I have a problem. I grumble nearly every time I think about DungeonWorld. It’s gotten worse, and I’m at risk of full blown curmudgeon-itis.

I have to talk about D&D first. For better AND for worse, D&D remains most people’s touchstone for roleplaying games. DungeonWorld isn’t D&D, but obviously looks and sounds like it should be similar. Based on my recent conversations with newer explorers of the hobby, DungeonWorld is the not-D&D game that they are most likely to have tried. Those who aren’t exploring lots of different RPG systems will try out D&D, look at DungeonWorld… and then often go back to D&D. Whenever I hear that, I feel disappointed—not with them, but with how much better DW could have been.

Maybe my sample group is weird. That’s totally possible.

DungeonWorld (DW) is the Powered-by-the-Apocalypse (PbtA) game that I like the least. That has been true for a long while. This opinion pre-existed and is totally distinct from my thoughts about Adam Koebel (here’s some now-old news on that front). Maybe I’ll talk about that drama some other day, but probably not.

I’ve had fun playing DW. I’ve had fun running it. Heck, I ran it during its playtest and had a delight with my friends. Back then D&D’s 4^th edition was still au courant, with its Daily, Encounter, and At-Will powers for every character class and its clearly MMO-inspired design. In retrospect I do like how D&D 4e worked as a tactical puzzle game, but DungeonWorld felt like a much-needed alternative. It was a game that felt D&D-ish and which didn’t assume everyone needed a tactical map to play their tabletop RPG.

I still really like the ways in which DungeonWorld encouraged the GM and players to all collaborate on the narrative and the setting. This wasn’t unique to DW: PbtA games regularly played around with more-collaborative systems. But DW had explicit mechanics by which players could contribute. That plus a great set of players led to The Underwatch, one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve run.

No, my problem with DungeonWorld is a personal gripe that I don’t expect others to share—and which I fervently want to convince you is correct:

DungeonWorld was designed ass-backwards, and thus fails to deliver on what PbtA games do best.

To be fair, I think it’s hard to make a good PbtA game. PbtA games define the game’s narrative AND thematic AND mechanical space with their Moves, a series of prompts that start “If you X…” or “When you Y…” and end with a die roll or a need to spend resources, and then a series of potential results (generally “bad,” “mixed,” and “good,” with “bad” and “mixed” taking up the bulk of the possibilities) or occasionally just a consequence (one NPC I loved, Turk, loved watching Westerns and had a Move that said: “When you get into a shootout with Turk, she shoots first”). These Moves can potentially do anything. Storytellers can make up new Moves to cover interesting situations. I like the system for its simplicity, its flexibility, for the ease of introducing new players to it. I love the system for the ways you can hone a game’s narratives, themes, and tone.

Systems have flavors, driven by their mechanics and themes. Their mechanics shape the expectations of the players, and through the focus of their mechanics they reinforce or reward certain approaches to playing the game. PbtA games’ mechanics are extensions of their Moves. Through their specific triggering circumstances and their limited set of results, Moves implicitly blend narrative and theme. Therefore a well-designed set of Moves (and character attributes and resources) creates a concrete theme and tone.

Every game does this. If you like visual arts, you could think of each system as a different kind of paint. Every RPG system will help you make a painting, but working with watercolors will give you a very different experience and final result than using acrylics. All this is to say: PbtA games aren’t special exceptions. Every game system deals with theme, and tone, and focuses its mechanical weight on a slightly different topic.

For a PbtA game to feel internally consistent and create a strong tone, every Move (and thus every attribute and resource) must be tied to its central themes, and ideally to a narrative tension that shapes how player characters struggle to get what they want. To crib from common idiom, the best PbtA games are built to make sure you only have a hammer even when your world is full of screws. The mechanical options available to the player characters should constantly encourage them to act out the game’s themes, and reward them for doing so even when they also suffer for it.

I love Monsterhearts so much not because it’s a game about the messy lives of teenage monsters (though I enjoy that too), but because every piece of its mechanics connect back to the ways in which the player characters are stuck in their messy, immature, horny, and violent patterns of behavior. PCs literally don’t have access to mechanics that allow them to interact with each other in healthy ways until after they’ve already spent a long time growing and changing. Instead they’re stuck using moves like Turn On, Manipulate, Shut Down, Lash Out, and Gaze Into The Abyss. They might want to give someone a reassuring friendly hug, but all they’ve got is that damn hammer. That’s a PbtA game at its finest.

DungeonWorld frustrates me because its theme is simultaneously specific (feel like D&D!) and horribly diffuse (feel like D&D!). D&D itself doesn’t have a single specific feel. D&D was never designed with that in mind. For every one or even three things you might think D&D feels like, another group of players may come up with different answers—perhaps the only recurring constant I’d point to is the idea of Vancian magic, where spellcasters use up their spells as they cast them, and the mechanical weight given to combat (though that varies by edition). DW could have identified a couple central themes and feelings to recreate (exploring the dangerous darkness for great treasure, resource scarcity, and survival horror) and then designed a new PbtA game to deliver those in concentrated form. Instead, DW tried to recreate the general feel of D&D by aping the form of D&D inside a totally different system.

The result? A complicated and clumsy recreation of D&D’s systems with a different ruleset. My complaint isn’t that one cannot and should not recreate a D&D-like experience with PbtA mechanics, it’s that DW attempted to recreate a D&D-like experience by sacrificing what makes PbtA games most distinctive. It’s almost like picking up pastels and saying “let’s make an oil painting.”

As an aside, I would absolutely want to see a master pastel artist try to make an oil painting with their pastels. Art is great. But that is very different from offering new players a set of pastels and telling them to make oil paintings.

To be sure, DungeonWorld did feel like an homage to D&D. Or maybe it’s an alternative interpretation of what D&D could be. But as someone who has played a lot of RPGs and has strong feelings about what different systems do best and how they shape the experience of playing their games, DungeonWorld feels awkward and oddly disappointing. For example, DW uses all the same attributes as D&D for appearances sake rather than for any mechanical design reason—and then DW struggles to make good use of them.

Maybe I’d be less grumpy if fewer new players tried DungeonWorld and then returned to D&D. If these new players are going to expend the effort on trying new systems, for those players’ sakes I want the new systems to show off their own strong suits instead of hobbling themselves by pretending they’re another system. The new players deserve to know what other games can feel like when they’re designed well, or even just more internally consistent.

Are there any systems out there which you would recommend for that? Anything (like the GURPS adaptation of In Nomine) which you’d warn fresh explorers away from?