Fantasy World vs Dungeon World - 14 Differences / Part 2

This article was first published on the Fantasy World newsletter and has finally made its way here. SUBSCRIBE to get future articles as soon as they are made, and to keep in touch about the upcoming Kickstarter campaign! Part 3 will hit the newsletter in just a few days from now!

Part 1 is here.
Part 3 is here.

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Eleven years ago Apocalypse World was born and, after merely a couple of years, it was adapted to play fantasy adventures in the form of Dungeon World. About a decade later Fantasy World is about to get published: how does FW relate to AW and DW? What are the main differences between the two fantasy PbtA? In this 3 part article we’ll go over the most important design choices that give FW it’s unique personality.

In this second episode we go over the main elements of character creation.

Setting first, fellowship second, characters... last

After an initial worldbuilding phase, in FW there is an actual procedure to create and shape the PCs' Fellowship. This happens BEFORE any PC is actually created. First you come up with reasons why the PCs are together as people, and only subsequently you go about selecting Class and Stats and whatnot. Fellowships are mostly fictional constructs that can easily change during active play, unlike BitD “crews” that are represented by rules, options and points and are meant to evolve but not really change.

DW simply states in its premise that the PCs are supposed to stick together, but offers no further tools to help Players make good on this and maintain it through play. This is reflected also in a class-before-group approach as Bonds (absent in FW) are established as the last step of PC creation.

Personalisation through fiction #1 : blood & kin

FW has no concept of race, nor of moral alignment. Everyone is people. Mostly humanoid people, different people with different characteristics, but first and foremost people. Blood and Kin is how these differences get into play.

Blood is a fictional TAG that summarises the physical features of a character: so a character of elven blood will have different physical characteristics than a character of orkin blood or andorian blood, etc. Kin then represents the socio-cultural features of a character’s past upbringing or current environment: so different characters all of human blood could identify as kin of northern tribes, kin of the fading sun church, kin of the Maldvoy noble house, etc.

There is no fixed list of available Bloods and Kins, nor are there inherent mechanics linked to them. Both Blood and Kin impact the game through fictional positioning, and a few Moves that leverage them to help Players and World explore and define them through active play. Anything goes, thanks to a few simple ground rules and limitations.

Personalisation through fiction #2 : issue & doubt

FW fleshes out from the start the individual drive and goal of each PC by defining their Issue and Doubt. This is done through an easy question-&-answer procedure that avoids vague “play as a writer” considerations, instead building on the specifics established during all the previous phases of the game setup (worldbuilding, fellowship, blood, kin and maybe an initial inkling of the Class one might want to play) to help Players focus on practical, pragmatic, personal things their PC might care about here and now. These elements are at the core of the Growth (advancement) system, and are revisited at the end of each session in a way that allows to naturally and effortlessly focus and polish them, until they are eventually resolved or abandoned. It’s an in-built personal story-arc machine.

Neither DW nor AW have anything like this, mostly relying on GM/MC prep and guidance, and on Player pro-activeness, to drive the action somewhere meaningful.

Personalisation through fiction #3 : classes

As PC creation is the last step of game setup, so is Class selection the last step of PC creation. This is because FW goes out of its way to help/teach Players in creating characters that are first and foremost “people”, or what could potentially be the seed for an interesting, complex, deep character. The PC’s job, their Class, comes last. This is the specular opposite than DW, where the Class is the first and foremost thing the PCs are made of, and narrative elements such as Bonds are subsumed into it, and usually dealt with last, after Stats and Equipment and Moves are defined.

Both FW and DW use a system of character Classes. For various reasons FW was built using the classic fantasy adventurer archetypes that are also common to D&D and DW, so it’s fairly easy to draw parallels between DW classes and their FW counterparts. But the similarities stop here: while the core concept at the heart of a “bard” is more or less the same in D&D and DW and FW, in practice the Bard from DW will play quite differently than the Minstrel from FW because of how the class structure is organised and how the class moves are designed, with a focus on making the Player describe stuff as part of the move procedures, and by avoiding numerical crunch whenever possible.

And the Minstrel is probably the FW class that is closest to its DW counterpart. Other classes like the Knight and the Priest take a radical and critical approach to the representation of their base archetype, deconstructing the way DW (and many other fantasy rpgs) depicts the Paladin and the Cleric.

Growth

DW grants expeRience points for every failed roll, and through those the PC earns levels, up to Level 10. Through this progression DW features a lot of filler Advancement Moves, most of which are level-locked or prerequisite-locked.

FW uses a list of possible "growth advancements" much like how AW does. These Growths give access, among other things, to a short list of impactful Moves that are all available since the beginning. But Growth happens exclusively during the End of Session move, which focuses on how Players brought their PC’s Issue and Doubt to the table. It also awards expeDience points for exploring through active play their PC’s Blood and Kin, for engaging in Bonding Actions with other PCs (through the Long Rest move) and for every failed roll. Expedience can occasionally be used to buy a Growth, but is mostly employed to fuel special Moves and to boost Player rolls.  Growth is not infinite, eventually leading to setting-altering effects and ultimately to a variety of PC-retiring options, as their individual story-arcs become complete. This structure rewards proactivity, self-reflection, and actual growth and change in the PC’s personality. The End of Session move also works as a sort of “fan mail” (thank you Prime Time Adventures) helping less experienced and more shy Players to see how cool what they did during the session really was.

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Continues and ends in Part 3...