Dungeon World vs OSR

18 May, 2021

Over the past few months I've been fielding a number of questions about GMing Dungeon World and how that differs from most OSR games. The answer is actually fairly simple, as the explicit principles and rules of Dungeon World make things pretty clear. Although the "OSR" as a movement doesn't have explicit principles, there have been a few attempts over the years so that's what I'll compare them to.

TL; DR:

• The rules and principles of Dungeon World make killing players hard.
• That means violence - or rather, the avoidance of violence - is not a good way to encourage critical thinking.
• OSR games use violence to force creative problem solving.
• PbtA-style Moves (or Rules, really) can act as walls against player agency.

GM Guidance

First, take a look at the Principles of the OSR from the Principia Apocrypha.

The "Cardinal" Principle: Your Table is Yours

Be an Impartial Arbiter

• Rulings Over Rules
• Divest Yourself of Their Fate
• Leave Preparation Flexible
• Build Responsive Situations
• Embrace Chaos...
• ...But Uphold Logic
• Let Them Off the Rails

Get Them Thinking

• XP for Discovery and Adversity
• Player Ingenuity Over Character Ability
• Cleverness Rewarded, Not Thwarted
• Ask Them How They Do It
• Let Them Manipulate The World
• Good Items Are Unique Tools
• Don’t Mind The Fourth Wall

Build Rocks & Hard Places

• Offer Tough Choices
• Build Challenges With Multiple Answers...
• ...And Challenges With No Answer
• Subvert Their Expectations

Dice With Death

• Deadly But Avoidable Combat
• Keep Up The Pressure
• Let The Dice Kill Them...
• ...But Telegraph Lethality

Be Their World

• Reveal The Situation
• Give Them Layers To Peel
• Don’t Bury The Lead
• NPCs Aren't Scripts
• Keep The World Alive

Dungeon World

Agenda

• Make the world fantastic
• Fill the characters' lives with adventure
• Play to find out what happens

The Principles

• Draw maps, leave blanks
• Address the characters, not the players
• Embrace the fantastic
• Make a move that follows
• Never speak the name of your move
• Give every monster life
• Name every person
• Ask questions and use the answers
• Be a fan of the characters
• Think Dangerous
• Begin and end with the fiction
• Think offscreen, too

A few of of these principles are quite aligned (Being and end with the fiction, think dangerous) but some really are in conflict!

Rulings Over Rules

This is a tricky one. PbtA is very much designed to "collapse" gracefully. That's great for making "rulings" at the table. However, many of the rules (including Principles and such) are by design written to enforce a particular genre model. This can create a rigid culture of play, as the GM works to treat things like Moves and Triggers RAW, rather than by interpretation. New Moves can of course be created, but they are still constrained by that same framework.

Divest Yourself of Their Fate

This is a doozy. In Dungeon World, you are instructed to "Be a fan of the characters" and "Address the characters, not the players", both of which yield a gameplay experience that reinforces a core Dungeon World trope: the character's story is the most important thing. The core rules themselves reinforce this again; Moves like "Last Breath" make it pretty hard to kill a PC (or TPK for that matter). And 24 HP for a Fighter at Level 1 is pretty crazy!

Player Ingenuity Over Character Ability

This is an example where OSR games directly contradict basic PbtA conventions, particularly in Dungeon World. In most OSR games, Wisdom is a stat, and perception checks still exist. Recent bleeding-edge OSR games (like Into The Odd) totally eschew this concept, which I'm a huge fan of! However, even in games that use Wisdom as a perception mechanic, the information fed to the players about what their characters can perceive is not based on dice rolls. OSR games tend to provide clues to puzzles, traps and mysterious in a way that encourages player engagement, not a reliance on the PC's perception stats. The same goes for knowledge/lore rolls. OSR games prefer Luck rolls or GM fiat for determining what a PC knows (or doesn't).

In Dungeon World, the Move Discern Realities depends entirely on the PC's Wisdom stat. The success of the roll determines the facts the player learns. See below:

When you closely study a situation or person, roll+WIS.

• On a 10+, ask the GM 3 questions from the list below.
• On a 7–9, ask 1. Either way, take +1 forward when acting on the answers.
• What happened here recently?
• What is about to happen?
• What should I be on the lookout for?
• What here is useful or valuable to me?
• Who’s really in control here?
• What here is not what it appears to be?

And look at Spout Lore:
When you consult your accumulated knowledge about something, roll+Int.

• On a 10+, the GM will tell you something interesting and useful about the subject relevant to your situation.
• On a 7–9, the GM will only tell you something interesting—it’s on you to make it useful. The GM might ask you “How do you know this?” Tell them the truth, now.

How does a player think critically, when your PC is doing the thinking/perception for them? How satisfying is exploration, when they are the authors of its wonders? In my opinion, if you value critical thinking, problem solving, exploration etc in a game, Dungeon World will have a hard time delivering that for you.

Dice, Modules & Prep

All PbtA games use 2 six-sided dice to trigger Moves, and Dungeon World is no exception. That means a result is either 6-, 7-9, or 10+.

These dice skew slightly in favor of the players, but makes prepping for a game a bit different than what someone familiar with non-PbtA games may be used to. Dice results longer looking at a binary situation. Instead, you must constantly consider the three tiers (and how they relate to each move specifically).

Each time a player triggers a move, you have to account for the "partial success" and total failure scenarios, instead of a binary pass/fail. Moves in Dungeon World they each have different trigger conditions and at least 2 result descriptions)

Imagine you are rolling Defy Danger to pick a lock without triggering an alarm. The player gets an 8.

Now you have to consider: what does that mean? Does that mean the lockpick breaks, but the door opens? Or does it mean that the door opens, but the alarm goes off anyway, after a moment? What about a 6-? Does the alarm go off, but a poison dart trap fire out (assuming this was logical)?

#nsr #osr #pbta #rpg