These are all questions that I've been wondering about since I made my first wizard. I do have one more, though. Do you guys tell the DM what you've prepared when you commune, or just cast what's convenient at the time and then count it towards what you've prepared? As it's written, I think it's the first, but my tables do the second and it runs a little more smoothly.

I like it. My table couldn't use it, because we allow people to cleave through if there's enough damage to carry over to the next guy, but I love the inspiration and the feel of it.

The Shapeshifter move specifies taking on a perfect copy of something's form. I think maybe it might need rewording if it's also supposed to allow partial transformation like stone skin or coral hands.

uhm that's your setting.
[/url]!

Nah, we haven't even mentioned dinosaurs. I'm just making a suggestion. I'm not saying it's mandatory, just that it makes a lot of sense and would probably get less protest than, say, Open Ocean (you heard me Plesiosaur, you unnatural abomination!). Sorry if I was misleading.

Also, I assume you're talking about a saharan desert, right? Well there you have also scorpion, vulture, fox, gazelle, crocodile, cheetah and a mouse
!

How on earth did I forget scorpions? They're, like, the desert animal! Good catch. I was talking about how awesome a vulture's moves could be earlier, but I honestly had no idea cheetas were a desert animal. That's something I'll use to my advantage later, somehow. I'm so in love with the concept of desert druids. Never would have even thought about it if the whole 'Lands' thing wasn't an integral part of the Druid setup.

To anyone keeping score, Carouse is another move in which you don't quite get everything, even on a 10+

Fighter's Bend Bars, Lift Gates, too. It's not a glaring unique exception to any rule. I think it's awesome as written.

Ignore this if you want, not part of the actual play (all technical details are underlined): This is probably an unconventional actual play- it's the first I've seen that wasn't written by a DM- and I think it was a pretty unconventional campaign. But I figure input from unexpected directions is still in the spirit of improving the game.

Actual Play:

This party setup was awesome and consisted of:

Ribbon (Neutral Human Thief) is a mercenary operating under an alias to eliminate racial purists.

Astrafel (Good Human Bard) is a traveling musician who accidentally learned Ribbon's real name, making her a liability, so he's stalking her.

Marcus Arealius (Good Human Cleric) is a warfather for Korinth, god of honorable battle, who's along to make sure Ribbon isn't a threat to Astrafel.

I found character creation a little restraining; the serious decisions like alignment and race feel out of my hands. In 4e I hated charOp, and having it all on the sheet did wonders for streamlining the process, but having only two options made me feel like I was pressured to take one of the more efficient options.

The biggest problem was alignment. My DM usually has a very strict 'good character only' rule. So the thief's player just had to pick the only alignment available that would play nice with a good campaign and a give-no-ground kind of DM.  No one was playing a unique character, so much as an archetype in a new situation. Again, streamlined the process a lot, and the alignments available/unavailable all made perfect sense; at a table of new players I would definitely limit their options to what are given. That's all house ruled easily enough to not worry about, though.

The DM was confused about how the cleric's Rotes worked. Nowhere on the sheets does it mention if they chose one or get all of them by default (every other aspect of our characters is printed clearly on the sheets). As they all had a spell level of one, we weren't sure if their levels count towards the cleric's spell limit or if they were something different entirely. We also didn't know if they were limited to one use a day or given unlimited uses. We just opted to give him one use of every one.

So our adventure 'started off' (I'm ignoring our character creation/tutorial chapter, because it was pretty rough and it definitely wasn't the system's fault) with the party waking up in a chamber, strapped to standing steel tables. Two people on the floor before them stared at the ceilings in panic, muttering something about structural failure before running off. The room began to rumble, shaking us from our bindings and onto the ground. Lacking in memory and wanting answers the party tore off after them. We made a wrong turn at a fork and found ourselves in a dank room that began in downward stairs leading to a chest surrounded by a forcefield. A sign above it read 'EMPLOYEES ARE TO REMOVE ALL EQUIPMENT BEFORE ENTERING. 3 WARNINGS MAXIMUM.' So, after the Cleric and Thief argued over which of them should be naked to grab the chest, both agreed the bard should do it while they leave the room. Before that, the thief decided to test the force field.

A big annoyance was what did and didn't count as being a trap. This force field seemed magical (and later we found out it was) which made the thief reluctant to check it. Even after he decided to, the DM thought it would be better to just Spout Lore, so the Thief was stuck rolling at a -1 instead of the +2 given to him by Trap Expert. I think that there may be a clear definition for what constitutes a trap in the materials, but I didn't see it. It would be really nice if it were spelled out clearly somewhere where it could be found easily by players and DMs alike. I can already see a long campaign of 'Well, won't work with this trap,' in games with tough DMs, which makes the thief class more like Fighter's Little Brother without the multiclass options.

The party got bored trying to figure out the trap because nothing they could do didn't end in the bard getting bounced off, and eventually they took a new route to tail their captors. We came to a door to our left (though the hallway stretched ever forward) and the cleric decided to open it. Inside were two crazed neanderthals. The cleric immediately slammed the door and valiantly held it shut so the others could eek past, and they charged ever forward to see a metal door ahead of them. The thief decided to launch himself feet first into the door. He managed a 7, and the DM let him choose between opening the door and causing some rocks to fall on him, or just bouncing off the door. He opted to just bounce off. Meanwhile, the cleric has torn off towards them with the neanderthals tailing him. My DM has decided that after 10 seconds of no deliberate action, one nearby enemy auto-hits (it's a pretty nice idea). So the neanderthals hit the cleric for negligible damage, and the bard tries to heal him with a healing song. This whole time we thought the cleric was the healer, but this seemingly unlimited healing song definitely gives that title to the bard. The thief tries to help out in combat and 6-s every swing he makes. Poor guy takes a heavy chunk of damage and in the fray both the bard and the thief get an arm broken. No problem, because the thief prefers jumping off of enemies to deal damage unarmed (when he can manage a running start).

Which is good because We've yet to build a thief who can carry all of the equipment he starts with. They start with +1 STR and have to take the rapier because the dagger is heavier than 3 throwing daggers, and you have to take the shortsword to take the daggers. A lighter dagger alternative would be great, but a ridiculously easy fix is just to fight with a throwing dagger. We'd just take a rapier (stolen) and decide it breaks on a failure. One more free weight, they don't have to be a STR thief (or wear clothes that don't fit the character) just to move. That's not a real problem, but a dagger weighs as much as a short sword. Can't imagine it's an easily concealed dagger. Our thief guy made a habit of dropping everything but throwing daggers as soon as it's plot convenient.

As soon as the cleric can, he uses Cure Light Wounds to make the thief's arm usable (now at a penalty, but at least possible to use; upon reading over the spell description, this is definitely not in the territory of the spell. I think a cleric spell that heals no damage but temporarily waives disabilities, an ignore pain, would be sweet). The cleric takes out a neanderthal with a well-placed mace bashing as the thief cuts down the last. All the while, the bard providing superb support (really, Bard is great). They begin down the path again to find an empty room with nothing but a few standing coat hangers, and from there a small menagerie of dangerous animals. The DM said that there was a busted cage and asked us what the name on the plaque above it said. We decided it was a Bumblewug, a giant frog monster. We find the bumblewug two rooms away. It's amazing how fluidly the DM can make monsters on-the-fly and have them feel both balanced and natural. I mean really, I can not wait to see how he does it (not supposed to read that page) but it really felt like it was prepared beforehand. Combat was fantastic and realistic, and I really fell into the moment. The thief was real-world proud to be the one who took it down. But that's probably because, compared to the cleric, the thief felt kind of useless in that adventure. See his trap problem above. The thief brought it down by hitting an overhead section of rock with an arrow enchanted with magic weapon (damn bards are cool; we decided the attack was a defy danger dex because if the arrow didn't hit then the thief set himself up to get grabbed by a giant froggy tongue), and this great victory was immediately followed by periods of falling rocks dealing d8s left and right. The team high-tailed it from the tunnel system just in time to find out they were in the middle of an active volcano; they could do nothing but look on as all that they remembered became a unity of fire and stone.



I'm not sure if I did this properly. I only got here through lots of conflicting information, but I know this much for sure: Dungeon Worlds is the best, most seamless system I've ever played. Usually seamless isn't a good thing. It comes hand in hand with arbitrary. But not in Dungeon World. In Dungeon World, as smooth as everything feels, I genuinely feel that everything happens for a reason. I'm going to do everything I can to get others involved. I'd also like to remind everyone who didn't to check out the kickstarter.

So does someone want to explain rotes to me? Maybe provide a good explanation for what is and isn't a trap? Can anyone guess who I was (though that's really to see if I was biased or impartial more than anything else)?