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DW has Discern Realities, which surely any competent player is likely to trigger. They're going to ask at least one question, and it's likely to be "What should I be on the lookout for here?" The GM is bound by this, as it is part of the fiction now. A cook puttering in the kitchen is a fine...

This is a soft move in AW/DW parlance, Describe Future Badness (IIRC). There are a bunch of things that could be going on. First, the cook follows from the fiction, it's a situation and scene element that is logically consistent with the existing fiction. Second, the GM might be considering...

I didn't really have a problem with his lightshow either. I might have made it a bit less complicated, but conceptually it's OK.

I think the issue here is the difference between simple task adjudication and Narrativist 'fiction resolution'. Even in AW I'd like to see some generalization. Jane is breaking into the warehouse, of course she can succeed! If the place is entirely unguarded why even roll? Is there a secondary...

I can't speak for others, but what I want is clear stakes. I want to know what I'm risking, what the potential rewards are, and how the rules of the game work in this situation. If @Lanefan tells me I am going to have to figure out what the rays do, that's fine. What are the ways to do that, and...

It's not, and it illustrates a much more common pattern in Narrativist play. Hino sees a bunch of peasants being driven into an assault by a troop of samurai. She's incensed and I roll to resist her attachment (loyalty to the farmers of Iga). I fail, and she whips out her dodgy arquebus (dodgy...

No, it isn't. And as for 'pretty much every topic in existence' being in dispute, I heartily disagree. Most things are settled matters, or else fall into the category of the unknown. Some things are known to be unknown, others are unknown unknowns, but very few things are thought to be known...

Well, I'm certainly no expert on QM, but my understanding of the state of the field is that Einstein's reservations have yet to be effectively addressed. And there are, in fact, a number of quite competent physicists who take them seriously and have worked out interpretations of QM which, like...

Nope: you may be attempting to articulate the Appeal to Authority fallacy, but you have it wrong. Appeal to Authority is a fallacy when the person you are appealing to is NOT AN EXPERT in the field you are discussing. So, appealing to Gary Gygax, a legitimate expert in the field of RPG design...

Sure, but that doesn't make consulting an expert, or accepting the opinions of one on a matter in their field, as a fallacy, or foolish. Quite the contrary, a certain politician simply looked foolish when he insisted he knew better than the NWS where a hurricane was going to go, right? How'd...

That seems a bit odd to me. Like, an SC could be a 500 mile overland trek, or it could be haggling with a dragon. Like, granted larger scale SCs generally have more scope for different skills to be used and whatnot, but there's no inherent level of detail/granularity. Interestingly, the other...

Well, there's room for some dice. The GM could rule that the Discern Realities move was triggered. A Defy Danger could be rolled, say using INT. Or the PCs just hear something, where as simply barging the door into a dangerous place calls for the GM to drop a hard move on them. Those all seem...

Sorry, I think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill. First of all players are always free to interject, "hey we want to gather some herbs along the way." Or maybe flashback or retcon in a minor way, what's the big deal? Also things like PbtA, or I'm sure BW, but even trad games...

I'll go you one further. Once I started a Traveller game. I just told the players that their characters were on a small station. They started going about the usual kind of activity of such PCs, meanwhile I described a disaster unfolding on the station which trapped them in a decaying orbit...

This reinforces my point above about 4e SCs.

I'll just point out that skill challenges were maligned often, but they're a huge boon here! They allow for a mix of more and less intense fiction, and 'pool the stakes' in a helpful way. This can greatly facilitate seamless blending of gamist play and attention to pacing, etc. Super helpful and...

Let's approach it from a perspective of what is more realistically likely play. First, the intensity and salience of any given bit of play is probably not totally clear beforehand. So even some super intense play has lulls, and some of those will end up, on reflection, being fictionally...

Oye! Exactly how many encounters would you manage in an evening? People said 4e combat was too slow!

Oh, come now. He's mostly just explicating what every successful game designer knows. If you want to know that sort of thing, why not take the word of the (maybe second) most influential designer? He's sure a lot more of an authority than any of us. But of course I don't think he speaks for all...

1e DMG. I don't have it in front of me, but he brings this up several times in different contexts. First of all is the general GMing advice and discussion on using dice in the first part of the book. He also touched on it at the start of the combat system chapter, IIRC with respect to combat...