GM: Jason Morningstar
Players: Chris Bennett, Jackson Tegu, J Li, David Hamaker, and Sean Nittner (briefly)
System: Dungeon World
This was going to be it. This was going to be my second (er third) try at Dungeon World and I was going to like it! Jason was running, awesome people were playing. I was going to be so down, and I was going to figure out how to love this game!
We started and Jason told us that we were all prisoners of a lich. Most of the characters were previous adventurers. Deprived of their belongings and freedom, but otherwise still mighty. Two of us lucky few were pit slaves who had spent our lives digging for the lich’s riches. I was one of the lucky two! Jason was the other. Together we were Pox and Lox!
My was pretty simple, I had a dented flute and a bag of human excrement. My moves were bed for forgiveness and squirm. My stats modifiers were all -1. I had 4 hit points. Huzzah!
The game started and we set off to action. My first (and what would be only) action was to squirm (my move) under a rock… and on a roll of 7, it was a rock that I was promptly stuck under… for the rest of the game.
No, it’s not that Jason is that cruel of a GM (Yes, I have read John Wick’s Play Dirty stories of keeping a character in a jail cell for multiple sessions, Jason wasn’t trying to do that). It’s that 10 minutes into play I needed to put out a fire at the con, and then another one, and then Big Bad GM started and I needed to be there for that. By the time I was free the game was over. I was delighted to hear that my good friend Lox did not meat a horrible end.
Thoughts on this game.
Adventurers! Had to look and see what was in the killing pit!
I’d actually be really interested in seeing how pathetic characters would fare in Dungeon World (or in AW) for that matter. I was sad I didn’t get to flounder more with Pox.
Best Morningstar stare of death EVAR:
I wrote up the Pit Slave playbook specifically for convention demos, where you’ll often get a couple of experienced Dungeon World players amid a table full of new people. So I ask for a show of hands and give the veterans these miserable, useless curs that are really fun to play but don’t have a lot of mechanical weight, so the new people get to try out the system with actual functional characters.
I like that idea a lot. And since I can’t imagine using Volley or Hack and Slash with a pit slave, I like even more the absence of rolling damage, which is a particular level of granularity that has never appealed to me.