A few weeks ago I rallied around the office to see if I could get enough people together to get together a lunchtime RPG group. It is a pretty big office, so my odds were good. I landed six players and we sat down to see what we should play. Given that I was drawing from a broad pool, I was expecting anything but D&D to be a hard sell. But, I floated the idea of Dungeon World and everyone went for it. If you don’t know Dungeon World, click through that link and read up.

Right around the same time, my semi regular weekly group’s campaign was nearing the end, and the GM indicated he would enjoy a little break. I proposed Dungeon World to them as well, and they agreed too.

So I had two very groups on my hands – one group had been gaming together for a couple years, all very experienced players. One group had never played together, and had a range of experiences. The work group could meet for exactly one hour a week, the other group met for 3ish hours everyish week. I decided to run Bloodstone Idol for both, to see how it went. I thought there might some interesting compare and contrast to be found by running the same scenario with two different groups. I’m going to talk about that scenario a bit in the posts to come, so, you know, spoiler alert. But if you are playing in either group, this should be safe to read.

Team Lunch Hour did their chargen first. With six people and only five published roles, we knew someone would have to double up. We expected there to be a bit of a scheduling conflict with this group, as sometimes work would take precedence. We ended up with two Paladins representing two different deities – one a hedonist and the other a Popular God ™. The Cleric and the Popular God Paladin chose the same deity, though they chose different factions. The Cleric was a flabby priest from a more pious arm of the religion, while the Paladin was from a moneyed order of knights. Already we had three great party lines along which conflict could form. Joining the party was a Fighter who followed Popular Religion ™ mostly so he could kill people on crusades, a Thief whose mother had been killed in the name of Popular God by some of those moneyed knights mentioned above, and of course, the evil wizard who was using everyone to get himself safely into the Hall Under the Hill. We were able to complete the interesting parts of chargen during a single lunch hour, and the players really latched on to suggestions for relationships.

Team Game Night was smaller, initially just three players. The party started with an angry halfling knife Fighter with a chip on his (very low) shoulder. Next came a Paladin of Popular God, who was in deep cover as a drunken washed up lout but was really a drunken washed up foolhardy lout. They rounded out with a good Cleric of a evil god – someone who had been chosen to serve the god and had been bound into servitude. With fewer party members, we didn’t get the same level of party lines and conflict opportunities that we had in Team Lunch Hour. But we did get some good backstories about how they came together, mostly involving how the Paladin and/or theCleric had pulled the Fighter out of trouble.

One thing that was interesting about comparing the way the two parties developed characters was the Clerica. Both Clerics chose Suffering as the thing their god valued, but the interpretations were vastly divergent. While Team Lunch Hour’s Cleric saw suffering as something to be alleviated in the name of Popular God, Team Game Night’s Cleric saw suffering as the way his god gave his blessing – communing for him meant self torture, and his healing was physically painful to endure.

Next post, we’ll look at how the two groups approached the Hall Under the Hill, and how they got in.