Introducing: Kinship & The Group Playbook
On page 10 of the original Dungeon World (OG DW) there’s a section that became the core inspiration for our vision for Dungeon World 2 (DW2). It’s entitled “Why?” and it presents the three pillars of the DW experience:
- The characters do amazing things
- They struggle together, and
- The world still has so many places to explore
The first one was the basis for our class redesign, including their core feature, starting and advanced moves, and other aspects of the player-facing content. The third we’ll talk about in more detail once we reveal and discuss our exploration framework (and its corresponding journey moves). The second, in turn, will be the focus of this post.
One thing we wanted to emphasize in DW2 was that this is a group game. One in which all the player characters are interesting and cool in their own right, it’s true, but one in which they’re at their strongest when working together.
We started by analyzing Bonds, and how we wanted to present them in our game. We wanted to make them more relevant to DW2 and, from there, the discussion and brainstorming led us to an obvious conclusion. If we wanted to make working together a central part of the game experience, it needed a strong mechanical framework.
This we ended up calling (so far) The Group Playbook.
The Alpha rules include an example of the group playbook, which encompasses our version of the Bonds rules, group conditions (which, as you may have already guessed, affect everyone in the party), wealth (which we decided to make a communal thing, rather than something each PC needs to track individually), as well as some starting and advanced moves. Our idea is that all of these together should allow you to discover who your adventuring party is through play, what your shared strengths and weaknesses are, and that it helps you establish interesting internal dynamics from the get go.
At the center of the group playbook, however, there’s one more mechanic we need to discuss: Kinship.
We wanted to have another group resource, apart from wealth, one that reflected the cohesion and harmonious cooperation of the party. Kinship is thus at the basis of our “help move”—Assist—and Push Yourself, which allows you to have a dramatic moment of growth up to once per session. We’ll talk more about these in future entries.
Moreover, Kinship is the resource you can always rely on to fuel your advanced moves, whether they’re from your own class or ones you grabbed from other classes through our version of “multiclassing”. Many moves can also provide you with some Kinship as a side benefit or allow you to spend Kinship in new ways (or get a better benefit out of the usual uses). In this manner, we’ve established what we feel is a solid framework of interlocked mechanisms that allows you to perform team feats that feel more powerful than single, personal exploits while, at the same time, incentivizing working together and thinking about benefiting others when getting good results (mainly by choosing options which add Kinship to the shared pool).
As for Bonds, our current thinking is that you start with some and, when you try to Redress conditions, it’s easier to do so with someone you have a Bond with, so they’re valuable right there. It’s also easier to Read PCs you have a Bond with, and relying on a Bond is a sure way to Resist a harmful consequence! You can also gain Kinship if you let your character be Swayed by another they have a Bond with… And many other little things here and there.
In short: we’ve tried to make Bonds an integral part of the DW2 experience. We’ve done so not so much by giving them one huge constant benefit (like with Kinship), but by incorporating into many different places. Its importance, then, is in the aggregate of seemingly small but significant benefits more than a single “shiny” bonus.
And that’s about it for today! On Tuesday we’ll start talking about Core Moves for Dungeon World 2, starting with the ones most related to information gathering in one form or another.
Until then, happy gaming!
Helena.