Fantasy World vs Dungeon World - 14 Differences / Part 3

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 2 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 final episode we go over some subsystems specific to FW.

Fictional Harm

In FW combat is swift, brutal and unforgiving. It rewards clever strategies and daring tactics, but instead of numbers and mechanical combos it completely relies on fictional positioning and purely fictional Harm effects. The end result is violence that is meaningful, rather than trivial. And scary, rather than lighthearted. It's not punitive, as PCs have plenty of tools to save their necks, but they can die or suffer medium-long term consequences if they act recklessly.

This is radically different than DW and AW.

PC-vs-PC

In FW all the moves and game mechanics are built to support individual agency. While never overtly adversarial as in AW, PCs can and will butt heads with each other, and the rules help them get to a meaningful and swift resolution, be it through words or actions. This is not the case in DW, where PCs are supposed to stick together because of the initial premise, and therefore have no in-game tools to resolve PC-vs-PC conflicts. The idea in DW being that conflicts are either minor, and should be easily solved through roleplay, or are major, and should be resolved out of the game through Player agreement.

Split Framing

In FW PCs are expected to, whenever necessary, to go off and do their own thing independently, at least until it all falls within the frame and scope of the common Fellowship. Short individual detours are fine, like splitting up to accomplish the different tasks that lead to a common goal. These kinds of situations are supported by framing rules and techniques that keep the game moving and dynamic. DW simply doesn’t cover these kinds of topics.

Being together independently

In FW it is possible (to some extent) to abandon the Fellowship to go on separate ways, or to disrupt the Fellowship's unity of intent and purpose, as it is fertile ground for interesting drama. It allows you to play your PC to the hilt. But there are specific procedures in place to avoid these behaviours from disrupting the overall game, keeping the focus of play firmly on the Fellowship. Again, DW’s text just doesn’t talk about this occurrence. And while AW even pushes towards it, it doesn’t really offer tools to help handle it.

Dis/Advantage

FW uses the Dis/Advantage dice mechanic (roll 3d6 and use just the 2 lower or higher) in place of the numerical +1s and -1s found in  DW and AW. Dis/Advantage is not cumulative and always results in either having Advantage or Disadvantage or neither. FW focuses on rewarding the awareness and creative leverage of fictional positioning (through TAGs and Moves and plain clever ideas) to turn the tide in your favor, rather than promoting narrative and mechanical min-maxing in order to accrue all the possible modifiers (here City of Mist comes to mind).

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This third installment concludes the bird's eye view of the main differences between FW and other PbtA games, with a special focus on DW.

By popular demand, the next couple of articles will focus on in-depth analysis of the game's Classes.

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