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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 6162563" data-attributes="member: 12037">On playstyle.Dungeon World has a very free flowing game. It has no initiative, and the GM doesn't make any rolls (except maybe damage). You move from person to person based on what's going on, so you can focus on one or two people. Failing a roll means you get XP, so there's a mechanical incentive to not always do what you're best at. The central conceit of Dungeon World is that how you describe something determines what happens and how it happens, and the players decide how to describe things.Fate is more structured. Like D&D it has initiative and skills. But, it also has aspects that are phrases describing the character. The PCs can use the fiction to guide how to use these aspects, creating problems with them or enhancements with them, both of which are desired based on mechanical feedback in the system. How to use aspects isn't defined, so you make up what happens as you go. This requires descriptive phrasing to make use of aspects.Dread is a game where success and failure is determined simply by pulling from a Jenga tower. If the tower doesn't fall, then you succeed. If it falls, you die. Attempting to do something in Dread is a deadly prospect. Do you make the attempt or do you back down? How shaky do you get the tower? When is it worth it to pull? Character generation is also different than usual. It uses leading questions to define your character, instead of stats or powers.Fiasco is an RPG where your character is defined purely based on your relationship to other characters. It plays out in scenes between two characters at a time, and other players vote on who came out ahead in each scene. Then at the end of the game, the characters' epilogues are determined by how well the players role played with each other.Take two groups who have never met. They each play one session of each of these RPGs. After they come together, there will be similarities that they'll find about how they played and what they took away from each system. These commonalities involve the playstyle of the systems. For example, regardless of how much a group likes to narrate their games in detail, they have to in Dungeon World. In FATE they're all going to like it when bad things happen to them, even if they normally wouldn't. In Dread, they'll all know that tenseness of attempting something, even the most reckless of players. And, in Fiasco they'll all remember how the story played out in crazy unexpected ways, even if they normally just enjoy dungeon crawls.So, the system can heavily influence gameplay. Very very heavily.</blockquote>

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