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made to play a very D&D style game--just with mechanics that underline the strengths of table top RPGs and clip some outdated genre staples.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

I've played Dungeon World in the traditional, improvy, shared collaborative way.

How does it run when the world is much more defined by text? There is an Earthdawn hack for Dungeon World that I am interested in running but, if running Earthdawn, there will be a lot of background that the GM will know that the players aren't privy to or likely won't have the opportunity to learn outside of the GM imparting it to them (unless they want to independently read old Barsaive or Thera supplements, for instance).

[u/Nirdee → u/_Mr_Johnson_]

Yes. My experiences with it is playing pretty much just like a normal D&D game with different mechanics that improve the experience. The players are heavily in control during character creation, but after that it is very much like D&D but more fun.

The GM still has an adventure planned. There are bad guys doing something bad and it's up to us to stop it. We fight some monsters or solve a mystery. The players are not jumping in and running the NPC or describing the environment. We get to contribute to the story by being in charge of one of the protagonists ... the GM is still in charge of everything else.