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Dungeon World helped popularize Powered by the Apocalypse games by capitalizing on players’ familiarity with Dungeons & Dragons. Enough so that it is sometimes used as a reference point by gamers who ask, “Can you recommend a game like Dungeon World but…?” Here are some common answers. Next-Generation Fantasy PbtA OSR For a comparison of the more popular systems, see Table Comparing Dungeon World to 5 Hacks. Other Styles of Play Other Settings Other PbtA Games Thanks to the Dungeon World Discord community for the many suggestions over the years. […]

PbtA games (Powered by the Apocalypse) are sometimes summarized as 2d6 games, due to the 2d6+stat dice mechanic popularized by Apocalypse World: a 10+ is an unmitigated success, a 7-9 is a mixed success, and a 6- (6 or less) is a failure. But some PbtA games use other dice mechanics.* I was particularly fascinated by the action rolls of Blades in the Dark, which use dice pools where only the highest die is considered: “They might succeed at their action without any consequences (on a 6), or they might succeed […]

Tl;dr: Don’t pay for a Duolingo subscription. Much of the free technology that we interact with strives to build behavioral addiction primarily to show us advertising. The software developers of Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok all concentrate on increasing utilization of their respective apps, often using cognitive science against us (check out this review of Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked for more). So it is nice to use an app whose developers are primarily trying to help us achieve our educational goals (though, […]

Synopsis: “Double Draw” is a variant of 5-card draw where after the second round of bidding, each remaining player may discard and take up to two additional cards, then bid again. Everyone who wants to play first pays to the pot an agreed-upon ante (typically one or two of the lowest-valued chips). The dealer shuffles and deals each player 5 cards, face down. First betting round – Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, bidding proceeds clockwise. Prior to any bet being placed, initial players can “check”, […]

As a conlanger, I’ve been curious about the phonotactics of fantasy names for the player characters in D&D 5e. My assumption is that these names are designed to be vanilla, easy-to-pronounce names, while conveying a bit about character and setting. As someone who overengineers names, I wanted to assess the names I generate against the mainstream standard. The Sample The Player’s Handbook (PHB, shown above) has lists of suggested names for dwarves, elves, halfings, humans, dragonborn, gnomes, half-orcs, and tieflings. For humans, there are lists of names by eight of […]

One of the many things I love about Homebrew World and similar fantasy PbtA games (Powered by the Apocalypse inspired) is their druid’s ability to spend time studying a creature and then subsequently becoming able to shapeshift into the form of that creature. My player who was a druid would go out of her way during adventures to master new animal forms that she would be able to turn into. For instance, one evening in a swamp, while the wizard was studying his spellbook, the druid spent time in quiet […]

If you are interested in designing a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) tabletop roleplaying game: Happy designing! Originally published 03/21/21. Revised to remove a reference to an older version of Vincent Baker’s series of blog posts and to include a reference to the Dungeon World Patch Kit. Updated 10/22/2022 with links to 2d6 probabilities and Uncommon World. Updated 10/12/2023 with links to new posts here. Photo by Ana Itonishvili on Unsplash.

I’m thinking again about armor hacks for RPG rules. Fantasy TTRPGs over-obsess about armor, to my mind. Thinking about all the swords & sorcery and fantasy that I read, the only narratively interesting scenes about armor that spring to mind come from The Lord of the Rings: I asked around for other suggestions: What interesting fictional scenes with armor can you think of? Let me know on Mastodon. Image credit: Richard Mortel, copyright under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

If I’ve blocked you on Twitter, it’s not about you, but about Twitter’s UI. Maybe you’re a huge fan of Funko Pops and the people I follow like your tweets about those, so I keep seeing them. And keep seeing them. And keep seeing them. If I mute you, then you can talk to me and the people I follow without my being able to see those conversations. So I have to block you instead if I want to control my feed. And I believe I should be able to […]

In trying to research improvements to Dungeon World’s Volley move, I came across a 2014 post from Rob Donoghue, one of the inventors of Fate and a co-founder of Evil Hat. This led me into his blog posts of his initial plays of Dungeon World. Here’s the first two: I really like his take on a new Discern Realities move: One idea I’d been toying with was to give each class an extra question on the Discern Reality move (so the fighters could ask “Who’s the biggest threat?”, thieves could […]

A popular feature of hacks of Dungeon World is replacing alignment (Lawful, Good, Neutral, Evil, Chaotic) with drives. Worlds of Adventure, Unlimited Dungeons, and Homebrew World all use drives. Some examples: In the End of Session move, players can earn an XP. The language I use in my own PbtA hacks: “Give an example of how you’ve met the requirement of one of your Drives. If no one objects, mark XP.” If you are switching from XP for alignment to XP for drives, my own suggestion is that you let […]

Diamonds is a plain trick-taking game where ♦ Diamonds are trump, with prediction-based scoring. Players score 10 points for each bid trick that they took and potentially either 1 point for each excess trick (overtrick) or -10 points for each trick that they fell short of their bid (undertrick). Players compete against each other, without partnerships. The Cards and Deal Use a standard deck of 52 cards. For each hand, shuffle and deal the entire deck out, making sure that all players have an equal number of cards. Discard any […]

I’ve created a Dungeon World Patch Kit. Each Basic and Special Move starts with its Dungeon World wording first, then shows the wording from popular hacks. Select the wording that works best for your table! Why did I make this? I just finished my first Dungeon World campaign last week, played Rules as Written except for tweaking the End of Session move as we went along. We’re about to start a new campaign this weekend. We want to continue to play Dungeon World, but recognize that the language of some […]