Dungeon World is the first foray into Powered by the Apocalypse games for many gamers, since it is just a hop, skip, and a jump from something like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder into Dungeon World. It borrows quite a bit from those games, in terms of surface-level mechanics, to capture the tone of those worlds while keeping the core of the PbtA system intact.
One of the first things I loved about Dungeon World is how it tonally captures what I always wanted D&D to be but could never quite get there. It blends the adventuring, swashbuckling heroism of your "typical" high fantasy game, and blends it very smoothly with the kick-ass, full throttle, swaggering attitude of Apocalypse World. The Bard playbook gives you abilities like "It Goes to Eleven", while the Thief might get "Wealth and Taste". The Barbarian, my favorite class to play in any game, gets such gems as "What is Best in Life" and "My Love for You is Like a Truck".
Dungeon World was the first game I ever played where bonds and relationships between characters are baked into character creation; it's a non-optional step to build a cohesive party where everyone has history with each other. The bonds you create have a mechanical impact at the end of each session, where resolving relationships and histories helps you gain XP. While it's not the only game to do this, I think it's especially important in this type of setting, where I usually find that the group is held together only by the promise of gold and glory. Putting a mechanical benefit to role-playing your relationships with the other characters is, for some players, the only incentive to do so.
Where Dungeon World might be unfavorably compared to D&D or Pathfinder is a lack of versatility - when they say Dungeon World, they mean it. The game is centered strongly on the aspect of raiding the dungeon, killing the monsters, and taking their stuff. For players who want more in the way of intrigue, politicking, and secrets, they will likely find this game lacking. It can be done, but it's not what the game was made for, and I think trying to shoehorn an intrigue plotline in will do a disservice to both the story and the game. Some publishers have put out rules expansions to bring in more of that element, which might be worth checking out, depending on your group.
As with anything, where you simplify and streamline a game like this, you lose out on some of the crunchier aspects. Dungeon World's character stats, customization, and rules in general are less crunchy than D&D 5e, and certainly less so than Pathfinder. If you like poring over minute situational rules, rolling great big handfuls of dice, number crunching, you won't find it here. PbtA games use a basic 2d6 system, and the list of normal player moves is only one page, front and back.
A good thing to explore with Dungeon World in particular is the huge quantity of third-party content available. There's hundreds of fan-made playbooks, like the Spider, the Living Star, the Slimeling, the Shroomkin. There's several "creature decks", providing quick stats for a wide variety of foes on playing cards. There are numerous published campaigns, building whole worlds for exploration, which you don't see for many of the other PbtA games. I particularly recommend Space Wurm vs Moonicorn, a complete package: a science fantasy world, a multifaceted story, new character playbooks, and more (also you get to say "Space Wurm vs Moonicorn" as much as you want and that's just delightful).
contributed by Jennifer Adcock
You can see more of Jennifer's thoughts on the stream of design in Powered By The Apocalypse games here on EN World.
One of the first things I loved about Dungeon World is how it tonally captures what I always wanted D&D to be but could never quite get there. It blends the adventuring, swashbuckling heroism of your "typical" high fantasy game, and blends it very smoothly with the kick-ass, full throttle, swaggering attitude of Apocalypse World. The Bard playbook gives you abilities like "It Goes to Eleven", while the Thief might get "Wealth and Taste". The Barbarian, my favorite class to play in any game, gets such gems as "What is Best in Life" and "My Love for You is Like a Truck".
Dungeon World was the first game I ever played where bonds and relationships between characters are baked into character creation; it's a non-optional step to build a cohesive party where everyone has history with each other. The bonds you create have a mechanical impact at the end of each session, where resolving relationships and histories helps you gain XP. While it's not the only game to do this, I think it's especially important in this type of setting, where I usually find that the group is held together only by the promise of gold and glory. Putting a mechanical benefit to role-playing your relationships with the other characters is, for some players, the only incentive to do so.
Where Dungeon World might be unfavorably compared to D&D or Pathfinder is a lack of versatility - when they say Dungeon World, they mean it. The game is centered strongly on the aspect of raiding the dungeon, killing the monsters, and taking their stuff. For players who want more in the way of intrigue, politicking, and secrets, they will likely find this game lacking. It can be done, but it's not what the game was made for, and I think trying to shoehorn an intrigue plotline in will do a disservice to both the story and the game. Some publishers have put out rules expansions to bring in more of that element, which might be worth checking out, depending on your group.
As with anything, where you simplify and streamline a game like this, you lose out on some of the crunchier aspects. Dungeon World's character stats, customization, and rules in general are less crunchy than D&D 5e, and certainly less so than Pathfinder. If you like poring over minute situational rules, rolling great big handfuls of dice, number crunching, you won't find it here. PbtA games use a basic 2d6 system, and the list of normal player moves is only one page, front and back.
A good thing to explore with Dungeon World in particular is the huge quantity of third-party content available. There's hundreds of fan-made playbooks, like the Spider, the Living Star, the Slimeling, the Shroomkin. There's several "creature decks", providing quick stats for a wide variety of foes on playing cards. There are numerous published campaigns, building whole worlds for exploration, which you don't see for many of the other PbtA games. I particularly recommend Space Wurm vs Moonicorn, a complete package: a science fantasy world, a multifaceted story, new character playbooks, and more (also you get to say "Space Wurm vs Moonicorn" as much as you want and that's just delightful).
contributed by Jennifer Adcock
You can see more of Jennifer's thoughts on the stream of design in Powered By The Apocalypse games here on EN World.
