After a few weeks of missed sessions we got back to our Dungeon World game. I think most of my observations from the last session still apply, but I noticed a few new things I wanted to comment on.

Parallel real-world player tasks are a human interface design issue

I’m playing a Fighter, and in both sessions my Strength has been highlighted (which is probably what you’d expect). The most common way for me to roll my strength is when I Hack and Slash. Since I have a high strength, that means I’m almost always going to get the 7-9 or 10-12 result, which means I need to roll damage. But whenever I roll my highlighted strength I need to mark experience. I use the same hand to roll dice and put marks on my character sheet, so I can’t do those things simultaneously. Rolling damage is the more important thing (since another person is waiting on that result) so I usually do that first. As a result, I often forget to mark experience because I’m paying attention to the damage and the accompanying description and getting caught up in the momentum of what’s happening. In later lulls, I’d often find myself wondering whether I had remembered to mark experience and having no way of figuring it out, leaving me with a vague sense of being cheated out of something I deserved. I think having a game process that asks a player to do two independent things in parallel is asking for trouble in a game’s design (I ran into a similar problem when playtesting my own game and felt the issue was important enough to completely revamp major subsystems). As I understand it, Apocalypse World usually puts the job of interpreting the results of a move into the GM’s hands after the 2d6 hit the table which leaves the player less mentally encumbered for remembering to mark experience.

Am I indestructible?

My Fighter has Armor 2. Most of the foes I faced in last night’s game were doing 2 points of damage when they were hitting me. Let’s do some math: 2 – 2 = 0. It became immediately obvious that they weren’t really threats to me, at least in terms of hit points. This caused a bit of a fictional disconnect for me when we got near a goblin army camp: on one hand an overwhelming horde of goblins ought to give my character pause, but on the other hand I know (or at least think I know) that nothing they can do to me is actually dangerous. I’m skeptical that flat monster damage and flat armor ratings are doing good things for the design. I wonder if there should be something more like AW’s Harm moves, maybe something like: “When a blow strikes you in a place you are armored, roll +Armor. On a 10-12, take 2 less damage. On a 7-9, take 1 less damage.” Or maybe take an idea from Iron Heroes and make the damage reduction from armor into a die roll: bigger dice for better armor, but you still might get a 1. This might just be a symptom of a different problem, though, which is that our GM was having a hard time wrapping his head around what to do with moves besides “the monster does damage”. Maybe things would have been more interesting if he was offering hard choices, etc., on a miss.