There is also "make Apocalypse World seem real"; between that and 'barf forth', you refer to all of the 'always say' rules, then tie back to being a fan of the players.  You shouldn't be using a move in this case until asking provocative questions, responding with fuckery and intermittent rewards, and disclaiming decisions leads to making a move that arises naturally from taking a real close look at the brainer's flat, like, as you said, announce future badness or off-screen badness.

When the characters are looking closely, you are having fun according to your agenda, focused through the lens of your principles; once they ignore your soft moves (announce badness) because, hey, it's just exposition, then you snowball those into fronts and threats and harder moves.  If they are more proactive, great, that's the game, you are making their lives not boring quite handily.

You have the right of it.  It is not terribly hard, but it is a bit more complicated than everything else and ends up being a significant speed bump.

Hey.  I've been working on, playing, and running my own version of 'dungeon world' (I'll change the name eventually, sorry about that) for a while.  I've run into a few problems, one with hit points (called Fight!), one with the nature of bonds, and one with alignments, and I'd like suggestions.

Fight! works pretty smoothly for most folks I've played with, but the rules I have for the recovery of Fight!, while they seem simple to me, need to be simpler or more intuitive.

Right now, the move is: if you meet the following conditions, you regain all your lost Fight!
> sufficient food and water
> medical attention, if you need it
> a relatively safe and comfortable place to rest
> about six to eight hours sleep
The complicated part is, for each condition not met, the amount you would regain is halved.  This is a bit of unwelcome math and is a bit clunky, I guess.

I really want to retain the in-fiction, meet-these-conditions quality; they've led to some fun play and tie back racial qualities and some other setting elements into the fiction pretty nicely.  I also want to retain proportionality with Fight! total if I can, since it maps to the idea of increased capacity at increased level, an important conceit for this genre.  Suggestions (and questions, of course) are super-welcome.

Bonds, the way I've written their expression and function, are very confusing (apparently).  In this game, a bond is defined by your relationship with another character, characterized by some need you have relating to them and the type of action that addresses that need.  Frex "I love Betty, I will do anything to protect her" is fine.

When the bond is relevant to a move by the possessor of the bond, the bond can be 'tapped' (in the sense of temporarily expended) to re-roll one of the 2d6 used in the move by the person tapping the bond.  The bond can be tapped by anyone involved, a very important quality.  The bond becomes untapped by that relationship being addressed in the fiction by the possessor of the bond.

It is a powerful trait, but even first-time players think it is one of the ways you get XP!  And they take a really long time to explain, and create at character generation.  I have decided to revert to the AW/Dungeon World style of writing out explicit bonds to choose from, and will need suggestions to fill out the lists.

Finally, Alignment is wonky.  I was using Good and Evil; you make the move, you get XP.  But there is no general approach or explicit benefit to the pseudo-alignment Neutral, and yet no significant potential negative consequence to allying to one of the alignments.  In the setting I have used for play(testing), there is also the Law-Chaos axis, and so I have ended up entirely with Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil characters.  I am loathe to remove alignment as an option, it is evocative and extremely in-genre; I also do not want to incentivize either a 'do-whatever-I-want' or a 'move toward balance' interpretation of Neutrality or add big penalties to having a particular alignment.  Some feedback on a different implementation would be appreciated.

My friend and coworker wrote up his play report in the style of a journal; he is a very funny guy, which I did not know until I had him as a player in an RPG - he's very nose-to-the-grindstone with a touch of bitterly sarcastic at work but he had me laughing uncontrollably several times during play.

The other players have promised play reports; if they come through I'll put them here too.  I had a great time MCing AW!  It was preposterously easy, other than clarifying the Seize By Force/Go Aggro thing (which enough folks have been through and over so that I was ready for it).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lDWm7-Xzag4mugzJaCVDxn8gYAp2_6tuo9DLmL-Fwgo/edit?hl=en_US

This is something I ran into with a hack I'm working on - translating the MC Agenda and Principles was mostly intuitive, but there didn't seem to be an analog for the other players.  I'm happy but not finished with what I came up with; in particular, distinguishing between Agenda and Principles is difficult for me.

It has also been difficult to not drift into an admonishing or pedantic tone.  I try to think of how I would like to be told these things, especially when I was younger and more sensitive to whether someone was being respectful or not in addressing me.  Sorry if it doesn't jibe for the reader.

So this is what I wrote under 'Player Principles':

The PC player is taking on the role of a protagonist in the fiction created by playing this game.  mDWH requires that the PC players all adhere to the following set of principles:
   1.   Play to explore the world and take risks with your character.
   2.   Play with the other people playing (i.e. not in spite of or at the expense of).
   3.   Play your PC to be adventuresome, plausible, and part of a team.
   4.   Look for opportunities to make rolls and show off your character.
   5.   Look for opportunities to make your PC more powerful and more fun to play.
   6.   Concede final authority over the fiction to the DM.

And this is what I have written in the Examples/Explanations for this section:

1.5.1  Exploring the world and taking risks
The game is no fun if you are not interested in exploring the world or in taking risks with your character.  It simply doesn’t work.  If you aren’t engaged by the current direction, say so and offer a direction you would find interesting.  If the risks to your character overly outweigh the reward, say so and clarify the kinds of risks you are willing to take.

1.5.2  Playing a collaborative game
The game will not work if one or more players are enjoying themselves at the expense of others.  This doesn’t preclude competition.  If you feel you are being treated poorly, point it out and clarify what you would find acceptable.  It may be that your fellow players enjoy harder competition than you, or enjoy their accomplishments in a way that bothers you.  Irreconcilable differences mean you can’t successfully play this game together.

1.5.3  Adventuresome, plausible, part of a team
Your character (tying back to taking risks) needs to be motivated to go out and get into dangerous situations - establishing and being clear about this motivation is your job.  Those motivations need to be sensible enough to fit into the setting and appropriate to the situations in the fiction, preferably with due consideration for potential consequences.  You will be playing with other folks’ PCs, and so you’ll need to have those motivations mesh well enough to continue playing together.  If you can’t find suitable motivation(s), can’t play your PC with regard to possible consequences, and/or can’t establish sufficient pretext to keep your PC working with the others, then the game won’t work.

1.5.4  Getting rolls, getting spotlight
Much of the game comes from taking risks, and much of those risks are represented in rolling for the Moves; much of the engaging fiction comes from watching the PCs get up to their adventuresome lives.  If you often find yourself trying to bypass having to roll, consider whether a risk-oriented game is what you want to be playing.  If you find your character not getting much ‘screen-time’, speak up and/or push to get into the action.

1.5.5  Growing and changing, increasing the fun
mDWH models from D&D and its ilk, where character capability increases over time; taking risks leads to getting XP, which leads to a more powerful character capable of taking bigger risks, and (usually) having increasing ramifications in the fiction.  This is central to this kind of play, so if this kind of exploration isn’t fun, think about what is and if this game can provide it.

1.5.6  Authority over the fiction
You choose your DM on the basis of trust - trust in their sense of fair play, trust in their creative capacity, and trust in their investment in your enjoyment.  When these trusts come into question, this game cannot support an actual lack of trust.  You will have to sort it out in whatever manner is normal for you or stop playing.


It needs some work!  But those are some of the things I thought would be good to be able to refer back to while playing - they are (I think) supported by the way the other parts of the game interact.

Something else relevant to this subject is the (um, can't find it, if someone else can link to it please) "x-y-z axis" of character playbooks in AW; the tools to engage and guide the players are built into the character playbooks at a conceptual level and expressed in the details of their looks and moves.  This kind of precludes the need for an explicit agenda for players, for AW.

Some race ideas:

Halfling Fighter: You get +1 to Position and Dodge against larger opponents, and any weapon you throw is effectively Precise.

Halfling Thief: Nimble fingers and small size make a great thief.  You get to Choose 2 on a Thief Skills roll of 7-9.

Human Thief:  You are a professional.  When you Spout Lore or Discern Realities about criminal activities, take +1; when you use Thick as Thieves, they always know you are a professional.

Half-Orc Cleric:  Your people understand pain; start with the Inquisitor move.

Half-Orc Fighter:  You are a brutal warrior.  Any attack you do has +1 Piercing.

Hal-Orc Thief:  There are victims and there are victimizers.  Add your level to damage you do when you have advantage over your target.

Then I read the announcement on Story Games.  I've been plodding along with my hack-of-a-hack-of-a-hack for a couple months, since the last version of DW was problematic for the way I run this kind of game; after getting someone else to run it for me, the need for really clear text became evident and this is the main document now:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xMM-tdmrND1nPvjIwEbwuPgRHC5Qkxu4knYpC6vZDB8/edit?hl=en&authkey=CNnlxbMB

The new version of DW is looking pretty sweet, so I thought I'd get active in the actual discussion.

I have setting notes (elsewhere) for what I'm calling 'Generic D&D', and rough notes for Hyrule, Morrowind, a general Final Fantasy setting, and a dungeon-oriented part of Warhammer.  The little bit of playtesting I've done has gone well, and I'm especially excited about how intuitively 'adventures' and 'challenges' work for me.  A huge surprise was the near-complete transparency between MC moves in AW and DM moves; I was expecting a real need to shift and re-focus the moves but they map almost perfectly.

I'm really looking forward to 'Dungeon Fronts' ('adventures' work really well but 'challenges' lack the coherence of function that threat types from AW have).  Most of all, I wanted to say thanks, both for AW and for these hacks.