I like systems that allow the player to change the result of a bad roll by spending resources.

Me too, normally, but not in Apocalypse-powered games. I like how unforgiving the core mechanic is.

In a game like DW, with its focus on stuff like hard bargains and tough choices, when you give players a resource to spend to turn success into failure, you're saying that the game is about success vs. failure, but it's not -- it's about contributing new details and dramatic elements to the narrative.

(October is Big Bad Con too.)

Spoken like a man with no familial commitments!

Actually, October is traditionally the month when I get together with friends up in Washington State for what could be considered a very mini mini-con. But that's framed as "seeing old friends," not "gaming all weekend." It's both, really.

I'd consider crossing the ditch for an Oceanic LDW.

BTW, Mike, I seem to recall I was supposed to be digging up some LDW photos from last time. Who was that for?

I think it was for inclusion in the Kickstarter's video, but that thing's done, so... never mind, I guess. (Hey, I didn't manage to get my pics to them in time, either.)

Speaking of which -- I'm still planning to recap LDW (and the full weekend) on my blog, but we're moving to a new city in a few days and life's just been too hectic to get to it. I'm going to be taking pictures of all the props we used too, because some of those (especially the XP cards) were pretty cool.

Rough first day with the Kickstarter, I know, but tomorrow's another day. Here's to hoping the pledges pick up as word spreads over the next week or so. I'm fully confident you guys'll hit that goal!

...

I hadn't looked at this move until just now, and yeah, it definitely seems inspired by TOR to me -- that was the first thing I thought of even before adam mentioned it.

While I get why rations are treated the way they are (as a measure of travel time), I think I'd rather see them used like Ammo: Spend one when something goes wrong.

The TOR travel rules are, IMO, a bit fiddly and inelegant, although I admittedly have very limited experience with them (my apologies again to anyone I ran TOR for at GenCon last year -- only later did I come to understand what a terrible, terrible job I did). I'm not thrilled to see UAPJ go down that road. I'm not saying it can't be done well, and I'm glad it's now explicit about having multiple characters participate, but the current version is odd, for the reasons already stated.

Oh -- and I don't like that it's been changed from +Con to +Wis. Con needs more moves.

Hey hey. So last weekend a few of us ran a scaled-down Living Dungeon World, and over the course of the next week or so I'll be posting some stuff about it on my blog, including pictures and a recap of the event (and the rest of the con).

First up: Pictures of the Big Board.

(For those not familiar with what that's all about, every time a fact about the world is established, whether thrown out by a player or GM or emergent through play, we write it down on a sticky note and stick it up on the Big Board. As the weekend progresses, we collaboratively build a setting together. This particular setting was pretty wacky, but totally in keeping with the premise of the weekend's fronts. Here are some pictures of the Big Board from the first LDW back at OrcCon in February.)

One of my players noticed that there are no advanced moves for building an archer. Of course, the Ranger gets Called Shot, but it is it.

Yeah, we noticed the same thing (and whined about it to Sage on Twitter!). All kinds of support for blazing a trail through the wilderness, and even for fighting with two weapons, but nothing for the AD&D ranger's (to me) iconic weapon.

The easiest thing to do is adapt the dual-weapon advanced moves, but it's not necessarily the most interesting option. I like giving arrows the Piercing tag, and Noofy's moves.

I don't really know about making an Archer mini-playbook, though. The Fighter pretty explicitly is melee-only -- notice that his Signature Weapon options specifically exclude bows, or anything that could pass for a bow. What's the alternative? An Archer playbook that comes with a Signature Bow? The Ranger's already the only playbook with any real support for Volley; if it were me, I'd just extend that to make Ranger the Volley playbook as a counterpart to the Fighter instead of making a new archery add-on class. If a non-Ranger character wants to get more into archery, they can multiclass to Ranger, just as a non-Fighter character might multiclass into Fighter to be more effective with Hack and Slash.

(Although even that analogy doesn't hold up that great, because multiple playbooks get advanced moves for Hack and Slash or damage-dealing in melee, but last I checked literally nobody gets an advanced move for Volley.)

As far as the art being prescriptive: so what if it is? I don't quite see a problem with someone saying "oh yeah, that picture is my dude(tte)."

I do. The problem I see is this:

I think my problem is that the art reads more like a specific character than an archetypal one, so if I was making choices during chargen that diverged from the art I might feel some cognitive dissonance.