Back in the heyday of the Fudge community, I delighted in other people’s hacks, but almost never used them as is. I would absolutely use the ideas in them to improve my own (and give credit) but using hacks as written just never worked for me. And I was not alone in this – the community was full of hackers who handled things the same way, so the community embraced this sort of behavior.

As I start dipping my feet in the larger Dungeon World community, I feel much the same way. Lots of great stuff out there, not a lot I’m inclined to use as written. And while that’s a comfortable space for me, I’m still trying to get a feel for the community norms and how acceptable it is.[1] I lay this all out here because as I present the Dungeon World hacks I’m fiddling with, I hope it is clear that it’s done with love. In my mind, there is no criticism implicit in a hack, only celebration.

I also am aware that the bits I get out of Dungeon World are absolutely not the bits that others get from it, so please also accept the implicit acknowledgment that I’m hacking for me and my table, and sharing it only in case someone finds it useful.

Anyway, I’m looking at playbooks. As I noted yesterday, we are running out of unique playbooks in the Mappers/Navigators campaign, so in addition to casting a wider net for third party playbooks that I like[2] I’m looking at writing some. I approach this gingerly because it is clearly very easy to make a kind of lame playbook and, more subtly, easy to make a playbook that works for no one else but you and yours. So I started thinking.

Now, a thing I find interesting about Dungeon World (and most other -World games) is that the playbooks and moves are, effectively, a pitch. They are making a case. Dungeon World’s basic moves are basically an assertion that an adventurer should be able to[3]:

• Fight
• Survive dangerous situations
• Know useful things
• Get a sense of the situation
• Negotiate

The basic moves are that explanation converted into mechanics.[4]. And more, that “An X should be able to Y” model extends into the playbooks as a refinement of that list. So, for example, a fighter should:

• Fight really well
• Have a cool weapon
• Bend Bars and Lift Gates
• Wear heavy armor

Excepting Fight really well (which is reflected with the large damage die) those bullets translate directly to the fighter moves. You can pretty trivially do this exercise with every class, and that is a big part of why the classes work so well. And the model extends into advanced moves, which basically add “An X can Y” to the sentence – it adds bullets that a member of the class might have.

Breaking it down into a list like that also reveals assumptions. Not that assumptions are bad in this case, but you want to know what they are. Specifically, it highlights that the DW classes are expressing existing ideas. They leverage broad ideas of what the classes should be like. That bullet point list up there isn’t true for every fighter ever, but it’s true enough to form a baseline.

That matters because when you create anew playbook, you have two paths to follow: You can leverage an existing idea, or create new one. Those are two things you don’t want to handle the same way.

Leverage an existing idea depends upon there already being a concept (and implicit list) not yet represented by the classes. So if, for example, you grabbed a D&D nerd and asked them what a Monk should be able to do, you’d probably get a list like:

• Badass unarmed Kung Fu
• Fight Without Armor
• Do cool meditative stuff
• Resist Poisons, diseases, other weirdness
• Block arrows

Individual lists may vary, but that list could pretty easily be turned into a move list for a Monk class, if one were so inclined. That leverages existing ideas about what a monk is.[5] If you can, leveraging is totally the way to go. It has more buy in from the get go, and you have a clear, non-mechanical reference to draw on to answer your questions as you design.

If you need to create an idea, you have a tougher row to how, because you need to build that underlying idea before you build the mechanics. If the idea is weak, then the mechanics will feel like a hodge-podge, and that means you need to make the idea compelling. How to make an idea compelling is a whole topic of its own[6], but the key is to make it make sense. The “X should Y” test seems useful to me in this regard because it forces you to articulate the fictional logic before you start playing with the mechanics.

And, of course, the real dirty trick is that if you can create something that makes enough sense, then you are effectively leveraging it. Behold, the wonders of communication!

Anyway, that is my baseline I’m going to use to start building my first playbook, starting tomorrow.