Some rambling thoughts about move and playbook design.
Something I realized tonight. The playbooks I like best are the ones that don’t let you hammer on one or two stats for everything. I played a Thief in DW, and pretty much as long as my Dex is high, I’ll nearly always win hard.
Sure, some of that’s up to the GM and player to create appropriate challenges. But a savvy player is going to work the fiction in their favor. There can be a weird success spiral in *World games, where success leads to more success when you can leverage your strengths too often.
A player of mine with his Barbarian is levelling up about twice his party only by failed Sprout lore and Discern realities rolls… His CON score doesn’t really seem to matter 😂
It’s why I really like the new XP system for AW: Dark Ages. IT helps balance some of those issues. I will explain more later when I have more than a second to type if no one else has.
I haven’t played too much Dungeon World, but in the other World games it feels more like a trade off. You focus on one stat and you get really good at the stakes you can achieve with that stat but bad at the stakes you need other stats for. Like if you don’t have Hard it can be…well…hard to Seize by Force. So you end up spending precious move slots on moves that let you use another stat to Seize by Force.
Now if you have more balanced stats, you end up with no overwhelming advantage in one type of thing. But you get more chances in everything or multiple things. So it kinda works out.
On the XP side, I too love the way Dark Age handles it like Tommy Rayburn . But then my groups always try to screw each other by marking the lowest stats on each others sheets. So it forces them to use their low moves. And I know Dungeon World uses the fail system.
On the Dungeon World side, by the by, I wonder if the way Defy Danger works allows you to use your best stat by choosing the right fiction maybe contributes to the issue you’re seeing. Does the player normally choose the stat? Or does the MC? And if the MC, do most MCs allow the player the luxury of their best stat?
More thoughts/some answers.
I think AW is the best implementation I’ve seen to avoid this problem. Characters can get good at a stat, but the highlighting mechanism and reliance on other moves to bolster your actions (e.g., it’s a smart play to Read the Sitch before Going Aggro) ensures that players will roll their low stats a lot, too. Have I seen a Hardholder pound their Hard stat all session? Sure. But AW is dynamic enough that the consequences of going Hard all the time work out.
DW’s XP-on-failure mechanism rewards you for working against your strong stats. Still, a playbook like the Thief is a problem, because all of your moves are based on Dex. There is no incentive for a Thief not to roll Dex nearly all of the time, succeed, then fictionally position themselves to be able to roll Dex again. Does that mean you’ll rarely fail and so rarely advance? Sure. But who needs to improve when you’re already succeeding all the time? (That speaks to a bigger problem with the XP-on-failure system, but that’s a topic for another thread.)
To answer your questions, Robert Burson – When I run DW, I usually suggest one or two options, based on the fiction. Nearly always, the player has created the fictional positioning necessary to use their strong stat. Like, a Thief that wants to sneak? That’s Defying Danger with Dex, and, as we already know, Dex is their strongest stat. So, if I offer Defying Danger with Int or Dex, they’ll choose Dex every time.
By succeeding constantly, you create a success spiral. Since MCs/DMs rely on rolls of 6- to make moves, constantly rolling 7+ keeps them from introducing adequate complications into the fiction. This makes the game really one-sided, and frankly kind of boring.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a huge, game-destroying problem. But, it is something that I hope that I and others keep in mind while designing playbooks. Players ought to be encouraged to diversify their characters’ actions.