I am rather enjoying the Dungeon World game I'm in, it feels pretty much like most RPG's in play. (The group in question, we play Talislanta and Basic D&D, plus Dungeon World...so )

Quote from: One Horse Town;673871I don't think it's hate in most cases, just incredulity that in some quarters it's been marketed as an OSR game - mainly by fans, it must be said.

This is my only problem with it. It's not an OSR game -- it's not even close. I wouldn't even consider it an old school game. At best, it's an old school setting played with new school "narrative RPG" rules. As a new school narrative RPG, it may be great -- I'm certainly not qualified to judge as it pushes most of my "this game is not for me" buttons.

I think most of the "hate" it gets isn't about the game, but the fact that OSR fans have quickly become tired of the recent "fad" of people pushing their "new school rules" games as "OSR games" apparently hoping to cash in on whatever popularity the OSR has.

Quote from: RandallS;673880This is my only problem with it. It's not an OSR game -- it's not even close. I wouldn't even consider it an old school game. At best, it's an old school setting played with new school "narrative RPG" rules.

I don't know what counts as narrative rules, but I'm not sure DW has them. With a very few exceptions, the players say what their characters do, the GM says what the world is (plus takes the player's input, as fits the world, on their terms), and there's nothing to enforce a story arc or plot line or any particular structure.

Practically, in my play, a lot of the events are of primary importance only because we played through them. We didn't save the world, or make some dramatic personal discoveries. We played a bunch of friends (sometimes "friends") who went into The Castle of the Flaming Skull (or whatever) and often died pretty miserably. In one case, while singing Pinball Wizard. (My character was, not me… it's a long story with a planar alignment and a movie theater from the real world and a bard with a keytar.)

Oh, and edited to add: I don't claim it's OSR either. If people are claiming that, I think they're wrong, but that's my opinion. I don't think it's an "old school game" but I'm not entirely sure what that means that a game that is literally old, which DW isn't. Our claim with DW is that we found a lot of inspiration in old-school games, and feel like DW is related to them, because we wouldn't have ended up with the game we have without playing and loving old school games.

Quote from: RandallS;673880(...) tired of the recent "fad" of people pushing their "new school rules" games as "OSR games" apparently hoping to cash in on whatever popularity the OSR has.

I can say pretty confidently that I have no interest in cashing in. We make the entire rules available for free, because out top priority is sharing our game with people. I personally would hate to design RPGs as a job. I love my day job, and love keeping RPGs as something where I can do what I want without worrying if I make a penny.

Quote from: RandallS;673880I think most of the "hate" it gets isn't about the game, but the fact that OSR fans have quickly become tired of the recent "fad" of people pushing their "new school rules" games as "OSR games" apparently hoping to cash in on whatever popularity the OSR has.

As a matter of interest, is this something that has happened here, on TBP or elsewhere in regard to DW? Without wanting to sound naiive, I haven't seen these claims being made and its not something that happened in this thread.

I have seen Myth and Magic using the term OSR pretty heavily though.

Quote from: sage;673875Sorry I couldn't have saved you some money: the entire game is Creative Commons licensed and therefore freely and legally available from http://book.dwgazetteer.com/

Did you seriously post this on GitHub formatted for InDesign?

Quote from: sage;673883I don't know what counts as narrative rules, but I'm not sure DW has them. With a very few exceptions, the players say what their characters do, the GM says what the world is (plus takes the player's input, as fits the world, on their terms), and there's nothing to enforce a story arc or plot line or any particular structure.

You are acquainted with Vincent Baker and the Forge (I could go and dig the tweets you got in with the lol-band when Vincent took some potshots at the RPG Site for a similar thread, claiming we got our greasy Cheetos-stained fingers on AW or some such, hence my user title).

Therefore, I think you know very well what you are doing here. You are equating people's talk of "story" here with "story telling", i.e. the enforcement of a "plotline" in a rigid (railroady) way from the time of White Wolf, when in fact your game is of the Vincent Baker/Ron Edwards' school of design, the school that taught that this take on "story telling" was "brain-damaged", and that what actually needed to happen was "Story Now".

Your game is very much a narrative game, because the world around the PCs actions and moves has in fact little substance before the overriding principle that drives the emergent narrative (Story Now): "Find out what happens next."

Everything else is secondary to that goal, as exemplified, for instance, by entire swaths of maps left blank to be able to fill them according to the emergent development of the narrative. The world serves the fiction, which is construed as such: what you are building with this game is a cooperative fiction, and the GM must "Follow The Rules" for the players to be able to participate meaningfully in the creation of this emergent narrative in which all participants have to be grabbing the edges of their seats wondering "what happens next." This is a story telling exercise. Not world emulation.

Quote from: StormBringer;673915Did you seriously post this on GitHub formatted for InDesign?

Yes: https://github.com/Sagelt/Dungeon-World

Early on we used svn, since I've contributed some code there, but man was it not the tool we needed. We moved to github somewhere later on.

The next move is to take the fan-generated HTML from http://book.dwgazetteer.com/ and make it the canonical version, since I think I'm the only person to ever make use of the xml bindings and we're not really touching the book at this point. Way more opportunity for people making their own cool HTML versions than a full InDesign relayout.

Quote from: Benoist;673917You are acquainted with Vincent Baker and the Forge (I could go and dig the tweets you got in with the lol-band when Vincent took some potshots at the RPG Site for this very thread).

Therefore, I think you know very well what you are doing here. You are equating people's talk of "story" here with "story telling", i.e. the enforcement of a "plotline" in a rigid (railroady) way from the time of White Wolf, when in fact your game is of the Vincent Baker/Ron Edwards' school of design, the school that taught that this take on "story telling" was "brain-damaged", and that what actually needed to happen was "Story Now".

Your game is very much a narrative game, because the world around the PCs actions and moves has in fact little substance before the overriding principle that drives the emergent narrative (Story Now): "Find out what happens next."

Everything else is secondary to that goal, as exemplified, for instance, by entire swaths of maps left blank to be able to fill them according to the emergent development of the narrative. The world serves the fiction, which is construed as such: what you are building with this game is a cooperative fiction, and the GM must "Follow The Rules" for the players to be able to participate meaningfully in the creation of this emergent narrative in which all participants have to be grabbing the edges of their seats wondering "what happens next." This is a story telling exercise. Not world emulation.

I'm not a theory-head at all. I honestly can't stand to read Ron's writing. Never finished a single essay.

I don't tend to use "fiction" and "world" in those ways, so it took me a while to get what you're getting at. To me, the "fiction" is the "world," i.e the fictional place the character inhabit.

You're leaving out the first part of the GM's agenda: portray a fantastic world.

That, in my opinion, is key. It's why it's first. "Play to find out what happens" is a way of precluding lame scripted adventures, in my mind. Vincent, who wrote AW, may have had other use for it there. In DW, it's about not scripting what will happen. Instead, you make a world in motion and see how it turns out.

I'm not sure about "entire swaths of maps left blank." From the DW text: "When you draw a map don't try to make it complete. Leave room for the unknown. As you play you'll get more ideas and the players will give you inspiration to work with. Let the maps expand and change."

For me, this is how I run just about everything, and have since I first played D&D (way before I ever encountered anything from the Forge). I draw a map with the important stuff, and then fill in more as it becomes needed/obvious.

I can see some ambiguity in "change" in the above quote, reading it as if it was written by somebody slightly crazy. The intended use of "change" is "oh, the players drove off the goblins, I guess the map should change. What might take advantage of the goblin warrens now?"

The world around the PCs is of utmost importance, because without it the rules literally cannot work. If I say, in a vacuum, "Gregor swings his sword" we have no idea if Hack and Slash might be triggered, or if damage is just dealt, or whatever else (class moves, maybe defend in some cases). The world of DW is key, and it has to be as fictionally "solid" as anything made up in a person's head can be, at least when it comes into contact with the players.

The areas that players don't get to, those can be filled in later. Those are the blanks. They're the "here be dragons" of the DW maps.

DW presumes a world where the player characters will be caught up in, in the way of, or working against interesting things. That's the bedrock assumption, and I guess that may be narrative in some way? I don't know the rules here. "You're at the entrance of a dungeon" is totally being caught up in something, by the way.

There's also the whole Fronts and World systems to help the GM manage the ever changing world around the characters. That's what the GM does.

So wait. You are using all the buzzwords, you are talking of Creative Agenda for the GM and players, you are talking about "Fronts" which really are "Antagonists" in a narrative sense, you are clearly with your co-author pushing the narrative-first angle where the actual depiction of a world, as exemplified by the map of the dungeon, is left blank to respond to what actually emerges from the narrative (and not "changed" in the sense of an emulative evolution of the game world at all), and you are trying to tell me you have NO IDEA what it is I am talking about?

OK. I got to tell you something. I think you are a smart guy. I think you created with Dungeon World a very finely tuned game, a good game, for what it is: a story game. So either you have no idea and are a totally blind follower joining in the lol-band on twitter when it comes to laugh at people like us, so you are basically a brain-dead moron who has no idea what he's laughing at in the first place, a loser, who just happened to come up with this really good Forge design by pure chance, OR you actually are disingenuous here and know exactly what I'm talking about, and actually came up with a really tight design knowing what you were doing.

I'm going to go with Occam's Razor here, and think the latter is much more probable.

Quote from: sage;673919Yes: https://github.com/Sagelt/Dungeon-World

Early on we used svn, since I've contributed some code there, but man was it not the tool we needed. We moved to github somewhere later on.

You do realize that is what PasteBin is for, not software versioning systems?  Or, you know, since you have a hosted web site, you could always post plain text and/or pdfs there?

Here is more or less exactly what you just said:  "We originally published the novel as a spreadsheet, but that didn't work, so we decided on MatLab instead".  It's not that is simply doesn't make sense, it's that it intentionally doesn't make sense in the most complicated and difficult to use manner possible.

QuoteThe next move is to take the fan-generated HTML from http://book.dwgazetteer.com/ and make it the canonical version, since I think I'm the only person to ever make use of the xml bindings and we're not really touching the book at this point. Way more opportunity for people making their own cool HTML versions than a full InDesign relayout.

"Instead of releasing the Hittite we have been working on, we are going to let everyone make their own Latin version instead".

You seem way more interested in making a point or being edgy for its own sake than publishing a game, let alone a role-playing game.  A text file of mixed html/xml on GitHub is not how to attract players, it's how to keep the development and distribution confined to a very small group of people; ie, those with a similar technical background that are highly unlikely to 'rock the boat' to any significant degree.

Quote from: sage;673883Oh, and edited to add: I don't claim it's OSR either. If people are claiming that, I think they're wrong, but that's my opinion.

I don't believe I've ever seen you or you co-author make this claim, but I've seen it quite a bit from fans of Dungeon World. They post in on threads asking about favorite OSR games or what OSR rules would be best for X with the "Dungeon World" and if someone says it isn't an OSR game they insist it is. It seems somewhat common on places like RPGNet. It extremely annoying. It's just like when 4e was relatively new and many of its fans were claiming it was really just like OD&D back in the 1970s. ::head desk:: I know you can't control your fans, but what they say affects others opinion of your game.

QuoteI don't think it's an "old school game" but I'm not entirely sure what that means that a game that is literally old, which DW isn't. Our claim with DW is that we found a lot of inspiration in old-school games, and feel like DW is related to them, because we wouldn't have ended up with the game we have without playing and loving old school games.

I guess it is related, but more by setting (dungeon-focus) than by rules or style of play. DW is very "new school" in its rules and really does not support the main OSR-supported styles of play. That's not a bad thing, but it is why most OSR fans don't think the game is remotely an OSR game -- even those OSR fans who enjoy playing DW (and there are some who do, not a lot as far as I can tell, but some) don't consider it an OSR game -- or even an old school game.

QuoteI can say pretty confidently that I have no interest in cashing in. We make the entire rules available for free, because out top priority is sharing our game with people. I personally would hate to design RPGs as a job. I love my day job, and love keeping RPGs as something where I can do what I want without worrying if I make a penny.

My apologies. I did not mean to imply that you were doing so. You don't seem to be from anything I've seen, but a lot of the publishers who are calling (or strongly implying) their new school games are part of the "OSR" really do seem to be trying to play off the OSR's supposed current popularity. This is why the pushback from those fans who are trying to get DW accepted as an OSR game is so strong. Some fans are strongly pushing DW as an OSR game and some publishers are trying to do so with their new school games, and it all gets conflated. That's probably not fair, but life seldom is. I think you are doing the right thing by trying to engage in a dialog with OSR fans -- convince them that the DW publishers are not trying to push DW under the OSR umbrella and things will die down.

Quote from: StormBringer;673938You do realize that is what PasteBin is for, not software versioning systems?  Or, you know, since you have a hosted web site, you could always post plain text and/or pdfs there?

Here is more or less exactly what you just said:  "We originally published the novel as a spreadsheet, but that didn't work, so we decided on MatLab instead".  It's not that is simply doesn't make sense, it's that it intentionally doesn't make sense in the most complicated and difficult to use manner possible.

"Instead of releasing the Hittite we have been working on, we are going to let everyone make their own Latin version instead".

You seem way more interested in making a point or being edgy for its own sake than publishing a game, let alone a role-playing game.  A text file of mixed html/xml on GitHub is not how to attract players, it's how to keep the development and distribution confined to a very small group of people; ie, those with a similar technical background that are highly unlikely to 'rock the boat' to any significant degree.

Wait, what? We also have a free PDF, free HTML version, and more.

For me, XML was the best way to work. I was able to easily version and create multiple layouts. InDesign's XML mapping is super cool, and was very useful to us.

I mean, I'll totally admit I'm a software nerd and love my tools, but writing in plaintext and then mapping to layout was awesome for the process. Instead of the normal write->layout flow, it was a loop. We could rewrite and update our layout independently. We could also maintain multiple layouts, epub, and mobi files.

I have no clue if it's of any use to anyone else, but it was the easiest way to make it open, by just sharing our development process.

Quote from: Benoist;673930So wait. You are using all the buzzwords, you are talking of Creative Agenda for the GM and players, you are talking about "Fronts" which really are "Antagonists" in a narrative sense, you are clearly with your co-author pushing the narrative-first angle where the actual depiction of a world, as exemplified by the map of the dungeon, is left blank to respond to what actually emerges from the narrative (and not "changed" in the sense of an emulative evolution of the game world at all), and you are trying to tell me you have NO IDEA what it is I am talking about?

Creative Agenda is some Ron term, right? That's not what DW's Agenda is, at least for me (again: using something someone else originally wrote, they may have different intentions).

I guess you could call Fronts antagonists. I think of them as "what shit is going down around the player characters."

Let me show you an actual DW dungeon map, as this may clear up some misconceptions:

Link to DW map that's too big and screws up layout if I leave it inline.

The bits beyond 13 and 16? Those are blanks. They're the unknowns, that's it. They're unknown because as a GM (before I ran this, which was eventually published) I didn't think those areas that the players will likely go into, so I save some time and skip detailing them. If I need them, I fill them in. Or, if inspiration strikes. Or, if the players give you something you want to use.

This is a custom map made to order, not something we found. Those are the canonical examples of blanks.

If you don't like the idea of leaving blanks like that, cool! DW probably isn't the game for you. But they're not huge Schrodinger's Dungeons. They're the GM being economical with their prep. You don't have to know it all now.

They change as the world changes. I don't know where you got the impression that wasn't the case. The map reflects the world.

Quote from: Benoist;673930OK. I got to tell you something. I think you are a smart guy. I think you created with Dungeon World a very finely tuned game, a good game, for what it is: a story game. So either you have no idea and are a totally blind follower joining in the lol-band on twitter when it comes to laugh at people like us, so you are basically a brain-dead moron who has no idea what he's laughing at in the first place, a loser, who just happened to come up with this really good Forge design by pure chance, OR you actually are disingenuous here and know exactly what I'm talking about, and actually came up with a really tight design knowing what you were doing.

Can I choose none of the above?

I made a game. I don't give two shits about the theory other people ascribe to it, I wanted to make a functional thing.

As I said: based on a Vincent Baker design. From all my interactions with him he seems like a really nice guy, but I don't agree with him on plenty of things. So maybe there are all these crazy ideas I'm perpetuating, but the only reason DW exists is because it worked for me, in play.

Funny historical thing: I played DW before I ever designed/ran/wrote it. The original idea belongs to my friend Tony, and I played in his "Apocalypse D&D" game, and loved it, and he gave us his blessing to take over the project. (I think secretly he was laughing at how much work we'd just taken off his hands.)

I'm not laughing at anybody here. We've got some different views, but I think there's an actual opportunity to just hang out and play games (online, at cons, whatever) and failing that, at least talk about all the cool stuff going on in gaming.

As for twitter: I've probably laughed at this site there, sure. It's a coping mechanism for being accused of destroying all gaming. Probably not the best thing I've done as a person. These days my twitter feed is mostly comic panels.

Quote from: Benoist;673930I'm going to go with Occam's Razor here, and think the latter is much more probable.

Man, I don't know. I'm trying to approach this as openly as I can. I don't know what I can do to prove anything.

Quote from: RandallS;673945I don't believe I've ever seen you or you co-author make this claim, but I've seen it quite a bit from fans of Dungeon World. They post in on threads asking about favorite OSR games or what OSR rules would be best for X with the "Dungeon World" and if someone says it isn't an OSR game they insist it is.

This is a really hard one, because my connection to these people is basically business. DW has sold thousands of copies, and maybe a hundred or so of those are people I know as any thing more than a name, or maybe even just a transaction number in some places.

If anyone ever does this, feel free to quote me: "Hey! Glad you like DW, but I don't think it's OSR. There's lots of cool OSR games out there though, so definitely check them out."

Quote from: RandallS;673945My apologies.

No problem! Sorry to sound defensive, as someone noted up thread I feel a little "in the lions' den" here. Shouldn't have assumed that was about me!

Quote from: sage;673864You're welcome to call it what you want, and I was asked to post what I think it is. I'm presenting my opinion, not telling you what to think. I tried to make it clear that these were my thoughts, that I'm sharing, particularly because some people seem to think DW is OSR (or is trying to be).

I do play D&D. Often. Along with OSR and old-school-inspired games, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Our reason for making DW was to make a game that better suited a type of game that some people (apparently quite a few, based on the response we've gotten) have also gotten from D&D. We could keep doing that with various D&D rules, but we found that, for us, DW makes that particular flavor of D&D easier. That's just us, though. If your flavor of D&D isn't DW's flavor, or if you prefer any given D&D ruleset's tools to DW's, great! DW isn't for you, and that's no problem to me.

I know that myself, my co-author, and a lot of the people who have told us they like DW also like (or have claimed to like) DCC, Lamentations, Moldvay D&D, AD&D 1E, Red Box Hack, Rolemaster, Fiasco, 4th Edition, 3rd Edition, Stars Without Number, 13th Age, Amber, and a whole lot of other games. So, as far as I can tell, it is a product for (some) people who like classic RPGs. Our most common feedback from people who enjoyed the game (not everyone does) is that it reminds them of their first time playing D&D.

If, for you, DW is a meat pizza and you ordered veggie, that's a good reason not to play it. The reaction I've seen more often is that people think of DW as one pizza joint, and each edition of D&D as another, and that they hit some of the same spots and some different ones. It's like Papa Johns and Pizza Hut: some people prefer one all the time, some people like the deep dish from Pizza Hut, but the dipping sauce from Papa Johns, some people would rather have a burger.

A person can like a meat pizza and vegetarian one, and so what?  The point is to categorize pizzas because there are different types of pizzas.  A person might eat a different type of pizza every Friday, or a person could choose the same one every Friday, it's up to them, but the pizza providers need to have a menu so that someone can select what they really want without obscuration of what food they are really getting.  Which requires categorizing them, perhaps even down to every last ingredient. In other words, saying that you know a person who likes to eat a meat pizza just as much as vegetarian one does not mean that you shouldn't categorize them differently.