon by the players and the GM. PCs only roll dice and make moves when they trigger one of the Moves on their sheet – otherwise, they make choices, take action and face consequences as everyone agrees is appropriate. Even outside of that, the Basic Moves tend to be broad enough (“acting despite an imminent threat” or “suffering a calamity” triggers the Defy Danger move, which predictably is used A LOT) that you’ll rarely if ever have to ask “can my character do this?”. The answer will be whatever your Moves dictate or whatever you and the GM agree on.
Dynamic, character-driven storytelling and cinematic gameplay focused on choices, costs, and consequences. In the style of all PbtA games, Dungeon World is designed for you to “Play to Find Out.” The GM is expected to have some looming threats in the world which may cause a change to the setting that the players don’t want – but most of the storytelling (including these hidden threats, in fact) follows from the actions of the players. Player characters are constantly being presented with situations and asked to make choices in Dungeon World, and the choices they make and the consequences of their actions, including (or perhaps especially) their failures, are what color the experience and shape the adventure as it unfolds. Players are NOT asked to roll dice based on the difficulty of the activity they are attempting, but based on the possible interesting and story-advancing outcomes of attempting it. Overland travel distance is not measured in feet or miles, but in rations consumed. In moments of danger or conflict, characters do not have codified movement speeds. Instead, the game asks “would it cost them something to get there?” and allows you to roll Moves as appropriate. The game is fast-paced and scenes are cinematic, cutting rapidly between characters as threats approach them, rather than as their initiative turn comes up and they move into range.
Narrative power and freedom for players (and their characters). The classes (or playbooks) in Dungeon World offer solid character identity, and the means through which the character can pull on the strings of the narrative.
The Wizard has a list of spells with rigid, predictable effects they can cast – but their Ritual move is literally only limited by the fiction.
The Fighter is not merely a “good at using weapons” class. They have a unique, customized weapon that can grow stronger along with them – and they can use brute force to tackle obstacles both in and out of combat.
The Barbarian is not just an angry Fighter with more hit points and less armor – they are an outsider, a traveler from a foreign land with a big personality who seeks to quench their powerful and all-consuming desires, whatever those might be.
Each class has Moves that allow them to shape the world around them in some way, taking control of some part of the narrative shared by the party as well as what it means to be a member of their class.
Character advancement that encourages adventuring and roleplaying. Characters grow in power as they loot treasure, conquer great foes and learn about the world, but they also gain XP from following (or perhaps changing!) their alignment according to their class, as well as resolving Bonds (also suggested according to class) with the people who inhabit the game setting. Most commonly, though, characters will gain XP when they roll a miss for one of their Moves, and this serves as GREAT encouragement for players to roll for Moves and try to make changes to the world around them. In Dungeon World, failure isn’t necessarily the worst possible outcome because ANY Move that requires a roll will ALWAYS move the story along, and the character who failed to do what they set out to do, but made the change to the world and the story anyway, will gain experience for doing so.
Resources to support GMs. Dungeon World comes with all of the tools it expects GMs to use while running their games – incredibly simple monster stat blocks and guides for creating new ones, tables and guides for creating settlements of any size, and a Fronts system that allows for codified and readily-accessible notes on what plots to advance or moves to make when the players look to you to see what happens next. Maps are encouraged to be drawn during the game, allowing the GM AND players to “Play to Find Out,” and the GM has a list of codified “Soft” and “Hard” Moves to consult whenever there’s an opportunity to push the player characters forward.
Easily customizable and compatible with other PbtA games. With very little effort, content from other PbtA games (Apocalypse World, Monster of the Week, etc.) can be converted fairly easily to work with Dungeon World’s mechanics. Given the incredibly simplistic nature of Dungeon World’s Moves as well as stat blocks for threats the PCs may encounter, it is incredibly easy to make a custom Move that the GM or the PCs might have access to.
The game is so simple that it’s not difficult to homebrew your own custom class Moves, or an entire class with its own Moves (there are many “Compendium Classes” created by the community that work similarly to “Prestige Classes” in D&D and are commonly adopted into games to supplement a player’s base class).
There are several customized rulesets out there for Dungeon World, which aim to change the tone of the game or to tweak some of the mechanics to lean more toward the feel of D&D/OSR, or other PbtA games.
System Flaws
Some of the mechanics are poorly explained or use confusing terminology. For first-time players, the difference between “+CON” and “+Constitution” almost always leads to confusion about starting hit points (an abbreviation is your modifier, the whole word refers to your total score). There are several Moves in the game that ask you to “hold (a number)” and then allow you to “spend a hold” without telling you what you’re holding or whether or not it’s a different pool from the “hold” you get by using other Moves (it is). These are a couple examples of unclear language that will almost certainly provide a stumbling block unless you can catch and explain them to first-time players. They are explained in the book, but the explanations are often separated quite a bit from the material they are referencing.
Over-reliance on a few “catch-all” Basic Moves. Some players note that, especially in combat-heavy games, characters will simply be using the Hack and Slash (or Volley) Move or the Defy Danger Move each time they’re called upon, and this leads to combat being boring and repetitive with no actual decision-making. I will admit that if the GM and the players are merely treating the PCs and NPCs as sacks of hit points slugging away at each other, this becomes quite possible (and I have experienced this while playing with a GM and other players who came from D&D backgrounds). I would argue this is not a failure of the system, however, as the game is explicit on the point that an action without interesting or story-advancing consequences shouldn’t require rolls at all. An enemy locking horns with the PCs should generally be smart enough to try and gain the upper hand somehow – and the PCs should be doing the same. This almost always leads to more diverse Moves, and more diverse outcomes even if you’re rolling the same Moves.
The game is dragged down by over-adherence to “D&D Tradition”. This one is a matter of taste, and like the above point is also one I don’t fully agree with. Complaints have been made against certain classes being “race-locked / alignment-locked,” and even against the uses of Race and Alignment as character-defining features in the first place. Some also complain about the use of ability scores, which aren’t needed especially for a game that seeks to explicitly cut down on D&D’s number-crunch. The game DOES offer players and GMs ways to customize races and alignments, though it offers sparse guidance on how to do so. Community resources often make use of “Backgrounds” and “Drives” instead of Races or Alignments, which can be argued to provide a stronger motivation for characters to go on adventures in the first place, but if “just homebrew the problem away” were a viable answer, we wouldn’t be writing this article!
Example Games
The best games to run in Dungeon World are those it comes already equipped for; it was designed as a sword-and-sorcery / high-fantasy dungeon crawler, and thus can run similar games to what D&D 5e is designed to run (albeit with more focus on roleplaying rather than necessarily killing and looting stuff, and less emphasis on number crunch).
The system can be adapted, though, as many of the Moves are broad, and equipment relies on Tags: one-word descriptors that determine how the equipment is used and/or its narrative properties. For example, crossbows in Dungeon World have “+1 damage” and “reload” as tags. “+1 damage” does exactly what you’d think – when you deal damage with a crossbow, you deal 1 more damage. “Reload” doesn’t have any precise rules for how it impacts the weapon, though – it only “takes more than a moment to reset for another attack.” You and the GM determine what exactly that means in the fiction, how it impacts your other Moves or the Moves of NPCs and other PCs, etc. It’s easy to see how easy it would be to homebrew something like a sniper rifle by adding these tags to a ranged weapon in a more modern setting. The classes and their Moves are broad enough to accommodate setting changes as well, so long as the setting is capable of supporting the abilities of each class chosen by the players.
Have you all read into any of the “hacks” for Dungeon World? The systems seems great but it definitely could be improved by moving away from some of the D&D 5e tradition or some minior tweaks.