The Gaming Den

I'm sure everyone knows already but someone made a *World hack for Dungeons and Dragons called Dungeon world. Despite the game being a tepid retool of an already terrible system it has won some kind of award for it's rules. Even theRPGsite which still denounces Apocalypse world as storygaming swine conspiracy has people including the Pundit shilling for it (proving once and for all they're full of shit). I'm left holding my hands up in dismay, the emperor clearly has no clothes yet it seems that everyone is caught up in complementing the outfit.

For those of you who aren't familiar with *World games it works like this the players declare their "Move" and if they roll 6 or less on the 2d6+mod the GM make "Move" themselves which inflicts a negative consequence ranging from "you drop you torch" to "a Dragon crashes through the ceiling". It's a core resolution system the resolves jack squat because on a failure the pass the buck right back to the GM. The range and arbitrariness of failure states makes a mockery of player agency.

Say for example after a dragon crashes throught the ceiling for no reason the PCs try to fight it how hard a challenge the Dragon is going to be? That's totally up to the GM literally on a round by round basis.

Fighting the dragon involves making defy danger tests for none, some, or all of you actions as decided by the GM with the fight being harder or easier depending on how often they're called for. Failed rolls could result in claw/bite damage or they also could be minor nuisances. Failing a roll could also get you kicked into the whelp cave and spawn a bunch of whelps. Even if the party minimizes their chance of failure by only ever rolling for things they have the highest bonus that only does so much because the dragon takes a deep breath and burniates the party when the DM feels it's appropriate and not at other times.

and the jackass who made this game sees nothing wrong with the game not giving a solid answer to questions a simple as "how often can this dragon breath fire" because...

Sage LaTorra wrote:The GM is the ultimate tool in gaming, they can respond to every situation.

Fuck. That. Shit.

people have payed him actual money for this abomination, and Dungeon World along with any other *World games are an abomination because the are worse than "Magic Tea Party", in pure "Magic Tea Party" everyone gets to make things up in *World you're on a nonstop improve railroad because on the GM gets to "MTP" and that sucks. The fact that developers made any money at all on this bullshit make them scoundrels and charlatans and Dungeon World has almost certainly done more actual harm to the RPGs as a whole than bullshit like FATAL. 'cause everyone just laughed at FATAL and *World games have actual followers that shill their shitty design.

Sorry about the rant, I just had to get that off my chest >_<

I dub this thread silva bait.

And walk away.

Read our discussion of said games already on this forum. Mostly just arguing with the one dumbass who defends them here.

Inb4 Silva

Inb4 suddenly bears

that is all.

We can agree that I've pounded my head against that particular wall enough times, right?

You´re late to the party. The consensus around here is that *World games suck. Not that I agree with that, mind you. But my arguments are the same that Sage, Robiswrong and Warthur already exposed over at theRPGsite thread, so I dont have anything new to add.

I know which game you wish you were playing, gamerGoyf: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54445

I'm glad to have some proper vitriol flowing around here again.

Edit: HOLY SHIT that link. Reading Silva arguing with the RPGsite retards feels like watching a subway groper fight off a group of full blown rapists. Silva you are seriously like some sort of evolutionary link between them and us. Not quite ape but not yet man. Keep fighting the moderately good fight man, that looks rough.

Fucking Moron wrote:

silva wrote:One game is over-reliant on hard-numbers and math precision (from concepts as thac0s and armor class, to stats witth little modifiers everywhere, to the consulting of lots of tables for precise outcomes).

What the hell edition are you talking about? Because it bears no resemblance to anything I've played.

Once again , "3rd Edition is not the entire D&D world."

Holy shit balls McHairyFucks.
That idiot melted my brain for a second.

slowpoke.jpg

deanruel87 wrote:I'm glad to have some proper vitriol flowing around here again.

The fuck have you been? Frank and K are going at it like wild dogs in the "How Many Monsters Does an Edition of D&D Need?" thread.

codeGlaze wrote:Holy shit balls McHairyFucks.
That idiot melted my brain for a second.

That dude is an even more ludicrous grognard than shadzar, he just knows how to use a shift key. His posts on RPGnet on how OD&D is awesome, anyone who wants balance is subhuman, description is evil, and disagreement is heresy should be preserved in amber...both because they're classic examples of the type, and so nobody ever has to read them again.

Of course, it's RPGnet, I'm currently in an argument with a dude who thinks that advocating non-libertarian positions is an initiation of force, and murder is a reasonable response. No, I'm not kidding.

silva wrote:...my arguments are the same that Sage, Robiswrong and Warthur already exposed...

I do try not to be picky about spelling.

But really when you want to say "espoused" or possibly "expounded" you REALLY don't want to accidentally say "exposed".

It makes it sound like your arguments were like cockroaches under a rock that they lifted up.

Or maybe that the quality of their arguments and presentation was much like what you would expect to find beneath a flasher's trench coat.

As I've said before, I actually like Apocalypse World. It saddens me that I was too busy during the last big AW flame war to participate fully. That sad, it baffles me why anyone would think smashing it together with d and d would be a good idea in any way. It's such a bad idea on its face that I can't actually summon the energy to say anything funny about it.

Morat wrote:Of course, it's RPGnet, I'm currently in an argument with a dude who thinks that advocating non-libertarian positions is an initiation of force, and murder is a reasonable response. No, I'm not kidding.

Can you shoot me a link to that, it sounds ragelicious.

I guess so long as we're tallying up votes I should mention that I still think Apocalypse World is good and the "bear problem" doesn't exist if you understand basic human interaction and how improvisation works.

However, Dungeon World is not that great. It has the advantage of being rules-lite which makes it easy to run, so I'd consider playing/running it just because a good group will have fun with it anyway and if the group isn't good I won't have wasted that much effort anyway. But really, combining double-digit HP, damage rolls, and those godawful traditional D&D stats with a game that has more in common with improv comedy or roundrobin storytelling than wargaming has created a frankensteinian abomination which, if only it could speak, would beg for release from its twisted mockery of life.

Apocalypse World has zero advantages over pure improv storytelling. There are absolutely no innovations in it that make it better than Munchhausen in any metric or subjective standpoint. The bear problem is not only real, it's hard coded into the actual examples of play. It literally says that the way you are supposed to play the game is for a character to succeed at a roll and then have the MC arbitrarily declare that they fail at the current mission because bears. If you don't pull that kind of insulting horseshit, you are playing the game wrong.

Seriously, the game has very few rules and guidelines that make it different from pure improv storytelling. And empowering and encouraging one of the people at the table to make any player succeed or fail at any mission regardless of whether their action nominally succeeded or failed because bears is one of them. It's actually rather central to the game as written and as practiced by the designer if you believe his RPG.net threads.

In all cases, if someone wanted to play a *World game we would all be better off if they played FATE or Munchhausen instead. No *World game has any advantages at all over either of those other games.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:There are absolutely no innovations in it that make it better than Munchhausen in any metric or subjective standpoint.

I do feel I should note that I cannot contest this on technical grounds: I have never actually played Munchausen, but I have done freeform roleplaying and assuming Munchausen is actually like that then AW does indeed have advantages over it. And to talk about that, we need to talk about Super Smash Brothers. Not as in the thing you do go and do because you won't be needed at the table for like half an hour, but as in an actual game of Smash Brothers.

Specifically, my little brother visited earlier today, and we fired up tourney mode on SSB Brawl so that we'd fight like 30 1v1 matches with random characters in a row, and then as we played we invented a narrative stringing the whole thing together. And that narrative was driven almost completely by the fact that we happened to have two Meta Knights who started in nearby brackets, and a bunch of the characters happened to be using black-and-white or grey palette swaps that made them look like mildly creepy or depressing, or that the Mushroomy Kingdom stage happens to look like World 1-1 from SMB if it got nuked. We didn't have the slightest impact on any of these decisions.

Really, we didn't have the slightest impact on any of the narrative decisions, because we're pretty evenly matched (we both suck) and the only thing we especially controlled was the personalities of involved characters and how we fought. Since who would win any given match was mostly a toss-up, weighted only slightly by things like the two of us having separate sets of favored characters, the amount of control we had over the narrative was pretty much limited to deciding what kind of characters would be in it, one set at a time, and half the choices were eliminated halfway through our descriptions of why they were in the tournament in the first place (notably, I spent all forty-five seconds of Dark Link's life trying to build him up as the main villain only for him to be killed in the first of five rounds).

It turns out, so long as you have at least one creative human being in the room and all of them are friends, you can create narratives out of the statistical noise of an unweighted random generator. Any meaningful influence over victory and defeat is, it turns out, completely optional, all you need is the barest of illusions to the contrary (like the illusion that a one-stock battle between randomly selected characters on a randomly selected arena with randomly spawning items between mostly-evenly-matched opponents is anything other than a coinflip in practice).

So really the only advantage AW needs over completely freeform roleplaying games is a random number generator arbitrarily wrenching the narrative into new directions. And that gives it an advantage over playing tug of war for control of the narrative because everyone being surprised together is a different and better experience than passing the ball of storyteller around the table. Giving certain players a single role to get attached to is also helpful.

The bear problem is not only real, it's hard coded into the actual examples of play. It literally says that the way you are supposed to play the game is for a character to succeed at a roll and then have the MC arbitrarily declare that they fail at the current mission because bears.

So far as I know, this argument is contingent upon your being clairvoyant. The example you are referring to is of a player succeeding at a roll and uncovering an ambush. You assume the ambush was made up on the spot by the MC as a result of the successful roll, but there is no indication of this in the text and that is kind of the opposite of what "successful" means, a fact which your own argument is contingent upon. So when you demonstrate the ability to reliably read the mind of AW's author, this will be something other than bullshit.

On the other hand, you could quote some of those rpg.net posts and maybe he does, in fact, reveal that the game is aimed at GM-worshiping cultists (which sounds like a hyperbolic attack but it's not like those don't exist; 2e's entire modern playerbase is pretty much just cultists). As it happens, that doesn't change the fact that the game he actually produced is still perfectly good fun in the hands of reasonable people.

And empowering and encouraging one of the people at the table to make any player succeed or fail at any mission regardless of whether their action nominally succeeded or failed because bears is one of them.

And this is where the failure to understand basic human interaction comes in. While it is undoubtedly true that there exist groups that will play AW with the GM effectively writing the entire story themselves and everyone else just along for the ride, it is also possible and not at all discouraged by the rules to not do that. To have the successes just be actual successes, the failures to be actual failures, and the in-betweens to be a success with drawbacks. And exactly what each of these things means will vary from group to group but so long as everyone within the group agrees on them that does not actually make a difference. So AW is best played by a group that knows each other already, rather than one specifically assembled to play. It turns out, this stuff happens sometimes.

In all cases, if someone wanted to play a *World game we would all be better off if they played FATE

It is sometimes the case that someone feels better about picking a pre-determined archetype like AW classes than generating from scratch like with FATE. It is also sometimes the case that people do not want to deal with the fairly large amount of rules understanding FATE demands, since you must be able to not only know how the rules work but also understand them well enough to modify them if you want the system to actually work halfway decently.

or Munchhausen

See above, the utility of a random number generator and etc. etc. Plus, people can want their character to have certain weighted advantages in certain kinds of conflicts compared to other characters, and Munchausen does not give you that. This desire is not mutually exclusive to having a small amount of rules.

Do you have any argument against AW that cannot be resolved by refusing to play with assholes?

So, what are the advantage of FATE Core over MTP, exactly?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So, what are the advantage of FATE Core over MTP, exactly?

An increase in consistency and, assuming adding a random number generator and a mandate to obey its results makes something not MTP, also that. I'm not entirely convinced that the increase in complexity is worth it, but I'm not convinced it isn't either.

Chamomile wrote:So far as I know, this argument is contingent upon your being clairvoyant. The example you are referring to is of a player succeeding at a roll and uncovering an ambush. You assume the ambush was made up on the spot by the MC as a result of the successful roll

I'm going to stop you right there, because none of this requires any form of clairvoyance at all. Because Apocalypse World has actually very few organizing principles or rules, but one of them is that the MC isn't supposed to plan anything. If the potential ambush existed before it was "uncovered" as the result of a "successful roll", the MC would very specifically be "playing it wrong".

I'm not saying that you can't get a good game out of having an improv storytelling session periodically interrupted with a three output RNG. In fact, I am totally saying the opposite, because that is exactly what Munchhausen is. I am saying that literally the only innovation of note in Apocalypse World is "suddenly bears". That's it. And it's fucked.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Chamomile wrote:So far as I know, this argument is contingent upon your being clairvoyant. The example you are referring to is of a player succeeding at a roll and uncovering an ambush. You assume the ambush was made up on the spot by the MC as a result of the successful roll

I'm going to stop you right there, because none of this requires any form of clairvoyance at all. Because Apocalypse World has actually very few organizing principles or rules, but one of them is that the MC isn't supposed to plan anything. If the potential ambush existed before it was "uncovered" as the result of a "successful roll", the MC would very specifically be "playing it wrong".

That is not actually true. The GM is not supposed to plan for the future. They are not supposed to set up specific set piece battles or worry about hooking the players into a specific quest. This is not the same thing as not worrying about what's going on in the present. In fact, the entire AW concept of Fronts is specifically there so that GMs can keep the big picture organized and drop appropriate hints about impending doom to the players before it hits, specifically so they can go do something about it before that happens.

Oh no. Please, no. Not again.

Yeah, it's really terrible how we're holding your family hostage to make you read threads you don't like.

I feel like I need to recalibrate my troll-dar after reading that brad guy's posts on rpgsite.

Chamomile wrote:Yeah, it's really terrible how we're holding your family hostage to make you read threads you don't like.

About that...

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So, what are the advantage of FATE Core over MTP, exactly?

Quantifiable and repeatable results that are codified within the rules.