An Inglorious Solution to Inglorious Delays

I don't really blame Sage and Adam.  Inglorious was a lot to bite off.  But, five and a half years later, it's probably time to admit they aren't going to make good on "bringing war to your dungeon world."

But that's okay for me.  I've actually been thinking on this a lot over the years.

Let's start with why this is hard.

First, Dungeon World is a narrative game, not a simulationist game.  Meaning, DW focuses on the narrative of a story, and not the nitty gritty of simulating something in particular.  And for RPGs, that's super dandy. But for wargames, it's super non-dandy, because wargames are simulations.  So there's an immediate conundrum the guys created for themselves.  How do you narratively address a simulation?  Ouch.  Not fun.

Indeed, even with a couple beta releases, Inglorious was... well... Inglorious.  It just wasn't very good.  We wrote units out on cards and moved them around the battlefield.  That's not particularly narrative.  And, when I mentioned the idea to my players at the time, one remarked, "if I wanted to play a war game, I would play a wargame!"  So much for that idea.

But this idea has tugged at me for a long time.  So I'm writing out some ideas I've had on how to enact large scale wars within the constraints of a DW game.  Some of these ideas lean more towards wargames, while others lean more towards RPG styles.  Many are pulled from other sources and modified.  None of these are what I would consider 'awesome" -- just makeshift for now.

METHOD 1: Diplomacy Evolved

Way back 30+ years ago, I played the game Diplomacy with friends in high school.  I loved the game not only for it's negotiating and backstabbing, but also for it's simplicity.  There weren't complex units.  There weren't detailed orders of battle.  There were simply armies (A) and fleets (F).  We used colored markers to define who was who and posted map pages to a public bulletin board outside the office every couple of days.  

The simplicity of the system still amazes me.  If you aren't familiar with the game, the map of Europe was divided up into provinces, as were the oceans and seas surrounding Europe.  A single province could support a single Army or Fleet.  Armies had to stay on land.  Fleets could move on seas or on land provinces directly adjacent to seas.  Most astonishingly to this gamer, there was NO randomness to the fights.  Orders to move units were resolved simultaneously among all the players.  Any deals you cut with others were exposed as heroism or treachery as you read off the results -- everything came down to these move orders:

• At the end of a move phase, only one unit can be in any single province.  No stacking.
• A uncontested unit would move from one province to the next. 
• Two units contesting for the same province would "bounce", remaining where they were. 
• A unit able to enter a contested province can "support" another unit, essentially having two units of strengthen entering the province to the opposing one unit - winning the fight. 
• Multiple supports are possible (and potentially incredibly complex).  
• A unit moving into an occupied province must be supported in order to dislodge the resident unit.
• A dislodged unit retreats to any available adjacent province it could make a valid move to -- if none exist, the unit is destroyed.  
• Some provinces (such as the Alps on the original Diplomacy map) were impassable -- if the only place you can retreat to is impassable, the unit is destroyed. 

What if we used these same rules for our Dungeon World battles?  Each army represented one 'unit'.  We could arbitrarily use the steading rules to say a guard is one unit, a garrison is 3, a battalion is 5, and a legion is 10.  We draw up a quick map of the battle area and we can start a nice fight that takes very little time to play out.

We can also easily expand this.  Let's add, for instance, Heroes!  A Hero lends its strength to an army for purposes of support as if it were a unit.  Heroes can stack.  Heroes (but not armies they are stacked with) can exist in impassable terrain.

Or Archers!  Who can only move to an adjacent province but can support up to two provinces away.  And so forth.  You can have a field day adding new units, but the simplicity of the system prevents too much drift.  

Perhaps the GM offers "missions" to the characters to change the situations on the battlefield.  For example, "If you and your brave companions can clear the tunnels below the village of goblins, the unit to the north can move through this province to the southern province without treating this as a move. 

I really like this approach because it can easily scale to the size of the battle.  World-spanning fight all the way down to skirmishes over a small village.  You're limited only in the appropriate scaling of the units involved.  You can even scale the power of a unit with some imagination.  You've got an ancient dragon?  Let's say he's a single army with the power of 5 armies.  You'll have to put a lot of power on the board to face him down.  

Obviously, these are just musing.  If you like or have questions, drop me a note.  Next time I'll try to look more narratively at battles in search of other ways to crack wars in Dungeon World.  In the mean time, have fun!