So I'm a brand new GM and a fairly new player. I ran my first session for a group of friends the other day and it just spiralled out of control and ended in complete chaos. I chose Dungeon World because I liked the ruleset and it was quite easy to pick up. I'm still very new at running a game so I obviously made mistakes.
The problem wasn't really that I made mistakes, that's going to happen. The problem is that when I made mistakes, things started to fall apart. I lost the group, my plans flew out the window and by the end I don't think any of the players were at all engaged. They were having fun by deliberately making my life difficult and trying to find holes in the rules. They enjoyed it, I hated it.
I still want to try this and I know my friends well enough to know that they can get engaged and interested in a game like this if I do a good job. I want to try again and we have another session planned for next week.
I've read a lot of the stuff I can find on the Dungeon world reddit any advice from people who've got experience with the game would be awesome.
Question: I want to enjoy running my game next week, what can I do to keep players interested in playing and how do I recover when I make mistakes that bring my players out of the game?
Edit for more detail:
What were your friends actually doing when you say they were "having fun making your life difficult and finding holes in the rules"?
One of them got bored and was trying to use discern realities/spout lore to repeatedly ask complete non-sequitur questions for the situation we were in e.g. 'how do kobolds have sex' - which was throwing me off whilst I'm trying to run a combat encounter.
I was starting to get frustrated and players were deliberately ignoring things or repeatedly rolling discern realities to ask 'Who's in control here?' to take the piss because I'd lost control of the game to get a rise out me.
They're immature, I wasn't running the game very well so they got bored and idle.
What kinds of mistakes or interest issues have you been running into?
I haven't run the game enough to have a full command of the rules, I was making mistakes about the mechanics of how classes etc worked.
The scenario I'd planned didn't fit the characters very well, some of them felt useless and I can't think fast enough on my feet as yet to adapt to that to keep them engaged.
My descriptions of things weren't always clear enough, the combat wasn't that great because I haven't got the rhythm down yet, or the variety and flexibility of consequences that I think is important to making DW interesting to play.
What's happened at the table that you're expecting to see more of?
It just isn't fun to have sit through having having the piss taken out of me for something I'm trying to learn how to do. For the game itself I don't mind if they're silly, serious whatever. I'm just happy if they're aimed at the game instead of at what I'm doing wrong.
Also, do you want dungeon world specific answers only or are you happy with system agnostic ones?
Either/or I've read a lot of the stuff I can find on the Dungeon world reddit any advice from people who've got experience with the game would be awesome. On the other hand, I think the issues I'm having are system agnostic so any advice for keeping control of a game would be great.
