I like this a lot. I'd call the role The Grease.

"That guy's the Grease around here."

He's what the squeaky wheel gets, you know? He knows how to lubricate various arrangements. Plus he's basically nothing, just the stink left over after you fry up some sewer trout.

You've got "ignores armor" and so forth as monster special tags, so that can get his attention. Because there is likely a huge differential in armor levels among the group, trying to "build a challenge" is going to be a disaster - the thing that can challenge the 5-armor guy is going to stomp everybody else into jam. So don't do that. But situations where there are lots of things that need defending, and situations where all that armor is a mixed blessing, that's good stuff.

Thanks, those are good thoughts, and the other thread is informative. Regarding time, I had the same concern, although our game seems to move pretty fast. I guess the GM would have to aggressively telescope time to make the birth relevant/possible. Or the PC could start pretty far along.

It's funny, the sex moves are 100% not working for us. We have a Driver (actively punished by his move), a Hardholder (gives shit away in a quartet with no quid pro quo), a Battlebabe (worse than nothing) and an ugly Brainer who occasionally has ugly brain sex with NPCs. So not a lot of sexin' going on.

Cool, that's all good stuff, Sage. My inexperience was at work regarding alternatives to straight damage.

In play I felt the impulse to ramp up the difficulty to provide a challenge to the players, who were breezing through all the monsters and bad guys I had offered them. This is what you do in D&D but it is strongly discouraged in AW. Which is right in DW? I trusted the AW framework, but it meant that nobody really got into a dangerous situation with their character.

We played DW last night for the first time and it was fun, but not amazingly fun. More on that in a second.

So we're four guys, all of whom have played AW at least once, a few of us quite a bit. We were all excited to try Dungeon World. Three of the four read the rules and handouts before we got together. Our session was about four hours long.

We all loved the character types, the alignment based XP, and especially the bonds, which work so much better than AW history to me. As GM I really found the monster section useful in building out my own stuff. I didn't print out enough moves sheets.

I set up a pretty broad setting with a variety of potential adventures and pressure points. It was all based around humans colonizing the ancestral lands of the frog-men, deforesting and looking for gold in their swamps. It was, as Ara pointed out, a cross between Ursula K. LeGuin and an episode of Captain Planet. There were a pair of cool dungeons and a wizard's tower, but they went for the more social adventure and tried to discourage a bunch of squatters from illegally invading frog-man lands. So - swamp excitement, social parley, fighting frog-men, that sort of thing.

It went OK, I thought, but we struggled at times and found stuff in the rules that did not ring true. I really hope the other guys will jump in because I can't remember everything.

Some issues - the Thief's signature move guarantees that he will never just steal a thing and get away clean. We were all taken aback by this. It's his thing!

We had a hard time with the synthesis of AW and D&D styles in combat - we did it AW style, but AW is sort of predicated on the PCs being very powerful and competent, and foes being individuals or gangs. When we had a bunch of individual monsters, it got weird. At one point Clinton's cleric recruited three miners to help in the defense of the squatter camp, so I said he could treat them like hirelings. That didn't work well, because the hireling move assumes they want money and autonomy. Also, the three guys gave him a +3, and I didn't know how to deal with monster damage to him and his "hirelings". It was just awkward and there was no guidance.

I was really hoping my deep experience with traditional D&D style play would be useful, since I struggled with running straight AW a little, but it wasn't any help at all. I still had a hard time internalizing what I was supposed to do and what I could do in terms of making moves. This isn't DW's problem but it impacted our game.

I made the mistake of giving some of my frog dudes 3 damage, which was completely soaked by one guy's plate armor. They'd need to make a special move to even have a chance of harming him and I didn't realize that until too late. I'd suggest assigning a die type to all normal monster damage, so that even the weakest at 1d4 could maybe hurt a dude.

I felt the strong desire to directly provide challenge, which is a very D&D impulse but seemed at odds with the rules for DW.

Everyone commented that the mechanical spread was harsher than AW. I'm OK with that. We started with second level guys and they all leveled up mid-game, and the increase in effectiveness was pronounced. I think they'd just get more potent, so this may be a non-issue.

I'll add more if stuff occurs to me. We all had a good time, but we all had a better time playing Apocalypse World straight. I hope some feedback is useful, because I love DW and want it to be as excellent as possible!

When you strike Syrian interests in eastern Lebanon or Beirut, roll +hard.

10+, choose one; 7-9 choose three:

* Assad exercises some influence (change one of your gang's/holding's modifiers for the worse or reduce its size)
* Business (Not sure how to note this; Syria should have holds or mess with gigs)
* Rhetoric (Advance invasion countdown clock)
* Black van to Damascus (GM chooses an NPC leader or family member and they disappear. If you ever see them again you'll wish you hadn't)
* A visit from Israeli intelligence

On a miss, GM makes an absurdly hard move.