First game of Dungeon World

And wow is my brain tired.

I'm about as old school as it gets when it comes to role playing games. Running OD&D or original Runequest feels very natural to me. Dungeon World has intrigued me since I first read the files off of Github but I've been playing more than GMing for the last several months, and when I was GMing it was a D&D 4th game, so my copy of DW sat there awhile. Picked it back up a few weeks ago to reread and tonight I sat down with my daughter and one of her friends who had played a bit of Guild Wars 2 but no real paper RPG.

Character creation was easy, and my daughter had a halfling druid set up at the cafe this morning. She did a call around to her friends to see if anybody was available this afternoon and one girl was. So I got set up on the table while they played with the laptop and graphics tablet. The friend is a skillful artist and got a lot out of it after just a bit, and we started her character creation as she finished up the drawing.

We built the setting on the fly based on the characters and questions, and the adventure itself grew organically from explaining what went wrong each time on bad rolls and fitting in the girls' answers to questions.

It was kind of strange and at times difficult. In old school games I can answer what happens next much more easily. Here it was sometimes a tough stretch, with "Yes and ..." sometimes making it easy to build story and sometimes making tough puzzles. At one point I had boxed myself into a corner in which too much power was collected in one place in opposition to the PCs, so to make success possible I had the make the Evil Shaman send off his minions to fetch a sacrifice he'd need to complete his elemental binding ritual  to give them two smaller targets to choose between.

For the final scene I played on a silly nickname they'd come up with along the way for the earth elemental, and made it concrete in a very satisfying way that ended in high fives.

They want to play again, and I have enough of a feel for the system now that I think I could run it for the usual Friday night gang. WIN.