NEW PLAYERS: I wrote a Beginner's Guide to Dungeon World

The guide was well worth the read so I just felt I should contribute to make it more precise. ;)

The guide also helped a lot in fleshing out the compendium class ideas, this baby helps a lot.

Cool! Credit where it's due: the compendium class section was all Emong, a frequent SomethingAwful poster and an infrequent poster here. I think his examples are awesome, too.

In the Cockatrice description one of its abilities is "Start a slow transformation to stone", the Medusa has a similar ability though "Turn a body part to stone with a look". After reading through them both I realized:

There is no "Stone to Flesh" spell anywhere in the book.

That was a bit shocking for someone GMing and playing D&D for 20 years like myself, isn't it? Yeah, quite a bit. Then I closed the book and let that rest a bit, it was a little while before I finally found the answer: Fiction Dictates.

The Medusa is a mythological creature, in quite a few retelling of the tale her victims were turned back into flesh after she was killed. That would be one way to go about it right there, simple, quick and solved alongside the conflict.

You could also say that a stone to flesh spell does exist but, given how rare it is used, it is not part of a spellcaster's usual repertoire but it is not hard to find or cast, a trip to a city with a little research and it is covered.

And at last you could say it is hard to undo such an unnatural power, it is a ritual requiring hard to find and rare ingredients, making the gathering and casting of it an adventure by itself.

What would the right answer be? That is where I go back to the most common advice here: whatever the fiction states.

The group is in the middle of something more important and the enemy's ability to turn into stone was an afterthought, then killing the beast should suffice

You want them to fear the enemy but not halt the game's current direction or force the player to play a new character right now? Then make it a simple spell but one that they do not have yet, a simple trip back and you are done.

You want the game to get a new front that gives them something they want (to turn the character back into flesh) with a cost (to let whatever was happening behind and having to deal with the consequences) then it can be an entire ritual, maybe one that hasn't even been done yet. This choice seems the most interesting for a well placed opponent and even uses one of the GM moves (present an opportunity at a cost).

In the end I was very happy to have been able to break the rules mentality, I finally understood what fiction first meant and am ready to try and enforce that mindset in a live game. :)

Just want to point out that there is, in fact, a built-in "Stone to Flesh" spell: it's the Ritual move.

The beautiful thing about Ritual is that it covers pretty much everything that would be covered by "bigger" spells in D&D. The spells in DW are the ones that a wizard would need right away, so any spell that boils down to "I want to make <effect> happen" falls under Ritual.

When I was writing the Crescent Isle section, I tried to come up with a "water breathing" spell. Should it be a Wizard spell or a Cleric one? What level? Then I realized that you can just cover that with the Ritual move, since the only real effect of a water-breathing spell is "you can breath water".

My point is that while I agree it's good to get out of the "rules mentality", DW has enough mechanical weight that it's a foundation, not a straightjacket.

 I agree, the ritual was actually the choice I like the most, but since there is no stated way, it means you can also apply any of the magical options available instead of worrying about a lot of metagame information, because it is the fiction that defines the choice, not the mechanics.

I love love love Ritual because my Wizard player used it so creatively and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of the move. For me, it fully captures what wizards do in every book and movie- they rarely have a list of spells, instead they're always like "Sure, I can make us all breathe underwater... but it's dangerous because blahblah blah" and then there's like some fun plot device that pushes the movie/book forward with some constraint for the heroes to work with. Ritual perfectly emulates that.

Nifelhein, you are a genius. Your post about fiction was actually quite an eye opener to me. The "Turns body part to stone" example was really spot on. I literally think I understand the premise of the system a lot better now!

Thumbs up!

I wish! ;)

I just wanted to share what actually opened my eyes as I was readign the book. =D

So I picked up a copy of the physical book at pax.  What a nice little booklet!

Thanks, mease! I made an extremely limited run of print copies (because I run a print shop, it's pretty easy for me). I'm glad you grabbed one, I assume it came from the Modern Myths booth. They're my FLGS and awesome guys!

I've already posted on RPG.net, but I wanted to re-iterate here how much this DW Guide has helped myself, a longtime D&D/D20 player, understand the way DW/AW works.  Simply amazing, and I'll be spreading the word!

I posted this DW Guide feedback on the RPG.net forums, figured I'd post it here as well:

Ok I've read and digested the DW Guide; the combat example at the end was perfect, by that point I was able to follow along and realize I would probably do similar things the GM did. And on page 52, "How big are the rubies": I totally laughed out loud at that, considering it was the Wizard asking rather than the Thief!

In return for this amazing guide, I humbly offer some editing feedback (for an eventual 1.3 update perhaps?):

Page 2: 3rd paragraph, 3rd sentence, extra space between "be" and "confusing"
Page 3: 1st paragraph, put a ";" after "Deal Damage" instead of ","
Page 5: 1st paragraph, 1st sentence, there's an extra "."
Page 5: 1st paragraph, 3rd sentence, remove "it" before "tells", change "tells" to "telling"
Page 6: 2nd boxed area, need a space between "an" and ""immediate"
Page 7: bottom of boxed area, need a space between "-1" and "forward"
Page 8: near bottom of boxed area, change "," after location to ".", add another space, and capitalize "they're"
Page 11: near end of 3rd paragraph, is "some thing" meant to be 2 words or "something"?
Page 11: boxed area, change all ", what do you do?"s to ". What do you do?"
Page 12: at the top, in the first 2 sentences, there are 2 extra "the"s
Page 12: 1st paragraph, 4th sentence, change "," after counterattack to ";"
Page 12: 1st paragraph, 3rd-to-last sentence, change ";" after one to ".", and another space, and capitalize "this"
Page 14-17, 19, 27-33: capitalize all instances of "move" to ensure consistency
Page 15: 2nd paragraph, "determining" mis-spelled
Page 19: 2nd paragraph, 5th sentence, replace "," after "moves"(another needed capitalization) with ";"
Page 19: end of 2nd paragraph, capitalize "xp"
Page 24: boxed area, 2nd sentence, change "," after points to "." and add another space
Page 24: boxed area, 2nd Cleric statement, change "." after "6" to ","
Page 27: 4th paragraph, 3rd sentence, remove "," after "moves"(another needed capitalization)
Page 27: last sentence, replace "might actually work" with "applies"?
Page 29: 1st full paragraph, replace "," after "move"(another needed capitalization) with ";"
Page 29: last paragraph, bold "The Supreme Court"
Page 30: top, bold "The Supreme Court"
Page 31: 3rd paragraph, change ";" after "choose" to ":"
Page 32: 1st paragraph, capitalize second "you"
Page 37: Need a blank line before the 1st full paragraph
Page 37: 3rd full paragraph, 4th sentence, capitalize "cast"
Page 58: 2nd line, need a space between "simple" and "and"
Page 59: 2nd line, extra space between "and" and "campaign"?
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Page 36: first full paragraph, you kinda skip over whether Dangers and Portent are actually what make up Fronts, or if all 3 are seperate-but-related

Page 37: Cast is barely mentioned, can you expand/elaborate?

Possible to have page numbers added to the bottom or top-right of the pages?

Something I've instituted at our table is having new Dungeon World players read this guide BEFORE reading the actual rules. I've noticed that the players that did this seem to grasp the game much quicker than those that went the more traditional route of reading the rules first.

Anyway, thanks for the hard work. It's really improved our game!

Thanks, Reno, much appreciated. It's been a while since we wrote the guide, and I wish now that I had included info on how to adjust difficulty. I'm really against any more editing (there are like, thousands of PDFs distributed across multiple websites and it seems silly to do addendums now). I was considering either a follow-up or submitting to the e-zine.

Anyway, I'm psyched that you guys consider it a must-read, that makes Sean and I very happy. The guide has been translated now into Korean, Italian, and Spanish that I know of. That rules!

Thanks for this @Scrape! It's made a big difference for me *grokking* Dungeon World as a new player. :)

I'm really against any more editing (there are like, thousands of PDFs distributed across multiple websites and it seems silly to do addendums now). I was considering either a follow-up or submitting to the e-zine.

Perhaps it could be offered for free download via DTRPG/RPGNow, that way if there's any further edits/fixes we'll be notified...

Is the source text file available for our own edits?