Post Campaign GM Notes - Scurvy (DW Campaign)

Wow! The world is safe, the last natural born magic user was saved, the baddies were stopped, and only one player character died in the process. The scurvy pirates saved the day. One of my more successful campaigns to date.

The majority of my games have fizzled out for one reason or another before any sort of conclusion could occur, so this has been a new experience for me. When I was younger I think it had a lot to do with me having no idea what I was actually supposed to be doing to run a game. There is also the inevitable player apathy that will settle in midway through a campaign after they realized they would have preferred some other character type. There is also the "Oh yeah, real life stuff." issue, where a long time between sessions makes the players forget most of the details of the campaign and are not really prepared to continue it.

The biggest lesson I learned from this campaign is: plan consequences for inaction NOT plans for actions/plots. This makes it so much easier not to railroad the players through some carefully written plot or bring the adventure to a grinding halt when they turned left instead of right like you were expecting.

Dungeon World - I had first got a PDF of it from a friend who said it was a great system. I honestly hated the book and didn't really pay much attention to it. The character classes are all scattered and there seemed to be no easy shorthand for jotting down the information from the class to a character sheet. It might have helped if the person had provided me with the class playbooks as well (which have all the moves and class information on them already in character sheet form) when I'd originally gotten it, but hindsight is 20/20.

It is a very fluid system that lends itself very well to customization for anyone that wants to put in the effort. And people have. As a GM it gives you a lot of tools to roll with the unpredictability of players; which most anyone could use help with. I honestly feel that reading and absorbing the information from the Dungeon World book will make you a better GM

One drawback about this system, and I think this is more a reflect on my style of teaching systems more than it is on the system, is that it is really hard for players to react with narrative exposition. Most players want to look at their list of moves and assume the answer to their problem lies there, or scour the basic moves looking for some key feature of a move that will unlock all the secrets of the situation. It is hard to break the notion that a game has rules, but that you don't have to pay attention to them while you're playing.

It was difficult to even get them to converse with someone by speaking to them without immediately being asked if they could try to parley with the person to get something out of them. I let go of trying midway through the campaign if I'm honest. I got tired of saying "tell me through narrative what you want to do or accomplish and I'll tell you if it requires a move to be used or it's just something that can happen."

That being said, Dungeon World is a difficult system to break as far as paying attention to the rules. It wasn't a something that ruined the game to have the player say "Can I spout lore about this?" instead of "My character would have researched this in his past. I'm going to try to recall whatever I can about this." The two statements really accomplish the same thing. One is just more immersive than the other and gets the player thinking within the fiction of the game rather than within the structure of the rules the game has.

I can't wait to run a game with this system again. It's a great system to introduce new players to role-playing and is really easy to pick up the rules and go with.

What Didn't Make it to the Game

SO MUCH! Oh man, all the turns this game took left whole sections of the world unexplored. I had come up with a system for random sea encounters and looting the ships, because I assumed the group would be into pirating and plundering. Not once did they even try to look into engaging another ship. During one of the sessions when the players said they didn't know what they were supposed to do. I explained to them that there was no correct way of doing this and there was no need to follow their current path if they found a better lead on what they were looking to find. This course of the game changed a lot more randomly after that. Almost always away from whatever direction I had expected.

There were a lot of islands that never got explored. I had drawn up a quick map and given it to the players so that they could see the entire world, but they skipped most of it. There was a whole island that was going to be a mining island filled with slaves being forced to work by the evil imperial forces that they could have saved. There was a pirate island filled with all sorts of rumors of treasure and adventure. Islands with mystical forests, steam driven imperial cities that took over entire islands and stretched out over the water. A gigantic intelligent hermit crap the was collecting an ever growing shell of shipwrecks to the point that it was large enough to be considered a small island in and of itself, the players would have gone searching through a maze of tangled shipwrecks for lost treasures. Nope.

I never intended for them to die, but they seemed opposed to retreating from any fight they were in regardless of how poor their odds were. I blame video games for that. The idea that any fight can be won with a thousand paper cuts to the baddy and it's just a matter of landing those paper cuts. I tried to stress narrative, but it still ended up with "I 'Hack and Slash' it" a lot of the time. It often felt as if they were searching for the "right" answer, so they got lost in looking for that rather than reacting to the situation. I'll work on that.

How it Changed as it Went

The players were really into the idea of the cult and pursued that relentlessly. I hadn't thought about a cult worshiping a banished god when they wanted to play a pirate themed game. It came up during character background story discussions and both players started fixating on the idea. That's just how Dungeon World (and any other game powered by the Apocalypse) works though, you play to find out what happens.

I got better at planning ideas instead of plots as the sessions went on. I think I learned that my prep time would get wasted if I tried to structure it too much. The players would always avoid the plots I tried to create. It was completely unintentional on their part, but it still presented a challenge for me in the beginning. I started trying to be more reactive to their input rather than trying to impose my ideas on the story-line.

Final Campaign Notes

There were parts that made me uncomfortable, definitely parts that pushed me to think more creatively and come up with ideas on the fly. I can't wait to run another game like this. Running a proper Dungeon World campaign made me a better GM. I can't wait to implement what I learned from this one in other games.

Do yourself a favor: if you have any interest in world building for stories, collaborative narrative, or improv story telling, then buy the Dungeon World PDF (or print if that tickles your fancy) and give the game a try. The PDF is only $10; which is about the cost of going to a movie, except more fun and cheaper to bring friends along with you.

What Game is Next for the Players

They're feeling groovy lately. Can you dig it?