What Dungeon World and Dance have in common

I recently played a game of Dungeon World, which if you don’t know is a pretty cool tabletop roleplaying game set in a Dungeons & Dragons-esque universe. I won’t go over all the mechanics, but this is how 90% of all moment-to-moment interactions play out:

Player: I do this thing!

GM: Alright, you’re doing this move, and rolling this stat

Player: *rolls poorly*

GM: Ok, well then I get to make this move, which means this happens

Player: Oh no! I do this thing!

What I find interesting about it is that while the player moves usually have mechanical effects (e.g. doing damage) the GM moves are pretty much all in the title. When the GM takes the move, ‘put someone in a spot’, they literally just describe that happening, and then wait for the players to react before taking another move.

So in essence, the moves just describe certain tropes of the fiction which play out well. “Nothing happens” isn’t a GM move because it’s not interesting, so the GM isn’t allowed to let nothing happen when a player rolls poorly. But for now, let’s just focus on the move system from Dungeon World, since that’s all I want to talk about for now.

Moving on to my experience at the Dance Student Showcase the other night, I found that a lot of it fit into much of what I knew about 3-act structures and a bit of the hero’s journey. But, because it was expressed entirely through dance and music, it felt startlingly unique, despite it’s similarities.

This brings up an issue I have with these two concepts. The hero’s journey isn’t really a set of rules, it’s a successful application of 3-act structure. There are alternatives out there which are good examples of 3-act structures but not of the hero’s journey - namely, anything lacking in a hero or a physical or emotional journey.

So then, what if a 3-act structure was the same as the hero’s journey? Not a set of rules, just a successful application of a different set? To bring back Dungeon World, what if we thought of individual beats of the story in terms of ‘moves’ the writer is playing?

This isn’t a new concept - if I say ‘deus ex machina’, you know what I’m talking about; whether I call it a move or a narrative principle isn’t really relevant. But I think there’s something to be gained by looking beyond just tropes and more the choices the writer makes in the moment to moment.

Now Dungeon World isn’t really any good at telling a story which isn’t about dungeoning and dragoning - at least, not in the way it presents itself. So any move list for dance or games or whatever is either going to be generalized or fits only one specific narrative. And if the moves are too specific, then it seems repetitive. But let’s try a general list of moves:

Introduce a new element (character, theme, environment, etc.)



Make two elements interact

Evolve an element

Change an element

Introduce status Quo

Introduce a question

Answer a question

Provide information which is relevant later

The list, of course, will be massive. More specific moves for, say, a conversation could look like this:

Show an ugly side of someone



Test a character’s values



Manipulate or trick a character



Escalate an argument to violence



“Wait, wasn’t this post about dance too?” Don’t worry, we’re about to get back to it.

I saw about 6 shows that night, and I found (in my unqualified opinion) the best pieces took each of their steps deliberately, and one at a time. We’re introduced to a cast of characters, we see their body language, we see their goal, and we see a conflict. If someone literally gave me no other context when describing the piece, I’d say I’m interested at this point.

Some dance pieces didn’t do that though. I couldn’t adequately pin them down to a short sentence or a move. One started off with two separate casts of characters each acting and showing their behaviors at once. Then several members of each cast would split off and start doing pretty much their own thing. There are moves here, but they’re all happening at once, and the cadence of them - how they flow together - isn’t very smooth.

Hearing ‘cadence’ brought be back to the theory of level cadence, and realized that we haven’t really ever left the area of game design. Introducing mechanics and enemies one at a time are core tenants of game design, as well as the cadence between them. Not much of a surprise, considering we started off this post with Dungeon World.

See what I did there? I used the “reference the beginning of the post” move.

Anyways, if this interests you, I recommend checking out Robin D. Laws book, Hamlet’s Hit Points. It does something sort of similar but in a format pretty much entirely generalized, and only looks at story beats rather than decision-to-decision. It also introduces the hope/fear cycle, which I think is actually a really important factor of the interest curve that I’m a bit shocked hasn’t been more clearly pointed out before.