Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text

Dungeon World is a PBTA (Powered by the Apocalypse) game, one of many games inspired by Apocalypse World. I don't know much about DW in particular, other than it's an early PBTA hack and not generally considered one of the better examples of the system anymore, but it still has a lot of fans.

However, these games share a lot in common, usually including a focus on Moves. The GM determines if something is a Move or not. If it's a move the player gets to roll for it, and if it's not a Move, it just happens. Moves tend to cover very broad areas of actions and are lot less specific and nitpicky than D&D rules.

Unlike D&D, the GM also has Moves. These moves are usually tailored to the particular PBTA game and generally include various ways to keep pressure on the players in a way that fits the theme and setting and mood of the particular game. It codifies the GM's job in a way that makes it more approachable for many. D&D is among the most difficult systems to GM and it leads to a shortage of people wanting to GM vs those wanting to play. Experienced DMs over many years learn to be a little looser and how to wing things and improvise and make the jobs easier for themselves. PBTA games are designed to teach the GM how to do this from the start, partly by teaching the players that this is expected and correct.

Because a lot of these d&d alternatives are fairly cheap I think it's worth your time just to buy a few here and there and give them a read (dungeon world, index card rpg, blades in the dark, vaesen, torchbearer, forbidden lands, not d&d adjacent but I'll just also mention mothership, I'm not going to really mention pathfinder here because it's very much still a fork of d&d though their action system I think beats the 5e action system).

It kinda opens your mind to what is great about d&d (for me their well defined settings and a lot of expansiveness of their class subclass system.. that and a ton of nostalgia, I played my first game of redbox in the 80s) and where it lacks. It's kind of the middle of the road game, it does a lot of stuff reasonably well but some of these other games specialize the gameplay in some very interesting ways.

Often as a group you probably aren't going to change systems but, and especially if you are your groups gamemaster, a lot of these little rpgs probably have very poachable rules or systems that could help your game run smoother, faster or push your game in new directions.

Pretty soon you'll end up with a shelf (or directory of pdfs) of d&d adjacent books. RPG sourcebooks for games you may never play, but all of those books are farmable for a d&d campaign.

If you are your tables 5e DM, I will take some time out to promote the best 3rd party monster manual i've come accross 'Flee Mortals!'. It introduces a alternative system for monsters (mostly bosses) in combat called 'action oriented monsters', there are some videos on youtube if you search. Great book, fun systems.

Most people who prefer DW would say that D&D sometimes has clear rules for something, but often has no rules, boring rules, or rules that aren't necessarily "fun". Combat, while tactical, tends to be slow and can frequently consume a lot of time in a session, plus the majority of rules and character powers are focused on combat.

If you're playing sessions with a lot of RP, DW will have a much better balance of rules:session-time, it's much easier to prep for, and given how rules-lite D&D really is outside combat, will probably have about the same amount of narrative input. Note that it's not necessarily the "group debating if the player survived", but typically the GM giving the player a choice when they fail to climb the wall, like "you fall and take a little damage, or you slip a little, cursing loudly and alerting the enemies at the top to you".

Done well, it gives the players a lot more agency, and much better buy-in for the story as they're now shaping it, instead of just being along for the ride. I would also say that pre-written narratives aren't really a thing for DW (at least, as far as I know!), so it's really down to what the DM sees as an appropriate penalty or choice, often phrased as "you succeed, but <thing>".

It's not really better or worse than D&D overall, I'd just say that it's much better suited for certain play-styles. If you enjoy tactical gameplay and using miniatures, then D&D (or maybe Pathfinder) are much better options. If the thought of yet another fight makes you want to gouge your eyes out, I'd recommend giving DW a try.

D&D has rules for fall damage that make no sense, worse they encourage people to jump from extreme heights because the risks are well understood.

In 5e players fall at 500 feet per round which works out to 57 MPH, take the same damage falling 30 feet onto a stone floor, pile of hay, or a lake and ignore what you’re carrying. The temptation is to codify more realistic rules IE you fall up to 500 feet in the first round and up to 1,000 feet every round after that but complex rules don’t necessarily add much to the game and it’s always going to be a massive simplification.

By comparison ‘No Rules’ just means do something reasonable for the situation, arguing about it is more an issue for your table not the game.

However, there's nothing simpler than having a clear D&D rule for something like fall damage, instead of having the party debate if a player survived the fall.

It's simpler, but it's not necessarily easier. I don't remember the rules for fall-damage, off-hand - and it's certainly easier to just say, "you take 2 HP of damage" than it is to dig out or start googling around for a rule.

I play a lot of D&D as well, and to me, it's a great framework for collaborative storytelling - but that's because I'm familiar with the flow of the game. That's not true for everyone, and for some people, it's more fun to have fewer rules and a more collaborative decision-making process.

However, there's nothing simpler than having a clear D&D rule for something like fall damage, instead of having the party debate if a player survived the fall.

I don't think anyone's suggesting having the party debate things.

D&D has a bunch of precise mechanical rules for combat, and very few for anything else. This makes sense for a game about simulating small-squad combat (which is what D&D started life as), but it's not really what you want for a game about narrative and roleplay. It means combat tends to take up a disproportionate amount of playtime in D&D (because you have all these mechanical rules, and the multiple-round system), when the combat actually isn't such a big part of the narrative or the fun; I've found that most successful/fun D&D groups tend to skip the fiddlier rules (e.g. how many people actually bother with full encumbrance calculations?) and even handwave away entire combats ("you kill the goblins, don't bother rolling").

Think about how you handle conflicts in non-combat parts of the game. If you're trying to persuade the King to overrule the evil chancellor or whatever, how do you do that? You certainly don't have n rounds of following precise calculations and looking up tables about each step of persuasion. Generally you either have narrative steps towards your goal (you break into the chancellor's vaults to collect the papers that prove he's been embezzling, you bribe a reporter to frame him in a compromising position, ...), and/or the GM decides whether your ideas were clever enough to succeed, or maybe the GM assigns a difficulty (modified by the previous two points) and then you do one roll.

In my experience even people who like D&D tend to enjoy sessions where they're doing stuff like that more than doing a series of combats (except for the occasional powergamer type who really does just want to kill as many orcs as possible for 90 minutes - but if you're after "creativity and shared storytelling" then you're presumably not that kind of gamer); often when people look back on a campaign their favourite session was one with no (or very few) combats but one where interesting character moments or story developments happened. (And conversely, more than once I've had a fun session where we were all doing some great roleplay, riffing off each other, and then we hit a big combat and everything just ground to a halt as we had to dig out dice and tables and stop the story for half an hour while we did a bunch of mechanics)

So what if you handled combat the way you handle other conflicts? The GM takes narrative reasons why one side should win or lose, gives the players points for creativity if they come up with a good idea, then comes up with a difficulty and you make one roll. Or maybe you do several rounds of that, but based on the narrative flow of the combat, not just crunching numbers. In my experience that makes for a much more fun, interesting game.

(I actually enjoy, like, Mordenheim or Kill Team, which is the kind of game that D&D originally was. But that's as a competitive game first and roleplaying second. Detailed mechanical simulation makes sense when you're competing about who's better at combat. But it's a waste when you're trying to do collaborative storytelling)

Ultimately a role-playing game comes down to a more organized game of Let's Pretend. Some people like to add on a heavy dose of recreational accounting and/or simulationism. Some people just want a few light rules to give their pretending some structure and an ample supply of narrative prompts to help when invention's running dry.

Does spending hours and hours looking for quirks in the complex rules to make a super-powerful character that's optimized for damage output per round sound like fun?

Does spending a few minutes picking a set of attributes and getting right down to making up a story with your friends over some beer and pizza sound like fun?

Does spending two hours working through highly detailed rules to simulate about five seconds of in-game combat as part of a multi-year-long campaign sound like fun?

Does spending two hours with simple rules that boil combat down to a die roll or three and the option to alter the occasional roll with a limited supply of "Wait, That's Not What Happened" tokens to tell a short story with a beginning, middle, and an end sound like fun?

Does spending hundreds of dollars on exquisitely detailed rulebooks and supplements, with new editions every few years, sound like fun? There's a new "2024" edition of D&D coming out and it's $180 list for a bundle of the PHB, DMG, and MM in physical and digital copies, maybe plus a subscription to the online service for everyone in the game, maybe plus a couple more physical copies of one book or another provided by the players. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of pretty artwork in there, I have the 5e PHB/DMG and they are gorgeous.

Does spending six bucks on a ten-page PDF, plus making a dozen copies on the office laserjet so everyone at the table can have the full rules at hand, including your brokest friends, sound like fun?

It's perfectly valid if the expensive, complicated options sound like fun to you. Sometimes complication is fun. But sometimes it gets in the way of fun.

Different rpg systems provide different experience with their rules. Dungeon World is much better than DnD at providing a cinematic experience that just feels loose and fun. Even if you want a lot of clear rules, D&D is a really bad game at that, and there are better systems (Gurps does that and plays much faster for example). My favorite system in Burning Wheel which is great at bringing out character development and pushing the story forward really focused on what the characters are striving for.

You'd need to ask the author of the article.

I backed the original DW project and was a user of Google+ in that time and place where the "Old School Renaissance" (my preference) clashed with "Story Gamers" - "you see me now, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars".

From those interactions I could say that preference for DW could range from simple technical preferences to deep-seated politics resulting from trauma.

Dungeon World is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. It's both ligher in rules and gives the players increased control over the narrative of the game. It's a narrative TTRPG. If you've played FATE or Blades in the Dark you've played a narrative RPG.

Dungeon World is an open game and there is an SRD for it: https://www.dwsrd.org/

In the case of falling, the GM would assign damage based on how dangerous it is: https://www.dwsrd.org/playing/playing-the-game.html#damage

Bear in mind that HP essentially doesn't scale with level. PCs are likely to have an HP maximum between 15 and 25 for the entire campaign.

If you're conscious, the GM might let you Defy Danger to mitigate some of that, but you have to describe what your character is doing to achieve that: https://www.dwsrd.org/playing/basic-moves.html#defy-danger

If it was a fall from a great height, you'd just skip to Last Breath: https://www.dwsrd.org/playing/special-moves.html#last-breath

There's no specific rules for it because the general rules are good enough, especially considering how often falling damage actually comes up

However, there's nothing simpler than having a clear D&D rule for something like fall damage, instead of having the party debate if a player survived the fall.

There is no party debate. The person running the game figures out what they think is most reasonable. If you think that's a lot of trust, it is, but it's necessary for a smooth running game.

As an aside, even rules light games I play has a rule for fall damage. But even DnD 5e doesn't have rules for falling onto softer surfaces. What if you fall on 10 foot thick foam? What about 1 inch thick foam? Into a bush? What if I use create food to create a pool of bread at the bottom of a cliff we're climbing so if someone falls they take less damage?

Do we need fall damage rules for everything players could fall on? Are you going to tell a player that falling on a stone floor is the same damage as falling on a 10 foot thick piece of foam?

Tabletop RPGs shine on the edges because no computer, much less a set of mechanical rules written for humans to understand, can account for every situation. And even if they did, you wouldn't want to spend 10 minutes looking up every rule anytime someone did anything.

Not everyone likes having to have rules or a table for everything. For some people, they're okay with the DM adjudicating a ruling and letting dice tell them whether there's a success, a success with consequences, or a failure. Personally that's not for me except in certain small doses, but I'm more of a GURPS player than a D&D player, which is its own different play style altogether.

As a DM, it's certainly something that's very easy to sink time into. And rewarding, too!

It depends a whole, whole bunch on what exactly you do.

Custom setting with great attention to detail and an entire campaign mapped out? Every possible semi-important NPC with a biography and set of motivations and stats for every place they might go in the whole campaign?

Yeah, shitloads of work, hundreds of hours, maybe thousands.

Or you can have a basic setting and a little town with some adventure hooks, a few partially fleshed out items and NPCs, a few more randomly-generated ones for roles like “shop keeper” or “bar patron” when you don’t have anything better, crib some other setting’s gods and politics and what have you, and only fill more stuff in if the players take an interest. They really engaged with that random street juggler and are already trying to figure out how she fits into the plot? Well… she didn’t, but now she does! Time to pick a clue or hook to attach to her and put her in their path again. Only write enough runway to get through the next session, and take your writing & prep where the players go. Saves tons of time, doesn’t necessarily make for a less-satisfying game than an intricately constructed complete world (often, it’s better)

Run a decent pre-written module? Usually not much work at all, just read the whole thing once then refresh yourself on the next one part before each session. Provided you’re already comfortable with the game and setting, anyway.

The first sentence leads me to imagine a torn up painting and a group of people clustered around it.

The second sentences leads me to imagine a large gallery space with high ceilings with a smattering of people in front of one of the paintings.

Both ways have their pros and cons. Describing the space first lets the reader paint a setting for the eventual object of interest.

Most people intuitively describe images from foreground to background or left to right

I've heard there are cultural biases to this ordering. Some cultures tend to describe the background or scene first. The example I read about identified Japan as an "outside in".

I've been encouraging my kid to use "outside in" or "context first" in their descriptions with me, mainly because they suck at giving context. I doubt I'd have known about it if I hadn't read that about Japan.

Would love to hear from a Japanese person on this.

I think of this in cinematic terms. The first sentence is going to start with a shot of the painting, then it will either cut, zoom or dolly out to reveal the crowd. Whereas the second shot starts with the wide angle of the gallery and then does the opposite. Each has a slightly different effect on the scene and the audience.

At which point I stop reading and I'm thinking "finally, I see why he's emailing us".

I never like to discourage 'too much' information because frankly 'end users' don't know what they need to tell us in support (that is kind of what our job is right?). I'd much prefer the above than just 'it won't let me log in' - where there maybe context that I'd want.

I spend more time asking follow up questions (without being able to provide even a modicum of solution) in many cases, I try to couch my 'questions answering questions' reply with why I am asking (more typing and explaining) when users don't give me chapter and verse, even if it is mostly 'puff'.

I now work as a software developer for a startup and often have to interact directly with clients, and when I communicate with them, I always make sure have my desired "call to action" (even if only summarised) within the first sentence.

But that is after they have emailed you right? You cannot summarize anything until you actually have them tell you what is wrong, no matter how long takes them. So yes summarize in the first sentence is always useful and if you don't kow the solution (yet) it never hurts to admit that and say something like, 'but we can try X or see what Y is doing as that will help me understand the issue in more detail' etc.

Customer Support is hard work sometimes, now try doing it with someone who doesn't speak your language very well ;)

Absolutely. I once did a "how to communicate effectively for executives" course and the guy who ran it said his advice for anyone from a scientific/technical background was to write the long thoughtful email explaining everything. Cut and paste the last paragraph with your conclusion to the top. Make any minor changes in wording you need. Add (preferably within the first 2 sentences) any action you want the person to take or something saying you don't expect them to do anything you're just telling them some information you think they will find useful and (hopefully) why.

His point was that technical people tend to want to produce an argument with all the information etc and then get to the conclusion. Business people typically will read the first paragraph and sigh because they don't know what the email is expecting them to do[1]. Then they go on to doing something else and tell themselves they'll come back to it when they have time.

[1] Especially not knowing whether the email is just for general information or there is a specific action the recipient needs to take.

Just a quibble,

In a business situation, with a motivated person, state the action you want quickly and then give whatever needed details.

In a business situation, with an unmotivated person, state the problem quickly and then the action needed for solution (or the reason this is the needed action and then the action, etc).

In a story telling situation, you can draw out the scene setting 'till when you state the problem until the final result is suitably dramatic ("For just a second, the mist parts and the rust-red scaly snout of a red dragon can be")

That why I can't get the author's idea D&D helps with business questions. As a DM, I describe the environment neutrally and don't give my players action bullet points 'cause it's their job to come up with those (and if I do their job for them, they lose out).

I use the "pyramid format". Conclusion first. Main points with little explanation next. Explanation of main points after that. Details last. That way someone can stop reading at any point and still have a complete view at some level of detail.

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-me...

Though this isn't a specific reading, there is a useful habit you can try out: you can start to regularly read well-written newspaper articles, because a focus of written journalism is to break down complex issues into understandable stories. These can provide exemplars for how to approach your own writing.

Consider a recent article in the Financial Times about rising sea temperatures [1][2]. The topic is vast and complicated, which is perhaps relatable to your perspective, yet it's the job of the writer to produce the linear narrative that you mentioned. How does the writer do this?

---

The article presents the key idea up front with a headline ("The dangerous effects of rising sea temperatures"), and then adds context with a sub-headline ("Scientists are increasingly concerned that the world’s oceans are approaching the limits of their capacity to absorb heat").

To ease the reader into the topic, the author then begins by focusing on a human subject by writing: "In 30 years of studying the oceans, Matthew England has learnt to understand their irregular yet constant rhythms — the cycles of wind, temperature and atmospheric changes that interact with the masses of water covering most of the Earth’s surface.

The author continues: "But what he has seen in the past 15 months has shocked him. Global sea surface temperatures have reached and stayed at record levels, fuelling heatwaves and melting sea ice. Temperatures in the north Atlantic waters he has been studying, including around the UK and Ireland, were described last year as “beyond extreme” by the EU’s Earth observation service."

The author later "zooms out" as a narrative technique—similar to the one described in the submitted article—that provides wider context for the problem that the interviewee is describing by presenting cases of natural disasters.

To get deeper into the subject, the author then includes perspectives from various other researchers who study the phenomenon, and then dives deeper into competing theories about the immediate causes behind these environmental changes.

---

So, in your context, you could begin describing how your software tool solves some problem by describing a human user who is facing a specific yet common issue that is frustrating. After the reader then grasps what the problem is, you could write about how your software tool fixes the problem.

But this is just one approach of many. Another author might have taken a "lede-nut graf" [3] approach, where the bottom-line conclusion is put in the first sentence as the "lede," followed by the "nut graf" of a paragraph providing additional context and motivation to read the rest of the article. With this approach, you could skip the focus on a human user, and instead jump right into a sentence that claims your software tool solves a specific problem (especially if the problem is a well-known one).

One of the best methods I've found to get better at a particular skill is to immerse yourself in high-quality exemplars of what you're trying to do. Even without taking notes, you can naturally pick up lessons from what you're experiencing. For this reason, a habit of reading well-written articles could help with your own ability to describe complicated concepts in a way that's more accessible.

[1] Link: https://www.ft.com/content/76c3747d-f068-467a-98f9-4ed687dcb...

[2] Gift link (viewable up to three times): https://on.ft.com/3LJJmBT

[3] More on nut grafs: https://www.theopennotebook.com/2014/04/29/nailing-the-nut-g...

Grammatically those are participles and are in fact technically adjectives, even though they are derived from verbs.

I played that game for the first time not long ago and found it funny how redundant statuses stack up when a creature gets something on them. It's a weird thing to not have changed after so many years of development.

Something like: Urden McUrist is covered with the blood of Urden McUrist. He is covered with the blood of Urden McUrist. He is covered [...]

I think they are the same thing, the magazine just put it in fun language so the reader would be more interested.

This structure is why I don't like those ridiculous interviews where it starts with "the actor sits in his home with [long description of furniture], wearing [long description of clothes], he sips coffee from a [long description of mug]". I just want the interview, I understand that the actor is living somewhere and wearing something, it does not matter.

Character creation is hard? Also I'm not sure this is entirely accurate. I generated an elf druid (the type I just created one of manually) and it gave me one less language than I should have, no wild shape, which feels pretty important for a druid character, one less spell than I should have and no actual details about what the spells do mechanically. Also I don't recognise half these classes from 5E, were they in an earlier edition of the game? And where's all my skills?