Episode Details

How To Play Discworld

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m a player in an upcoming session using the rules for the official tabletop roleplaying game of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my fellow players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Discworld game at home.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. Game category

2. Tests

3. Traits

4. Rolling dice

5. Luck

6. Group tests

7. How to attack

8. Magic (Jommetry)

9. Dying

10. Helping allies

11. Building a character

Game category. Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld book series has sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. In the 1990’s, Pratchett was the UK’s best selling author. Fans adore these forty one books, and their characters such as Rincewind, Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, Tiffany Aching, Moist von Lipwig, and the anthropomorphic personification of Death. This is the official Discworld tabletop roleplaying game. Mechanically, this game uses opposed rolls to determine outcomes. Players cite one of their traits that they feel gives them experience at what they’re attempting to do. The Game Master thinks about how well prepared the player character is, and how this specific situation affects the difficulty, and tells the player to use either a four, six, ten, or twelve sided dice as their outcome dice. The Game Master always rolls a d8 for their narrativium dice. If the player outcome dice result is higher than the Game Master narrativium dice result, they influence the story as they intended. On a tie they still do, with a complication. When the GM’s narrativium dice result is higher, the story is influenced all right but in a way the player might not have been anticipating. The GM describes the complication. That’s a quick summary of the rules. Let’s go into more detail.

Tests. When your character tries to influence the narrative, they will make a test. If you pass the test, you influence the story in the way you intended. If you fail the test, you influence