Anyway, I tried out this system with my group last weekend, and I feel that this system is really good as it allow players to be more attached to the game.

Unfortunately I think this system is flawed because the goal of it is to generate conflict (which leads to history), and this conflict will invariably lead to arguments and conflict between players. What happened in my game was that Players tended to want to protect their creations and took offense at other Players interfering with their pet races. As our offline friendship was more important, players who originally intended to screw around with the other players’ race decided to undo their move and spend their points doing something else.

Also, at the start of the game, I also defined the playable races in the campaign. This led to the players creating the races which their would-be adventurer will be, and heavily advancing their race over others (I suppose in the hopes that their character would have some sort of in-game advantage). As such, at the end of Age 2, the races of good had armies which could overwhelm the races of evil. In Age 3, these armies began to clear out the evil races, and I had to stop the game from continuing. I told the players that I might disregard Age 3 and either continue the adventure from Age 3 or re-write the history.

My group really enjoyed using DoW, and are even talking about doing it again sometime soon, so thanks again for the great game!

If you’re thinking of revising it, I’d say that all of the “issues” I cite are more along the lines of “put another paragraph of clarification in the instructions issues” rather than “There’s something wrong with your system issues”, which is why I said “There are no problems or mistakes that I found in the system, but there are challenges that need to be identified and handled for the game to meet it’s greatest potential.” Taking a few sentences to clarify some rules of thumb on scale and how to adapt it to your group, the kind of things you’ll want to have on your map or have already discussed at start time, and some other points will help players get the most out of what is a fantastic system.

As for actions to add, I think you’ve hit a good mix. The few things we tried to do that we couldn’t figure out how to classify we just called events and left it at that. We also had someone ask to use “create wonder” to create rivers in era 3, paying 2 points for what would have been 8 otherwise, but we handwaved them as “aquaducts” and said it qualified. It wasn’t a big deal.

Thanks again for dropping by! I hope you enjoyed the stew. I know the stew enjoyed your game.

The scale issue has come up on more than one occasion while we were creating worlds. In the end, it was decided that scale was probably best left up to the playing group, and the 1 inch rule be treated as a guideline (Roughly).

In our play testing, we were pretty much in constant communication during the first age. If a player decided to place a tropical jungle next to an arctic tundra for the fifth straight turn, a sidebar conversation would come up where questions like “Just what do you think you’re doing, Bob?” would be issued and valid responses demanded. But, remember that during the shaping of the world, fantastic scenery and breathtaking landscape can easily be crafted (as well as destroyed).

That all being said, I generally found the first age to be the slowest moving one, and the risk of players getting bored is great.

The idea about 1 and 2 point ‘bleed’ powers to keep the end of turn point total below 5 is a very good idea. I will try to bring this up next time we meet.

Part of our inspiration for the game comes from the classic mythologies, where the gods rarely got along with one another (unless they were scheming against other gods). The conflict that arises when one player tampers with another player’s ‘pet’ race parallels this environment. Unfortunately, we’ve also had our share of player tempers flare due to meddling. We have also had players save up points for several turns and then all but annihilate the aggressor’s creations. While not pretty, events like these do tend to create terrific history and spawn realistic religious tension in the game world.

We believed that we couldn’t possibly cover every case that a player might conceive, so we decided to just include some guidelines for powers. It was never intended to be an exhaustive list, only one that highlighted some of the more common examples. However, if you’d like some more cases included, feel free to let us know.

Again, thank you for the review of our game.

I’ve got a complete set of notes from start to end. Once this weekend’s adventure is ready to go, I’ll be adding some stuff to the wiki. Last couple turns, adding to some lists, and hopefully a map and timeline.

@Swordgleam – Will you share your secret about the origins of the undead with us?

@Monoxide – I think there is a typo in the url to your campaign wiki. I assume it should be obsidianportal.com/campaign/seramithra. Are you going to add a description of how your Dawn of Worlds went through (what happened and when) in some form to the wiki at some point?

I think you all have to more or less agree on tone beforehand.

The one issue we had was a player who didn’t really know what to do, so just spent all her points on advancements for her race. The other players wanted the world to have a ton of stuff, and so spread their points around. It led to one race that was more or less invincible, and a little angst before the differing motivations were resolved.

I still really love the origin of undead in that world, and plan to steal it for something someday.

@ Grim – In any collaborative effort, not having a clear agreed upon goal/tone/etc… can create vision issues. It’s even more important than normal games.
I had the opportunity to ask one of the creators about the game on http://www.youmeetinatavern.com a while ago. Turns out the Command Avatar-Create Race combo is intended to work only once per player per game, so it’s not as broken as it might otherwise look. I think it’s prmarily in place so that someone can create an elder “here since the mountains were young” race, but in reality it usually just gets abused to skip era 1 by impatient players.

@ Pseudodragon – Oops! Guess I should have been more clear with that link “You can download it here” or something. I have been properly chastised.

@ Taellosse – Thank you for helping out Pseudodragon.

@ Scott – We actually built the world over several sessions and a forum thread over the course of a month or so. I’ve never seen evidence that the time estimate of “about six hours” is anywhere near accurate. However, I always give the creators the benefit of the doubt and assume I’m doing something horribly wrong.