That's a crummy and pretty funny thing to say given the rest of the discussion from people who've played the game. I wasn't the DM, as noted, but the DM definitely did, and sought advice out online for clarification, so going above and beyond, thus you crapping on them from a height is ummm, deeply unhelpful? Not very nice? Pointless rudeness even by my standards?
Hang on. I agree with you, it REALLY should be made clearly an 'editorial you', but if they're misinterpreting basic stuff that is explained on page 4, and again on page 8, then WTF? The diagram on p9 is pretty clear (as is the accompanying text on page 8) You start in FREE PLAY, which includes Gather Information, Choose a Target, and Choose a Plan (but this is FREE PLAY, there isn't a specific order or structure to this, it is simply scenes organized around characters, actions, and consequences). THEN there's an engagement roll. This is not obtuse, it doesn't require careful reading of the book or picking carefully through text, it is on a par with the stuff at the start of the PHB in 5e.
Quite representative of the unfortunate side of the FitD/PtbA community though - lot of people eager to crap on anyone who "got something wrong" rather than be to be helpful in any way. Kind of ironic/perverse given the nature of many of the games, but things are often that way - Steven Universe is a show basically about being kind and had one of the nastiest fanbases in fanbase history.
I'm simply asking the question because, frankly, it gets old talking to people who first state they have read, played, and thus have a claimed familiarity with a game, and then IMMEDIATELY they say things that contradict the introductory text of said game and form its most basic rules!
So I will say it a different way, read the first 10 pages of the BitD rule book PDF (I assume the paging and such is the same in printed versions, if such a thing even exists). What else is one to say? If the only way to be a 'good community' is to tell people that didn't read the book that you're sorry you recommended such an obviously crappy game and how could we have done that, well, you will be disappointed. People are not required to like the game, but if they make factual statements about it that are incorrect, they will be incorrect, and probably corrected. Such is life!
Yeah, that's not the issue, as we can see from the rest of the discussion. People absolutely did.
OK, then maybe they have bad reading comprehension??!! I don't know how else to respond, except the assertion was trivially dispelled by my reading the FIRST FOUR PAGES OF THE RULE BOOK. OK?
This is just funny, given the guys who created Dungeon World also said they'd stopped using Fronts, not even that long after it came out.
I don't actually know them, and I don't really spend a huge amount of my time dwelling on lots of game forums. So, you could be correct that they don't play the way we do, but IME fronts are an important tool! They work! Now, maybe the authors have developed some other techniques, great. Fronts work, they work really well, and IME a game without them is flat and suffers from a rather static and uninteresting setting. Fronts are a point of attachment for GM prep, and a fairly structured way to control its introduction (IE by using Dooms and associated grim portents).
I know that AW 2e doesn't talk about fronts, it talks about threat maps and clocks. That's fine, but IME AW is a much more 'in-your-face' game where stuff is whizzing in at you from various angles. There's not really some sort of overarching 'thing' going on, and stuff doesn't hang out there, gradually materializing for long. DW is a little more strategic and it is more amenable to stuff unfolding over time. So IMHO DW is more suited to fronts (they also work pretty well as a way to populate adventure locations, another thing that isn't prevalent in AW).
EDIT - I guess my non-rhetorical question is, what do you think the point of saying stuff like this is? Like what do you think you're doing here? "Outing" me as a "fake fan" or "heretic" or something?
No, I am just genuinely puzzled and slightly nonplussed when people describe so many instances of 'facts' that seem to contradict what I can plainly read. On the topic of fronts specifically, I don't know, maybe you have techniques of which I am ignorant. I don't know, but I would strongly counsel people wanting to run DW to build some fronts (after session 1).
If so this is something I've seen before in PtbA/FitD fanbases as I've said - instead of people explain or helping re: understanding rules, people rush to condemn people who either don't understand or don't follow the rules as basically heretic and unbelievers, enemies of the holy church, and it's so odd in the context of where those games are coming from. Like D&D players can be snippy and mean about rules, but they're desperate to explain the rules and how they work, generally speaking, rather than to condemn the people who don't get them or who they feel aren't using them appropriately or the like.
I'm not 'condemning' people, but I am asking in a somewhat pointed way why they think they know what they think they know, when again considerably parts of it evaporate when you read page 4 through 8 of BitD. We can discuss opinions about fronts, but I can tell you they are alive and well and being used successfully in many places by people running DW... If you don't use them, you DO need to do something equivalent, IME. Finally, it is obviously fine to alter a game, but do understand it! Again, 95% of the things I see posted by people are crazy, it gets very tiresome.
