If You Play One Game in 2014
Over the last two or three years I’ve played quite a few games that were new to me: Eclipse Phase, The Burning Wheel, Fate Core & Fate Accelerated, Savage Worlds, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, Numenera, and the one-two punch of Apocalypse World and Dungeon World.
They all stand out for one reason or another:
Eclipse Phase for a mind-blowing setting
The Burning Wheel for reinforcing deep character immersion
Fate Core for providing a virtually limitless palette for customization
Fate Accelerated for cinematic one-shots
Savage Worlds for painless large-scale combat
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire for preserving the wild and wooly action of a well-known universe
Numenera for delivering mechanics that reinforce discovery as a driving theme
Apocalypse World is different. There are two things about the game that must be played to truly understand. Reading about them in the rulebook isn’t enough to drive it home. You have to play the game.
The first is the 7-9 result. When you attempt to do something opposed or meaningfully difficult, you roll two six-sided dice. On a modified 7-9 result, you succeed, but with complications. Those complications depend on what sort of action you are taking. What’s important here is that success and failure are no longer the only two possible outcomes. The broad middle ground of barely succeeding, or succeeding with a cost, or succeeding and in the process screwing something up drives the story forward in unexpected and dramatic ways.
The second is the concept of Fronts. This is a tool the gamemaster can use to prepare the outlines of an adventure without filling in too many details. It sets the world in motion and gives purpose to the environment, villains, monsters, villains, and other elements in the game world that will affect the player characters. In 15 or 30 minutes a gamemaster can put together all the components of an adventure. It provides just the right kind of constraints, the kind that promote creativity and keep a gamemaster from wasting time on things that ultimately don’t matter.
Dungeon World uses these mechanics, but adapts them to the familiar world of Thieves, Paladins, Wizards, and the like. As such it is more accessible to most gamers than Apocalypse World, which is set in a bleak, post-holocaust environment. Fantasy is always the big seller, which is why Dungeon World is more well-known than its progenitor. That’s not to denigrate Dungeon World – a lot of care and effort was put into the game and it shows.
Here’s the thing about Dungeon World: It is a deceptively simple game that runs with surprising fluidity. It also demands that the gamemaster give ample room for the players to put their own mark on the world. So it does take some getting used to, particularly for veteran gamers. But once you have played it a few times, a curious thing happens.
You can’t stop thinking about it.
You want there to always be something in between success and failure.
You look forward to seeing what will happen when players make their mark on a world you set in motion as the gamemaster.
And the best bit of all is that you don’t have to play Dungeon World to get these things. Dungeon World is a game that gives you a new perspective on how games can be played. It makes those odd Edge of the Empire die mechanics seem much more natural and exciting. It gives you an approach to gamemastering that you can use with almost any game.
The only drawback to playing Dungeon World is that once exposed to it, you may never look at roleplaying games the same way again. Is that such a bad thing? I think not.
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