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.

The player choices and handling of partial success in PBtA games (like dungeon world) really makes them sing. A partial success leads to adding complications, which creates really interesting situations.

The original Apocalypse World book has some really great ideas on how to run a campaign, as well - very worth reading for anyone who runs ttrpgs.

I had played enough TTRPGs at that point that when I encountered Apocalypse World that I found the advice to generally just be common knowledge. But if you're new to TTRPGs I highly recommend it for good advice even when running traditional TTRPGs.

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.

Can you recommend some of the better examples of the system these days?

I've played some Monster of the Week and read up on Dungeon World. I've played D&D regularly since 2008. I like the idea of the PBTA system but I've had a hard time justifying leading people into PBTA games since D&D seems to have such a larger ecosystem.

I'd like to take another stab at PBTA games, hoping that looking through a system or two that you thin is a good example of the system might inspire me to pick up a game!

I've been playing Ironsworn: Starforged (the sci-fi version of Ironsworn with similar but not identical rules; it's a solo-friendly PBTA game) for about 2 weeks, and as a generally non-creative person, it is stretching my brain in the best way. I can barely get my D&D 5e group to play D&D 5e (it's fizzled out completely now) let alone an alternate RPG so I joined a Play-by-Post game of Starforged that was just starting up. You can play it solo or co-op or guided (i.e. with a GM). We're playing it co-op and we're playing 4 player even though the game recommends 1 to 3 players. So we all have to be creative and figure out the rules together (we're also on the starforged discord where we can participate in discussion about the rules and ways to interpret them), as well as implement the best practices of play-by-post but we seem to be meshing very well so far.

One catch is you need more than the core rulebook. You'll need the asset cards, which you can download and print but it's easier to just buy the cards. (edit: or you can just copy the images of the specific cards you pick for your character into its own document instead.) And the reference book which is spiral bound so it can lay flat might be useful, although lately I've just been looking up each move in the index of the main rulebook instead. There is a free reference for the moves in the playkit as well.[0] I see they also have a preview version of the game you can get there.

[0] https://www.ironswornrpg.com/downloads

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.

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.

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.

> RPG sourcebooks for games you may never play, but all of those books are farmable for a d&d campaign.

I have purchased almost every printed GURPS 4e book and a fair number of 3e books for exactly this reason. None of my players have ever been interested in the system (I like it a lot, but won't force it because I'd rather play a game I enjoy but isn't in my top 3 systems than lose a group forcing a game I really like but they hate). However, the books are so well written and provide a wealth of references and ideas that when running other games I've borrowed liberally from them. I think I referenced some of them more than my CoC books when running a CoC campaign a few years back. And a lot of my OSR books are basically the same. I only ever run DCC or C&C these days in the D&D-adjacent space but keep getting other books and modules for other D&D-ish systems since they can be ported to those systems so easily.

Yeah i've been thinking about the dcc spellcasting system and how you could homebrew it into d&d to make playing a wizard a little more spicy.

> 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.

I don’t even play DnD and I know it’s 1d6 bludgeoning per 10ft fall damage with some very high cap that is unlikely to matter for player characters.

I heard it once on a podcast. Rules esoterica sticks to me like glue. I’ll remember 1000 of those rules before I remember the name of some person in a fantasy world and what exactly they were doing.

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.

> 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.

This has nothing on MMOs, where everybody constantly takes jumps that they know will cause severe damage (say, 30-80% of the amount that would kill you) because it's faster and damage heals.

> same damage falling 30 feet onto a stone floor, pile of hay, or a lake

Pretty sure it's the DM's job to adjust that. Eg "You break a toe from hitting the stone floor. Roll 2d6 for damage"

That aside, I'd say DnD is more like video games than real life. Most games have minimal fall damage because it's fun to jump. Also consider Mario games where you can kill an enemy by landing on them, but never kys by landing on bricks

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.

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.

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.

> 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)