Because I have so much to say about my experience at Gen Con this year, I’ve decided to break it up into multiple posts. This post is about Dungeon World.

Our first event (that we didn’t miss due to my poor planning) was a game of Dungeon World, run my MAMS Gaming. This was my first time playing Dungeon World, though I’ve had a copy of the rulebook for something like two and a half or three and a half years. I’m sorry to say it wasn’t a good first showing.

The GM for this event didn’t seem to have a very solid grasp on the rules, or perhaps didn’t know very well how to communicate them. When I asked questions for clarification, I never felt like the answer I got made a lot of sense. He told Erika that her druid had unlimited spellcasting as long as she was in the woods, and normal spellcasting outside the woods, but I didn’t see spellcasting anywhere on her character sheet, despite the inclusion of a list of druid spells that was identical to my list of cleric spells. It turned out that druids can’t cast spells unless they take two separate feats that allow them to dip into cleric spellcasting by way of ranger multi-classing, which her character, according to its sheet, definitely had not done, and even then you definitely can’t do it without limit, whether there are trees around or not.

I don’t know whether this was an adventure and setting of his own design, but I suspect it was, because he included a lot of details that didn’t seem relevant to the story of our adventure. This included a great deal of irrelevant backstory; a shapeshifter who was pretending to be the king exactly one scene before we met the real king; and a horse that the king was real proud of but never showed up again.

Three of our group’s six players also were very much of a type. In the notes I kept, I named them by the t-shirts they wore: American As F*ck [sic], Harley-Davidson, and Stark Industries. Harley-Davidson and Stark Industries were both drinking beer from tallboys by 10 AM, and after the intermission around 11 AM they had upgraded to what I presume was vodka. I knew it wasn’t water because Stark Industries at one point drank from Harley-Davidson’s bottle of the stuff despite having his own water bottle right in front of him.

We had another event of Dungeon World planned for Friday night, but backed out so that we would have more time to eat dinner, relax, try the Pathfinder Playtest in our hotel room, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. I’m not sure if that second adventure would have been with a different GM, but if it was, then I regret only that Dungeon World hasn’t yet gotten a fair shake.

I did see someone at Iron GM playing Dungeon World with his players. I checked in with him to see how it was treating him in the format. I don’t remember the details, but I remember his report being fairly mixed. That’s not a huge surprise; as a very narrative-focused game, it may be a tough sell at an event where the default system is 3.5 D&D. I did find myself wishing I could have sat at his table for a while.

---

Next post will be about Shadow of the Demon Lord, which was a lot more fun.