Sage posted a sweet new class on his blog! (http://www.latorra.org/2012/07/10/the-battlemind/)

Apparently the forums keep eating his posts.  This is so that awesome discussion ensues.

Preamble

Once a month there's a local gather of gamers in the area called GASP (Gaming Association of South Western Pennsylvania).  Fifty to a hundred gamers descend together to play pickup board games, RPGs and share food, drink and stories.  It hasn't gathered in 2 months while moving localles, so all of us were excited to re-gather and play.

In interesting side-stories, I met a guy who had an absolutely outrageously pretty hand-bound leather copy of dungeon world (Dan Cetorelli).  Dyed leather cover, the 4 core class symbols on the edges, a carved dungeon map, aged and yellowed pages - it was really nice.

So apparently I must be making a name for myself as a story gamer, since the organizer for the RPG section of the Game Day dragged a couple people over to introduce them to me for potential games.  Of course, I had a handy copy of the sheets to show to folks, and it was decided that people wanted to try out DW.  We only had a little under 2 hours to play, so we jumped in and got started.

Setup

Everyone picked characters.  Our roster was:

Halwyr, the Elven Wizard
Wesley Human Cleric of Helfereth
Pendrel, the Elven Bard
Celion, the Elven Ranger with a mule named Bill

The game went a little differently right off the bat.  Usually I run high fantasy, but as the dragon story shows, it's grim and reminiscent of early editions.  The cleric picked the name Wesley (he stated it as a joke, while laughing) and Pendrel the bard asked him what he wielded as a weapon.  It was a warhammer, so he dubbed him Wesley ... the Crusher. Now I actually haven't seen DW run before a little more over-the-top, heroic or Gonzo, but when you run a game at a game con who you get in your session is kind of arbitrary, and I decided to run with what the group was doing and see how the game held up.

World establishment:  We found out Wesley was the Human Servant of Helfereth, who was the god of Light, Fire and War.  He was his strong arm on the mortal plane, and a sworn vanquisher of the undead.  Yeah, their front line fighter was the cleric (it worked out way better than I expected).

We found out that most elves lived only 30 years (contrary to standard tropes) and our bard was elderly at 29 and a half, and this was his last hurrah before the end.  We also found out that Elven Wizards were immortal, stealing the power from the other elves (where their magic comes from) and living forever once they accumulated enough power.

We found out that the Ranger Celion and his dancing ferocious mule Bill (MVP for the night) were guiding Wesley to Shadow Vale which had been created at the dawn of time  when Helfereth had killed the god of Death and Darkness, and that undead appeared wherever his blood had hit the earth, and the valley was created from the remnants of the dead god.

Game

So game begins.  The first fight was against a number of zombie goblins and orcs, and an undead ogre.  Wesley charged forward, and Pendrell riding on bill egged him on, blending hymns to Helfreth with stories of bravery (adding to his damage).  Wesley didn't pay attention to the well-being of his friends, so he charged ahead of the group, and the rest of the party got swarmed.  While the wizards spells, the rangers arrows and Bill's mighty hooves fought off the clawing undead, Wesley went toe-to-toe with the Ogre, whose knee he shattered.

The Ogre brought to his knees was in range for a sudden charge from bill, and a well placed headshot from the ranger.  Pressing on, they roleplayed dealing with the priests zealotry as opposed to the  rangers more down-to-earth approach to problems.  Pendrell negotiated a peace between the two, and Halwyr identified the ogre's club, finding it to a mystic weapon with the Messy tag, capable of shattering bones in addition to any damage that it does, but it is tied to the power of Havrok the god of death which she conceals from the rest of the group.

The party presses on, Ranger first.  As they walk through a series of stone spikes with corpses chained to the top, the ghostly spirits exit and assault the ranger.  He sends Bill off with the bard to safety, and bets that fire which purifies will work even on the ghostly.  He suffers their chilling touch, while wrapping his arrows in cloth and setting them on fire.

The bard huddles with the Bill,  and both are protected by the ferocious mystic bolts of Halwyr, while Wesley charges forward to aid Celion.  They group is victorious, and Havrok uses their victory to call down the notice of his god and cleanse and sanctify the area long enough for them to rest.  I ran the 'end of game' move here to show the how XP worked, and everyone leveled up once

At this point we were running short on time, so I had them simulate getting to the final confrontation by undertaking a Perilous Journey (which turned out to work pretty well).  We creep up on the evil altar of the god Havrok contained deep inside the bone structure of his ribcage.  Several named opponents were there (including Sheldor, the morningstar wielding champion of the evil god). 

The ranger and bill sneak up, using a sneaky headshot to take out one of the enemies.  Sheldors arch-lich compatriot casts withering spells at the party, whih the mage blocks (interetingly she rolls a 7-9 but only takes 1 damage, considering the over the top description of the enemy spell everyone agreed that this was a fantastic representation of the block).

Wesley brings a crushing strike down upon sheldor, rolling a 12+2 assist to hit (bard), and max on his 4 damage dice (d6, +d4 magic weapon, +2d4 bard boost), and the Wizard uses her ritual ability to cleanse the area, finishing the story for the night.

Review

The game was (as I mentioned) alot more fast, loose and over-the-top than the usual DW sessions I run, but it held up well.  Moreover, when our cleric decided to be a front-line fighter I winced.  But he not only held up well, but showed me a build pattern using sacrifice and empowering to add magic weapons to his strikes, becoming quite the combatant.  Wasn't a combo I had considered, but it's pretty awesome because the cleric-as-a-fighter is a D&D trope that while i don't necessarily care for, didn't seem very well supported, but wow did it work out great.

The bard is really strong.  Their healing is constant (meaning it never goes away or fades) but the ability to heal enemies on a jump is interesting.  Moreover, the additional damage is awesome, but I think their assist ability is potentially the most deadly.  Not broken strong, but strong.  I'm hoping to see the class again in play to compare it to others.  Overall it was a great addition to the party.

The wizard was still one of my favorites, and I like how Ritual and Arcane Shield were used here.

The ranger was pretty strong.  The extra damage isn't necessarily too out of line at higher levels, but at lower levels it gave some folks a sense of sticker shock.  I ran some math on it vs the original driver that the build seems based on and came up with some math that I'll share in a future post.

In terms of the game, how would you handle something like 'multishot'?  Namely 3 goblins were attacking Bill the mule.  If the ranger was trying to save him by rapid-firing some arrows to try and scatter the assaulters.  He hit, and killed one, but everyone wanted to know since you guys have mob rules against a PC if there was an attack-a-mob-back series of rules for the PCs in return (attacking 3 goblins? roll 3dDamage*w?)

Getting ready to run a couple games at Games on Demand at Origins, and this has already been requested :)

Wow. One heck of a game last Thur.

I was actually pinch hitting for my Thursday Marvel Heroic Game.  The GM was packing for a trip, and we have a tradition of doing one-off games whenever we’re short folks (or in this case, RL took precedence over gaming).  So yeah. DW! Here goes.

The characters:

Shrike - Human Ranger. Long hair, tall.  Fights alongside Iral, his goshawk.
Sherasyth - The elven fighter wielder of the demon blade Woe.  (side note: what is it about badass female elven fighters? Every DW game I’ve run so far has had one of the ladies at the table choosing the fighter and kicking six kinds of ass)
Aldarys - Human Wizard.
Petor - Human Priest of Helios (the God of light and the Greater Good)
Rook - halfling thief (I love these guys)

Setup
We run a pretty tight schedule.  Folks assemble around 6:30 and we’re out of there by 10-10:30. But our GM was booking out at 10 sharp.  I mention this because I never cease to be amazed at exactly how much we get done in DW.  The system just moves so quickly that by the end I realize that we’ve gone through what most ‘fantasy’ staples take weeks and entire arcs to accomplish.  But I digress.

First up was character creation and world creation.  I took a few minutes to explain to everyone the fact that we were going to be making a world together, and I that this was more of an ‘old school’ game - meaning I was running with the fiction (so they shouldn’t expect to win constantly and indeed their lives would frequently be in jeopardy).  So they made characters, and I asked lots of questions.  My friend Jeff helped out and dropped some map action on the board, and wrote down notes for things we said.

We found out that Aldar was the capital of this nation, and Aldarys (being the Human Wizard) was actually a nobleman.  That nobility wielded magic, it ran in the blood, and he was a pretty boy, who got by on good looks and his noble status more than true study. 

We found out that the great Cathedral of the Church of the Sun was in Aldar.  We learned that not too far away was the town of Perrywood (about 5 days by boat) at the confluence of two major rivers, and across from that was the Iron Woods - where a massive orc army had wintered and were waiting for the thaw to end so they could ford the river and continue their rampage.

We also found out that the orcs were far better organized than they should be.  That they served demons (one of whom Sherasyth made a pact with to escape, and one of which is embodied in her blade), they hosted gladiatory combat for entertainment.

Game
Time to begin.  ACTION! Apparently they’re fighting an orc squad on top of a pontoon bridge (made of logs) which has been lit on fire by the ranger.  Combat ensues.  The fighter charges with teeth bared, and sweeps through lesser orcs, and attracts the attention of a champion.  The orc shaman calls to the fire on the bridge and blows the logs away, and the ranger is swept downstream.  The rogue (not wanting any part of this, sneaks off through the tall grass, and snags the ranger, pulling him to shore, and stops rifling through his belongings once he realises the ranger is still alive).

His side pierced by wizard magic, the shaman sumons a monster made of his blood, fire, and dying breath.  The wizard throws up a shield, and the two clash.  The ranger realizes quickly that the flame demon is impervious to his mundane arrows (nice use of ‘this is not hack and slash’) but attempts a ‘called shot’ by tossing up his waterskin and pinning it to the monsters head (and rolled 12+!).

The fighter is fought to a standstill, till the halfling moving with only a tiny shimmy of stalks of tall grass to betray him, sneaks up to the orc champion and backstabs.  Sherasyth completes a killing blow and her blade, Woe, devours the orc’s champion demon blade (leaving the tiny halfling as the only one to witness it, which the other players played up as nonsense when he tried telling the story at camp).

The demon stunned by the water splashed on it’s fiery form gives the wizard and the cleric a chance to break for the river.  The party, fleeing its fiery wrath makes it to safety, with a few folks getting singed badly in the process.  The demon stands at the edge of the river, roaring in anger, and begins a ritual.  The wizard realizes that it's opening a portal, and about to turn the water in the river to fire, and summon further reingforcements in the shape of demonic cohorts - and begins a ritual of his own, seeking to chain the demon in place.  He manages to tap into the power of the ritual and uses the unbridled magic to drain the heat out of the river freezing the demon still.  The ranger uses his cloak and heaping helpings of river water to extinguish their enemies last flames.

Beaten, bruised, burned, cut, the party decides to travel towards the next nearest town.  They make camp for the night, and are no sooner asleep than the ranger (who was on watch) sees his hawk perturbed.  Heading back the way they came, he spots a cowled figure tracking them, pausing periodically to sniff the ground.  He wakes up the rest of the group, and the wizard uses his magic sight to view their opponent.  He realizes that the mans spirit form is immense, and chained painfully to the frail humanoid shape tracking them.  Also he realizes the party is horribly outclassed.  They book it.

The ranger takes the time to distract and mislead their tracker before hooking around and catching up to the group.

The party (peeing their pants at this point) look for short term solutions.  Sherasyth mentions that the next town over has a Grove in the woods dedicated to the Old Gods (spout lore) and that the old powers of the earth might be able to hide them from such a creature.  The party decides to go there, but the cleric trusts in his god and heads to town.

There's some roleplay that ensues over the course of the next day.  The group rests in the grove under the watchful eye of its elven caretaker.  In talking (and making some spout lore checks, using his bag-o-books) the Fighter talks about how the cloaked figure is one of a dozen or so that lead the orcs.  The wizard explains that this was probably one of a group of ancient sorcerer kings, and that although they could burn, stab and otherwise maul the physical form of the black Walker that was chasing them, the only way to defeat it was with a weapon capable of severing the spiritual chains that bound it.  And that would take some rare ingredients.  He doesn't have a full list, so the group plans a trip to the library in the great spire of the White city to the south.  The wizard explains that it would be a few weeks travel at best overland, but not too far away is a Knot in the world, and if he can get there he could probably shave weeks off of their journey by activating the ancient portal to transmit them closer to their destination.  They begin prep.

The rogue is the only one with solvent coin, and he ends up  very sadly paying for the suplies.  They prepare to leave in the morning, but the priest (still in town) is woken up in the middle of the night.  The orcs have forded the river and are assaulting the city.  He blesses and heals the paladin of his faith guarding the church, but departs silently out back, following the guidance of his god.  He ignores the pleas of people (I really tried tempting him to stay even though he was horribly outnumbered, but he stayed the course) and the burning of the town, and sneaks out to the Grove to meet the rest of the party

The group gets to learn how to make a perilous journey (which is pretty awesome by the by) and end up encountering several warbands of orcs before we called the session as they entered the ruins at the World Knot.

Review
So the group was enthralled enough that this has been declared the official 'off week' game.  There were many glowing examples of praise, but I'll start with the problems and questions we encountered.

First off: Gear.  I want to give you guys a highfive on the new 'starting gear' solution with the boxes.  It's actually pretty awesome and I had zero questions on how to use it.  As a matter of fact, the players finished it before I even got to the 'gear' section in instructions.

There were a few minor problems however noted afterwards.  The ranger noted that he requires a Str +2 to even carry his basic loadout (actually it looks like the ammo aka arrows come in 2 weight bundles, which is inconsistent with the 'gear' chapter which labels them weight 1).  The rogue picked halfling (again) and complained (much like the last one) that there was no thrown/ranged weapon option.  I definitely suggest you guys put in a few throwing knives in the rogues starting gear list if at all possible, as this is the most consistent suggestion I've heard.  This might also be due to my predilection of starting with action as opposed to a shopping trip in a town, but that has gotten vocal thumbs up, so take it for what it's worth.

Mechanics
Funny story, the ranger picked the 1d4 option on ferocity (ha ha).  He had a hawk and thought this line was the most accurate representation.  As a result I made his hawk awesome.  When he would send it to scout and lookout (it's tricks) I'd make sure it came back with useful info.  Consequently I didn't see the ranger as a high-dps class.

The only complaint he had was that he saw his character as a forest/mountain-man, and largely a bow-hunter.  He thought the human racial was very counter-intuitive and against the concept of the ranger, and mentioned that he would rather see the a choice of terrains for where he could ‘forage’ for rations (although he really liked the elf one, just didn’t want to play the elf, so was excited to get to the half-elven advance).  Also he was hoping for more bow-play options in the advances.

There was also a question posed by the thief, wherein which he asked if when using a precise weapon Backstab worked with Dex.  I ruled no, since Backstab as I’ve seen is about striking once, as hard as possible to end a fight.  So to Backstab in the first place (to make the move) required an action focused on Str, so it wouldn’t be applicable. A similar action with Dex would be a hack-and slash.  But I wanted to pass on the question and ask for an official stance (albeit precise only speaks about Hack and Slash and not Backstab, even though one seems an extension of the other).

Fighter (unsurprisingly ;) ) thought fighters were awesome.  How there were abilities already written into the game to support her character ideas didn’t hurt one wee bit.

The Wizard really thumbs-upped the spell system. He loved how not automatically losing the spells made him feel less like a 1-trick 1-magic-missile pony, yet the fact that they did go away retained all the flavor of the original game.  Other big favorites included arcane shielding, and how he could ‘pull books out’ of his stack and use them.

The whole party actually commented on the initiative system (that is to say the lack thereof).  My favorite point was brought up by a player who said that usually they’re borderline ADD and seeing that there’s 10 people on the track till ‘their turn’ they check their G+/Facebook, but with player actions driving things, it was always being on the toes, ready to pounce at any chance, ready to jump in wherever possible (and I’ll note no phones were checked till after game AND after wrapup and chats).

I as a GM am slowly starting to get the hang of threats and hard/soft moves.  I still would like a shiny printable official GM sheet included with the character sheets, but I prepped this time with some index cards and that helped immensely.  Also I found that the spreads look gorgeous and are easy to bookmark and consult on my Transformer (tablet).

Overall, I find that I’m consistently having a blast with this, and that a similar group comp can have wildly differing adventures even with the same party composition.  It doesn’t hurt that prep involves a brief stop at Kinkos on the way to game (printing double sided on an inkjet at home is kind of a pain in the tush).  I *want* to run this more frequently, and it doesn’t overwhelm me in terms of time investment.

My only real complaint … is lack of druids ^_~ (kidding!)

So was thinking about the monsters in DW.  My answer to the question is yes, and no.

1. No: Location
The initial monster content (monsters of dungeons) wasn't all that useful for me.  Why?  Lets set aside for a second 'classic' D&D dungeon design (which makes somewhere around zero sense to me personally).

In most campaigns there are specific themes.  If the mad wizard Zorgon makes clockwork beasties for his dungeon, you're unlikely to put in Ankheg's and Ropers. You probably want some golems and elementals as a starting point for example stats, or included monsters.  Hence that section of the book is probably completely useless at this point, because unlike true D&D re-skinning stat-blocks and 'balance' aren't applicable so re-usability is kind of minimal.

Moreover setting specific monsters (ex again: ankhegs and ropers) are far less likely to be useful in an off-the cuff game, rather than a D&D clone.

I personally am a bit put off by the crazy unexplained ecology of locations (so ... in a few connected rooms that cover about a city block, you have two kobold tribes, some undead, five different kinds of apex predators that can challenge well trained and well equipped humans, some traps and everything carries coin. ?_?).  So I'm unlikely to just pick up the book and throw down whatever I flip to into the dungeon.  So in this sense, this is unhelpful.

However, what you're adding is very valuable in different ways.

2. Yes: Theme
Your monsters aren't conceptually very different from what we see in generic fantasy game X. Yet the 5-6 line description of most of the monsters you write will spring entire adventures into my mind.  They are the same monsters I've seen a thousand times, but filtered in a way that works with my brain (story vs statblock).

I'll provide an example: Sahuagin.  Seriously how many people have campaigns full of these guys?  Water and swimming rules are a pain, and they're low level enough that you usually substitute the staples (orcs, goblins etc).  Then I read your description and I get chills.  There's this crazy, creepy, Dagon and Cthulhu meets Insmouth feel to it.  I realize these things are f-ing scary.  And if a boat leaves the sight of land, they better have a weather-witch on board to sing down the Sahuagin, or they'll all wake up with cold fishy fingers clutching throats as mouths filled with teeth work on their bellies.

So I read this tiny six line blurb, and boom.  Adventures, flavor, theme. Sweet.

3. Yes: Example
So your rules on monsters are clear just fine, but examples really help drive the point home.  I'll try to demonstrate.

I read the stats on an orc berserker.  20hp, 0armor, cool.  Then dragons show up. Iconic, badass, sweet right?  And my first impulse when glancing at them is to go SIXTEEN HITPOINTS? Are you kidding? That's like 3 solid rolls.  You can't be ser... and then I look again.

I read their tags.  I think about how the fight feels in my mind.  Messy.  They don't just hit you for fifteen damage.  They rip off your arm.  Their breath attacks whole sectons of the battlefield.  Terrifying.  You have to stop peeing you pants just to run in praying you don't get incinerated before you even engage.  Weapons frequently bounce off their hide.

Man.  Doing 16 damage in that scenario is next to impossible.  Not just that, but you're probably going to be crippled, even if you win.  The STORY behind the moves they have really hits home.  And this example teaches me both the difference between Orcs and Dragons (who stat-wise aren't super dissimilar), and how to set up similar opponents.  

So even though the rules for making said monsters are laid out clearly, it isn't until i *see* this that it really sinks in and brings it home.

(edit: fixed HP, didn't recall difference between Dragon and Apocalypse Dragon)

4. Yes: Campaign
So, last night I ran a game (it went great, writeup is coming).  Our fighter is a scarred elf.  She decides she got the scars from being captured by orcs and being made to fight in an arena.  We build on that, and soon we realize the orcs are waiting for the spring thaw to end so they can cross a major river and they're only days from the nations capital.

I flip right on over to your 'hordes' and boom.  The orc encounters are varied within the same 'type'.  They're flavorful.  They have tactical bite.  I add a dash of some other evil things that get summoned by shamans and lead the war-horde.  But the core holds really well.

What I'm saying is that while I appreciated the dragon, this specific section is the most benefitial to me, and to the style of game I prefer to run.  (Ex: Undead, gives me good variety, and nice flexibility within the same theme)  To be specific - by doing iterations on a theme you provide immediate framework for me to generate a unified threat/danger without having to do additional work myself.  Sure the Sahuagin in my little Insmouth idea above probably have a champion, and maybe a giant squid to back them up, but I have to write it up.

So the hordes, and unified fronts (like undead) rock for me.

Hope that helps!

What about everyone else?