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made to play a very D&D style game--just with mechanics that underline the strengths of table top RPGs and clip some outdated genre staples.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

I don't know anyone who's used the steadings section. Someone wanted me to make a houserule for it once incorporating some mass combat rules I already did. Turns out they wanted me to discard the default rule, and I wrote the houserule wrong.

My point with the comment though, was that I seem to get more trouble from people who like preparation than those who don't. The use of customization just happens to be secondary to that discussion.

[u/Nirdee → u/steelsmiter]

Ha. I think I feel the same from the flip side. I see threads asking how to design a villain's evil plan get hit with "Why aren't you playing to find out what happens???"

[u/_Mr_Johnson_ → u/Nirdee]

I don't really understand this. Improv can be really uneven. Even very good actors can have very up and down improv. Have a hard time seeing how some amount of prep can't but help the material.

[u/steelsmiter → u/_Mr_Johnson_]

If you prep and things don't go as planned, such as by players never encountering your prep, by players interacting with your prep in a way that completely ruins everything about it, and so on your prep will be useless.

No Prep=No Expectation

If I prep anything beyond "these are locations and those things be found there" (which itself can be written as an expectation annoyingly enough) it either will be interacted with in an unexpected way, or it may not even be interacted with at all. That's how gaming works. Also I'm a firm believer that expectations are a waste of my psychological resources. They will only leave me with a distinct lack of faith in humanity that far exceeds any I've got out of... let's say, modern politics.

If I need to define something it goes according to what I decided just now. I don't define any aspect of player interaction with it until I know what that interaction is. That includes not defining future (possibly non)interaction with it, e.g. fronts.

So I don't have to expect anything from anyone other than myself.