Tag: Joshua Fox (Rabalias)

I’m running a short Sagas of the Icelanders campaign at the mo, and I’ve noticed a problem with the female moves. Two out of four of them (Raise your Voice and Talk Sense and Entice a Man) have their only mechanical effect (besides risking an MC move) as a bonus/penalty to a roll. Which means that, mechanically speaking, they don’t affect NPCs at all.

This leaves women, who in theory are good at achieving results by talking and working through others, with exactly one tool to get an NPC to do what they want: Goad a Man to Action. (The fourth and final move is Lie with a Man to Conceive a Child, which is interesting but rather specialised, not to mention infrequent use.)

They are at their most powerful when influencing male PCs, therefore. So what do you do if your game has very few such characters? (Or maybe none?)

In our case we have one Godar (not sure how to do the funky nordic characters here, sorry), and that’s the only man. He’s quite old and not that physically ept. So what I perceive as the normal model, of men going off and doing physical deeds or falling out with each other, and the women kind of herding cats to stop them from getting killed, doesn’t seem to work so well here.

In this situation it feels a bit like the engine of the system has lost all its friction. The parts are still there, but they’re not engaging with each other, and I’m forced to fall back on MC moves, which is kind of exhausting, or fudging the two PC-oriented moves to work on NPCs as well, which feels like it’s probably not how things are meant to work.

Anyone come up against this? Any advice?

It is probable that I shall soon have to run Dungeon World for the first time, having read it through once and played it once. Obvs, I’m going to read it again.

Anyway, this may be a stupid question that I could perfectly well get from the book, but – do you actually have dungeon maps in dungeon world? I mean, do you plan out the detail of places the players might go, and stuff they might encounter, like you would with D&D? Or do you just sort of come up with a bunch of things they might come up against and then throw them in as needed, making up the detailed geography as you go, like you would (well, like I would) in Apocalypse World?

Anything else I should know about prepping and running DW?

I’m about to start running a game at my local club, and two options have equal interest from the potential players: Apocalypse World and Masks.

I’m having trouble deciding, so please help me out by enthusing about your favourite things about either or both of these games. Hopefully this will in turn enthuse me, which is good in itself and might also help me decide.