AP: a test-drive of the game

Not everyone could make it to our regularly scheduled AW session, so I ran DW.  We’d been planning to play it in a couple weeks with a larger group, so this was a good opportunity to test drive it. 

I sketched out a swampy, anarchic river town at the southern end of civilization.  New Orleans with demi-humans.  A generation ago a war wiped out a big chunk of the population, especially the “hero” caste, giving me an excuse for lots of abandoned keeps, towers, lairs, etc.

Dylan played Premisl, an evil human cleric, who’d lost almost everything.  In his desperation he sold his last remaining child, a son, to Voitsech of the Hand, a local theatrical impresario/whore-monger.  Unfortunately, most of the payment was in books.  Fortunately (?), those books opened Premisl to the worship of the Stranger, God of What Lies Beneath.

Ben played Ebbot, a neutral Halfling thief.  He left home when his innkeeper father allowed a surly elf patron to slap Ebbot’s mother for a trivial offense.  He met Premisl while trying to steal the cleric’s books back for Voitsech.  Premisl decided Ebbot might make a good convert, and so the two teamed up. Ebbot has no idea that Premisl got the books from Voitsech, and Premisl has no idea Ebbot was hired by the same man.

Premisl dabbles in speaking with spirits, including the demon Nalfeshnee, who informed him that the wards on the late sorcerer Quinn’s home had finally faded after twenty years.  The wards had been set to kill anyone who tried to enter the garden surrounding the small cottage.  The neighborhood had long since been abandoned, since people dislike living near invisible, deadly force fields, so the two men were unobserved on the night they chose to loot it.

The overgrown garden was infested with red-eyed beetles the size of small that had a disconcerting habit of leaping on to one’s head and digging in.  Ebbot held a trio of them off with his rapier, killing one and wounding another, while Premisl broke the door in.  The two hurried inside and slammed the door.  While a slightly worse for wear Ebbot held the torch, Premisl began searching the cottage, finding some loose change, a few knick-knacks worth fencing, and a door to another room that appeared to be blocked from the other side.  Poking around the main room’s chimney provoked an attack by another mutated beast, a giant bat, which they dispatched after taking a couple more hits.  Ebbot decided to fix his torch to a wall to keep both hands free, and they blocked the chimney with a table in case anything else decided to come down.

Out of the corner of his eye Premisl noticed the blocked door slowly swing open.  An elven zombie shambled in, moaning for Quinn.  The cleric took control of the undead, and directed it to leave the room.  Of course, a vengeful beetle was sitting in the doorway, waiting for an opportunity to attack, and leapt on the zombie.  The brave adventurers fled into the now accessible bedroom, and slammed the door.  Crap, the torch!  They used up another dungeoneering unit to light another one.

On the floor by the door was a large circle of dried blood, a very nice, a dagger of Elvish make, and a few pages of parchment.  The parchment included a map to an observatory upriver, and a series of careful instructions for invoking the ward, with “DO NOT COMPLETE FINAL STEP BEFORE EXITING GARDEN”.  Scrawled across the pages in crude charcoal letters was an apology to Quinn from someone named Lorccan.

The duo searched the room, finding a cache of odds and ends under a loose floorboard.  Ebbot set off a trap, and got a needle stuck in his finger.  It didn’t *seem* to have any real effect. Rather than go back through the front, they opted to jump out a window.  Sadly, before they could sneak away, more beetles attacked, and the ruckus attracted the zombie, who had a beetle firmly embedded in his head.  The stalwart warriors routed the enemy, taking many more wounds in the process, with Ebbot finishing the fight by shooting a beetle off Premisl’s face.  Meanwhile, a fire broke out from the torch they had left in the cottage.

The now second-level adventurers, both hanging on to life by a thread, decided to head back home before anything else happened  (also, the GM was tired).  The next day the townsfolk marveled at the strange corpse of an elf outside of the smoking ruins that was Quinn’s home.

The players took new bonds.  For Ebbot, the knowledge that Premisl is a good man to have in a graveyard at night.  For Premisl, that he can trust Ebbot to shoot a bug off his face.

All in all we had a lot of fun.  My favorite parts:
-   Asking the initial questions to get some back-story on the characters and why they’re working together.  Those probing questions are my favorite part of AW, and I was happy to use the technique again.
-   I like where the style of combat sits between D&D and AW.  The former often feels a little monotonous, constrained and grinding to me, while the latter can be too loose and sudden. 
There were a few things that felt bumpy:
-   I didn’t have a good feel for what was enough of a threat, vs. too much.  Levels of monsters and characters don’t really mean the same thing as they do in D&D, and I haven’t gotten a good sense of what they do mean.
-   I also don’t have a feel for how much treasure is reasonable.
-   I had a few “gee, what move is that, anyway?” moments, but those moments can come up in D&D and AW, too.
-           Some of the spell and power effects were a little fuzzy, perhaps purposefully so.  For example, how complicated a command can a cleric give the undead?
-   We didn’t use initiative, which was fine for two players, but when we play with a larger group I may need it to keep track of everything.

I’m looking forward to playing this again, and I think the players are, too.

Rockin Joe.
I don't use initiative (but have only played with three) and it seems to smooth, so long as you focus on the evolving narrative rather than the mechanics.

I think the 'powers' of each class are ephemeral in some cases to allow for judicious storytelling. The 7-9 result is the brillant give some authority to both players and GM. I find it helpful to look at the intent behind the roll in the first place, ask lots of questions and go from there. For instance, with your turn undead query, was it to escape? allow further exploration? To counter the beetle? The answer will give you a good gauge of the command required.

Think of monsters in terms of powers vs character levels to give a reasonable 'threat'. There is no magical paradigm with DW. Though think outside the 'kill monsters steal their loot' scenario too. There are other ways you can challenge the players other than threat of death. Remember to take away their stuff / powers / contacts, announce future dungeonness, and place further quests in their path, its all good!

Hope your group keeps playing, please post more! Welcome to the Adventurers Guild!

Second session, same characters, once again in lieu of our regular AW game.  This one didn't go as well as the first.  It was a "town adventure", just following the PCs around as they tried to get more information about Quinn's observatory and the silver dagger.  The PCs had a lot of failures.  The combination of no specific dungeon to explore, and problem after problem arising from the bad rolls, made it feel too rambly and loose, and a little Keystone Kops.  I think I was running it too much like an AW session.

Some highlights:

- I tried out the fence-the-goods move I posted in the Treasure thread.  The PCs failed (the perils of dump stats), so they didn't get much for their stuff, and attracted some unwanted attention to their dagger and exploits.  It got me thinking of how it might work in different situations.  Do you roll once for the whole pile, or divide the loot into meaningful subsets?   Does each PC roll for their own share?  I guess it would be up to the PCs, and how they played it out. 

- There were lots of maneuvers that didn't map easily on to the available moves: climbing a tree to get away from monsters, bowling over an opponent in a fistfight, fighting over control of a weapon, etc.  We adapted existing moves as best we could: Defy Danger for fighting over the knife, Hack and Slash for tripping somebody with slightly different outcomes (instead of delivering damage, you successfully get your enemy on the ground). 

- There was some frustration about the questions you could ask using discern realities or spout lore.  They break down a bit when the characters want to know about a more general siituation, like best escape routes out of town when you kill a drunk elf in a street brawl while surrounding by a crowd of witnesses...

- It's hard to treat the characters as heroes when they feed an urchin girl to an alligator so they can escape.  I think we've been playing too much AW...

I would have done getting the knife as a Dodge.  Defy Danger reads more like a "saving throw" to me.

I think I'd to a trip as a Dodge, too, if there was any danger.

Honestly, I think Dodge probably gets used a whole lot, right up there with Hack and Slash.

The town adventure angle is cool.  I'll have to try that.  I'm just trying to decide if I want to wait for the next rules update, though.

We had another session yesterday evening, with the two existing characters, plus two more, a neutral elven Wizard, and an evil elven Bard.  There was a definite objective to explore (the observatory), so things went more smoothly from a "what exactly are we doing" point of view.  A few notes:

1) As others have alluded to, casting CLW over and over again could turn into an unbalancing xp pump, especially since it's easy to just take half effect on a 7-9.  But in practice it seemed like everyone was gaining xp at a pretty even rate.

2) The Fascinate move and Charm Person spell are a little strange, and led to some amusing RP.  We decided that a bard who gets a 10+ on fascinate can choose to focus it down to a 7-9 and affect only n targets, thus freeing up his allies to act.  Failed rolls by other PCs can result in their being under the sway of the magic.  We had one poor NPC who kept getting fascinated or charmed, reacting badly when she came out from under the influence, then getting fascinated or charmed again. 

2) I decided that there's no translation difficulty with the dead.  We all understand each other beyond the veil.  So the cleric was able to speak with the dead sleestak without a problem.

3) I did not use the Last Breath roll when someone went to 0 or fewer hit points, and should have.  I just left them bleeding on the ground until they could be tended.  Next time.

4) The PCs reaction to being routed by their last encounter of the evening was to head back to town, get healed up and...spread disinformation to encourage others to go deal with the threat, so they could then pick vulture-like over the resulting scraps.  My PCs, such the heroes.

about # 1, we have replaced the 1/2 potency option with "take -1 ongoing to spell casting until you rest" it seems to be working rather well. i dont play the wizard though, so i cannot say exactly how he feels about it. he might post something.

Great stuff, Joe. As others have mentioned, there are some changes on the way to XP and spellcasting that should help some of that.

You're right about, as currently written, a lot of things not always being a move, and we've already got something to fix that. Dodge is being replaces by a new Defy Danger that is effectively AW's Act Under Fire. Climbing a tree to get away is a perfect fit.

Fascinate is a tough one. I think I need to go back to that move, it's modeled on Arresting Skinner, but I don't think that comes across the same way in DW.

as far as fascinate goes, my last character in the game (a bard) utilized fascinate in a few fun ways that seemed both to help and hinder at the same time. To me the ability doesn't seem like it's meant to just captive your enemies so that your party can whack on them without rebuttal. On the contrary, it seems more of a pied piper type thing; follow the leader if you will. you might not necessarily let your party beat up on unsuspecting foes but you do accomplish a couple of things, one being that you draw everyone's attention toward yourself, which for anyone with an affinity for theatrics would be an amazing ability, the second is that you can potentially get yourself out of danger.

The 7-9 on fascinate is a bit vague (and while that's usually not a bad thing, in this situation I think it may be). I feel that fascinating your allies as well as your enemies is a big limitation of the move that both makes it interesting and restricts it from being entirely too effective. I LOVE the ability fascinate, but I only love it because of the fact that I fascinated my allies as well.

I think our scenario that we used is a good example of how its a help and hinderance, the scenario being that my bard used fascinate on a few creatures (of what type I don't know) that happened to be the only one's to notice it out of a group of 8 or so. This didn't give the other party members a chance to kill them (I think in our situation, if one of the party member's turned their attention to the creatures, they'd also have been caught fascinated) it did, however give me a chance to lure them away so the rest of the party was not overwhelmed. The downside came when I realised I could not fascinate them forever and at some point had to drop the song and run. When I did, the creatures attacked and killed my bard (I actually thought it was really fun, it took about 4 failed rolls for them to kill me and luring them away allowed the rest of my party the time to kill the other enemies).

long story short, in my opinion, fascinate is awesome because it is universal to player characters and npc's, the 7-9 result doesn't clarify this (whether that's intentional or unintentional) which results in the 7-9 potentially being better than a 10+. my suggestion would be to have some sort of roll (+wis?) for player characters to avoid fascination on a 7-9 (maybe even on the 10+ though I would surely say that attacking a creature should remove the fascination on them to remove chance of over powering the ability), this would make it useful or extremely dangerous if used in a fight, but almost always beneficial to the bard.

regardless, what I read so far of your sessions is very interesting. look forward to reading more in the future!

One thing I forgot to mention: we did not use formal initiative even with the larger group of four players.  I just let everything flow like AW, with frequent jumps from player to player to find out what they were doing next.  It worked just fine.