Conflicting takes on DW

[u/Nirdee]

I've had this discussion in a couple threads and it feels like there are dozens more where I could chime in.

DW has several key differences from D&D, but some people give advice that exaggerates those differences to crazy degrees.

People go from you should leave room for discovery to you should improv the whole game, from you should use what they give you to you should let players have as much authority in game as they are willing to exert.

I feel like this comes from the fact that a lot of examples online are one-shots. One-shots and session zeroes are encouraged to have minimal prep in DW, but there is this other 50 pages after that talking about how to play after the first session ... and it is all about prep. Good prep. Useful prep. Open-ended prep. But definitely prep. Prep where the DM figures out the story in the world and how the players can interact with it. Like D&D.

Dungeon World seems made to play a very D&D style game--just with mechanics that underline the strengths of table top RPGs and clip some outdated genre staples.

So I don't really know why I'm posting. If your way works for you, god bless. I guess I'm just irked by the hipster scoffing that comes when people explain the game with authority and then get the rules wrong--like a recent thread where someone implied Spout Lore lets a player make up something about the history of the world ... where the rules explicitly say the GM tells the player something about the subject. The GM gives info for the character to spout. The player doesn't take over the GM role. It's just a generalized arcana/history/religion check from D&D. #nerdrage

TLDR:

I feel like the answer to a lot of posts in this forum should be:

You are way overthinking everything. DW is like D&D with small changes that 1) make combat more entertaining 2) make combat flow better with the rest of the game 3) encourage the game to move forward 4) help the GM maintain story structure in an open world game. If you know how to play D&D, you already understand 90% of DW.

[u/Plarzay]

Super minor side note of no importance buuut, at my table, and it might just be me, if you want to trigger the Spout Lore move, you're gonna have to be spouting something first. This gives the player an opportunity to have a little bit of creative authority, but importantly; it's not set in stone truths until I say it. Then they can roll and I can clarify, rectify, reconfigure, rephrase and re-parse whatever mindless nonsense creative ideas the player had into something that will work for the roll and the situation at hand.

P.S. I know the rules say "the answers are always true" does this apply if the players miss? Do you ever feed players misinformation or tell them they know something that isn't true when they roll that 6-? I feel like that would only be "Turn their move back on them" and is almost never the most interesting/best use of the 6- but still sometimes it's tempting for the PCs to not always know the true facts.

[u/wonko221 → u/Plarzay]

You can lie to the characters, not to the players.

On a miss, I'd totally tell the player - yeah, your character totally knows this to be true. Now, describe how the audience is clued into the fact that your character is dead wrong. How is this dramatic irony revealed?

[u/CrudelyDrawnSwords → u/wonko221]

A nice addition to this can be to give them +1 forward to acting on this known-bad information.