"So, you guys are adventurers, and you're on your way back from... somewhere. I don't know where, I wasn't there - you guys can fill me in on the details as we go. Last night you found yourself at the village of York's Lay, and checked into the local inn. There, a farmer, one John Biddle, told you about the Kobold infestation in a cave on his farm, and how they had been stealing his sheep. For some reason, you guys agreed to sort it out for him.

And that's why it's just gone breakfast time, and you're standing at the bottom of a scraggly hill. There's a gravel path leading up to a cave mouth. Now, let's have a look at our prospective heroes..."

That was my pitch, and the lead-in to character creation. Five players turned up, so I explained the basis of the game - fantasy adventure RPG, heroes, decisions, rules-light - laid out the class sheets, and we got on with character creation. It turns out we've got the remains of three other groups. Let's start with...

Balthazar, the Wizard... Balthazar's the pompous sort of wizard, who commands all of reality, and fucking knows it. He was in the Line of Fire - a massive volcano chain down the west side of our continent - trying to relieve the villagers of the burdens of their lumps of "gold", offering to exchange them for valuable, shiny beads. After they ran him out of town, he bumped into...

Gorm All Mighty and "Hands. Gorm's a scrawny guy from the north, wearing a suit of stinking fur armour and swirly blue tribal tattoos, but he's pretty fucking handy with an axe. "Hands" is kind of a roguish sort - in a very lawful way, of course - and doesn't actually remember his own name. He's a nondescript guy who could easily blend into a crowd, even with the short sword and throwing knives he keeps handy, "just in case". After meeting Balthazar, these guys found themselves in battle with something that had far too many teeth. But, lo! They have further allies, in the shape of...

Samson and Nathan. Now, Samson's a fighty type - scale, shield, and a fucking ace sword called "Gray Herald" that he picked up from the teeth thing we mentioned earlier. Nathan, on the other hand, is a cleric of the god Sung - the god of Retribution - and his goal in life is to convert everyone. EVERYONE, but particularly Samson for the time being. He also completely trusts Balthazar, which... I don't think is well advised, personally. These guys fought a Tiefling that was trying to take over the world! That's pretty cool. I wonder if it had any cultists?

We actually had a rules query here, in that we weren't sure how many spells Nathan started out with access to, for preparation, so I decided ruled "three, same as the wizzie, but I'll find out and get back to you". I also let him add the domain Retribution, because he didn't think any of the others fitted.

Character gen was FAST, because the sheets are incredibly well-designed, and guide you through the process really well, almost too well because I did have to slow some players down while others caught up with each step. But that was fine, gave us time to talk about the characters and ask questions. I told them to ignore selecting from the lists, and pick their own names.

Also, one of my players is an occasional poster here. I'm happy to share my notes, but only after they're done with the caves.

So, characters established, we got back to the caves. Hands decided to go exploring around the cave entrance, finding what looked very much like a waste pit - sheep bones, small animal carcasses, eggshells, that sort of thing. Entirely unremarkable, really. Eventually, the decided to go in, and after about fifty metres, it started to get dark. Real dark. Nathan petitioned Sung for light, and lo, did Sung's magical symbol - a hand with an extended middle finger, on the end of Nathan's quarterstaff - shine. Like a beacon. The path diverged after a point, left and right, with kobold tracks leading in both directions.

Nathan told the group they were going left. So they were. I got a marching order - Samson, Gorm, Nathan, Balthazar, Hands - and off they went, until in front of them, blocking the corridor, they saw... a web. A giiiiant web, covering the width of the corridor, and in the distance... a darker shape, with some glittering... things... in the middle of it.

The group hunkered down to investigate the web, with Hands eventually deciding to get out a torch, light it, and burn the web, which... worked! The web eventually caught, burning away. Hands crept forward to recover his torch, and investigated the web, which... seemed to be more... ropelike. Maybe painted, and glued to the sides of the corridor. After being egged on by the rest of the group, Hands threw the torch at the dark, glittering shape. It whirled, twisting in the air, to land... wood-first beside the dark shape. It rapidly caught fire, and a screaming sound emitted from it. the party retreated, ready for action (And there were clangy-type noises coming from the far end of the corridor), but... nothing came. Samson edged forwards, and started smashing at the dark shape, which rapidly fell apart under his blows. It looked to have been the skin of some giant spider, with glittering glass balls where it's eye sockets would have been.

So all the screaming stopped, after Samson was done smashing the skin to bits. Hands picked up one of the glass balls; just a ball, made of glass, before scouting ahead to the end of the corridor. He found a dimly-lit room, with a number of dirty cots, and to the left, well, five grinning, reptilian faces. And then a shiny thing, moving fast towards him... he dodged back out of the way, and the fight was on.

Samson and Gorm charged into the room (After Gorm let out a spectacularly crap warcry), smashing back and forth with their weapons. Kobold parts flew all over the place, but they were fighting recklessly; striding forth and not caring about ambushes, one of which included a kobold dropping from the ceiling and biting a chunk out of Gorm's face, before Samson ran it through. Nathan covered Samson's back as best he could, but

Whenever they rolled 10+ - do damage and avoid counterattack, or do extra damage and open yourself up for an attack - they went for the damage, which was kinda needless as Kobolds are kinda krap. I think I used "deal damage" a bit too much, really. Still, they had fun.

I wasn't entirely comfortable with not rolling damage. I tried it the book's way, and logically it doesn't matter which person at the table physically rolls that dice (It's still a d6), but I think I'll take back that job.

Balthazar and Hands, meanwhile, decided to guard the rear of the party. Two Kobold archers were attracted by the noise, and attempted to ambush them; Balthazar magically feared one of them (But his spell caused a little more attention than he would have liked... and he doesn't know what, yet), but his buddy managed to get in a few shots at the rest of the group. Hands came up with a fantastic plan which involved wallrunning to the Kobolds and stabbing them from above, which went great, right until he fell on his face and one of them decided to stamp on him a bit, for good measure. Balthazar than attempted to talk them into surrendering; believing themselves to be mighty, Stampy the Kobold said they'd surrender if the adventurers did. Hands attempted to take advantage of the distraction to launch a surprise attack, but instead ended up falling over (Or "being crap at standing up", as we put it). Feared Kobold just ran off after a while, doubtless to shit a brick somewhere.

The fighters managed to finish off the rest of the Kobolds (Including running down the last two), and Hands managed to tied up Stampy, to use as a guide. Under interrogation, Stampy revealed that they had two sheep, they belonged to the Kobolds, and there were more traps. That seemed a fitting time to break for the evening...

Thoughts : Initiative-less combat is tricky to manage, and it felt like it went on quite long, but everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Actual play time was probably about ninety minutes, and I had assumed they would get through more game, but - first session, it's okay. Add some joking about, and it seemed like a decent session.

One thing that I did notice was, because the mechanics are so simple and so visible, you can't hide behind them as a GM. You have to be ON IT, all the time, and can't say "I'll look that up..." to buy yourself time. I certainly didn't feel constrained by my set of "GM Moves".

In terms of GM resources / tone-setting books, I had my scenario notes, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (Which is a parody travel guide for Extruded Fantasy stories) and Vornheim. I've got the Advanced Fighting Fantasy books as well, readied for use, but weren't at the table.

XP seems to be really fast, too, because it's given on a miss, and there were many misses. Then 0 - 4 session XP, and... it's rapid. Maybe it's a mechanic designed for longer sessions than ours?

As the aforementioned 'occasional poster' (and player of Balthazar) I'd been wanting to try out Dungeon World for ages but couldn't seem to get my head round it well enough to run it myself. My take:

- chargen was indeed very quick. People have argued about the pros and cons of only having 1 of each type in the party. Not sure if anyone would have wanted to play what someone else had already taken. I considered Paladin but settled for wizard in the end just to see how the magic system worked. As it turned out I only cast 1 spell all night...

- the mechanic is simplicity itself and the sheets have most of the info you need to interpret the rolls. Some of the abilities seem quite powerful (the Thief's Backstab for instance) but nobody outshone anyone else, and even if you don't take the default stat array like we did it's very difficult to powergame because the bonuses are so low - as 1st level PCs doing anything successfully is quite tough, so in that respect it does evoke the feel of old D&D for me. I echo the comment about the GM having to be on the ball though - being able to add info every time someone makes a Spout Lore or Discern Realities check looks like a bit of a challenge.

- I do wonder about the XP mechanic. Fail a roll (so 6 or less) and get 1XP. There are a few 'low/no risk' moves you can try which if they come off fine, and if not, you get XP. GM needs to be on top of potential abuse (but it's no worse than say early Runequest players rolling for everything on the basis that as soon as you succeed you get to try and learn from experience once you finish the adventure).

Overall, thought it would be a long time til I ever played a 'levels and classes game' again but this is kinda fun. Not a massive amount of options as the PCs progress but enough that you can have a bit of control over how you develop, without any of the splat bloat of latter D&D/Pathfinder type games. By coincidence, today I was speaking to one of my oldest gaming buddies who now plays in a different group. I told him what we'd been playing and he looked rather wistful when I told him how simple it was, before regaling me with what his own gang were doing the night after. Apparently only 1 of them now *doesn't* use a tablet or phone to run some sort of character tracker program as the number of modifiers being thrown around and constantly changing conditions (this is 8th level Pathfinder) is beginning to drag the game down otherwise.

Quote from: Derabar;674653- the mechanic is simplicity itself and the sheets have most of the info you need to interpret the rolls. Some of the abilities seem quite powerful (the Thief's Backstab for instance) but nobody outshone anyone else, and even if you don't take the default stat array like we did it's very difficult to powergame because the bonuses are so low - as 1st level PCs doing anything successfully is quite tough, so in that respect it does evoke the feel of old D&D for me. I echo the comment about the GM having to be on the ball though - being able to add info every time someone makes a Spout Lore or Discern Realities check looks like a bit of a challenge.

Let's explain one thing first. I hate perception / awareness mechanics. They are, frankly, boring, because a character with those skills is always going to get more information and thus more basis to interact with the game world. It's not situational, like the majority of other skills. I think they key in Dungeon World is to just... give out the information, if the character makes the effort to find it. And this is somewhere the GM can't hide, because there aren't those ten seconds of thinking time while the player is fiddling with mechanics.

There is also a bit of "player de-programming" required; a lot of games condition players to go for p/a rolls, rather than describe looking for things.

Quote- I do wonder about the XP mechanic. Fail a roll (so 6 or less) and get 1XP. There are a few 'low/no risk' moves you can try which if they come off fine, and if not, you get XP. GM needs to be on top of potential abuse (but it's no worse than say early Runequest players rolling for everything on the basis that as soon as you succeed you get to try and learn from experience once you finish the adventure).

I think this leads off the "Discern Realities" stuff above (Which is a relatively safe test to make), and I should probably be more restrictive in what I let get rolled for versus earned, and be harsher with failures when they appear.

QuoteI told him what we'd been playing and he looked rather wistful when I told him how simple it was, before regaling me with what his own gang were doing the night after. Apparently only 1 of them now *doesn't* use a tablet or phone to run some sort of character tracker program as the number of modifiers being thrown around and constantly changing conditions (this is 8th level Pathfinder) is beginning to drag the game down otherwise.

For reference, I had the scenario details up on my iPad, but my notes are very short, and take up maybe a screen of space. The kobold stats... well, 3 hp, d6 damage, be a sneaky fucker whose home is getting invaded. That's it.

Anything 3.x-based sounds like waaaay too much crunch for me, I've served my time with CCG's and their system mastery requirements.