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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 7729131" data-attributes="member: 85870">So this is a really interesting topic, especially considering what happened with our group recently. After 15 months of being a player in a mostly-okay-but-somewhat-uneven Shaintar campaign in Savage Worlds, I went back behind the GM screen for a bit, and after some deft persuasion, convinced my group to try Dungeon World. I was verrrrry excited for this change. I'd done a great deal of research, watched playthroughs on YouTube, read the rules multiple times, asked questions on these boards and got some very good, clarifying answers. If I was still a little nervous, I was confident that I had a good enough handle on the rules to make a decent show of it. And the first two sessions or so, I was quite pleased with the results. The players were engaging with the fiction, were genuinely considering what was going on around them, were using the basic system "moves" well. But over the period of four more sessions, my enthusiasm slowly waned. Over time I noticed that the players became increasingly less engaged, and I couldn't put my finger on why. Was I not giving them high enough stakes to pursue? Was I railroading? I hoped not---I was anxiously trying to follow the Dungeon World ethos of "play to see what happens", but that was something I've tried to do for the past four or five years as a GM anyway. Eventually what it came down to as players is that they didn't feel there was enough "game" in the game. There wasn't enough guidance, or structure in the rules for their characters. They were never really sure what they could do in a given circumstance. Why did failing a "volley" move as an archer mean that the character lost his footing? Why didn't the rules specifically outline what the ranger's animal companion could or couldn't do?(As a side note, the player in question said outright, "What do you mean there's no rules for what happens when I say I want to send my hunting dog off to fight an orc by itself?" The result was that even in one of the most simple rules systems devised, there was an argument about how to mechanically resolve animal companion actions. Every . . . single . . . time I've allowed animal companions in a game, there's been a lengthy, half-session or longer argument over what the animal companion can actually do or not do.) The bottom line was, they just wanted more from the system. They wanted more structure. In some ways they felt more free to make decisions when there were more "hard" restrictions on their character's actions. It was weird to see, but in some ways they needed the character structure not just to know what their characters could do, but what they couldn't. In Savage Worlds the action was more engaging for them, because they had a better sense for who their characters were when filtered through mechanics into the input/output of the fiction. So I'm wondering where the inherent Dungeon World loop went wrong---1) Ask your players/characters, "What do you do?"2) Determine based on the shared fiction if what they're trying to do is plausible/makes sense3) Decide if the intent of their action declaration triggers a move.4a) If yes, resolve the move4b) If no, allow the character to succeed and move forward5) Reset the fictional state based on the resultIt sounds like the classic feedback loop we're all familiar with, yet it was leading to weak, unfulfilling, uninspired gameplay moments.</blockquote>

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