I haven't played Dungeon World (or any other PbtA game) yet, but from listening to Friends at the Table and reading the DW book I'm a huge fan of the system and am trying my best to organize a game soon.
I just had a really frustrating situation in my D&D game, and I'm trying to figure out in my head how it would have played out differently in Dungeon World. Basically, this is what happened:
The party was walking along a snowy path when suddenly there was an avalanche. Myself and another PC failed our Dexterity checks and got buried in the snow. The DM put us into initiative.
- On my turn I failed a Constitution saving throw to avoid damage and failed a Strength check to try and dig myself out.
- My allies failed investigation checks to try and find me
- On my turn I failed both my rolls again
- My allies failed checks to try and find me again
- On my turn I failed both my rolls again
- Finally one of my allies dug me out, one failed CON save from being knocked out.
All this took about 20 minutes to play out, and the only thing I got to do was roll, fail, wait 5 minutes, roll, fail again, wait 5 minute, roll, fail again, etc. It's the dreaded "you fail and nothing happens" that is my least favorite part of D&D and seems to be one problem that's solved by the fact that failure, in Dungeon World, should fundamentally change the fictional situation.
This is how I would imagine this circumstance would start in Dungeon World:
GM: "You hear a rumbling above and notice snow starting to fall from the edge of the cliff. What do you do?"
Me: "I try to press myself up against the edge of the cliff face so the falling snow goes over my head."
GM: "Make a 'Defy Danger +DEX' roll"
I roll a failure.
At this point, I'm not really sure. None of the GM moves really seem to map to "Bury the player in the avalanche" which makes sense to me intuitively since it's not really a situation that the player can narratively recover from in an interesting way (hence my frustration when it happened). However, getting buried by snow because I failed to react in time to the avalanche does seem like something that would naturally follow from the fiction.
Dungeon World players and GMs: how do you think a situation like this would have played out?