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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9311374" data-attributes="member: 82106">I personally find the whole "Fronts in DW are described like crap" meme to be odd.DW's description of fronts begins on P 185 describing what a front's core purpose is "They sort and gather your dangers into easy-to-use clusters." It then immediately describes 2 types of front exist, campaign and adventure. It then succinctly describes what adventure fronts do and how they can be used: "Think of them as episodic content:..."The next paragraph then describes the campaign front as "tying your adventure fronts together" and gives a very brief example. It then states plainly that this front will unify all your sessions and is slower burning, weightier, and 'scarier'.All of this seems quite plain to me. I agree that up to this point we're not in any kind of really new territory. HOWEVER, I would note that you need to take all the above in context (I mean this in the editorial you, as [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] surely has a good grasp on this stuff). This is not simply advice about prepping an AP or a Sandbox, because DW doesn't fit either of those paradigms at all! This gets more clear in the next part.There is then a detailed description of how to create fronts. It is in the form of a kind of recipe-like procedure with 6 steps. Each step is pretty straightforward, and the instructions proceed directly into fleshing them out.First up are dangers, each is given a name and an impulse. There follows a considerable chunk of detailed text explicating the possible natures of dangers, why they exist, and how you might create them. This all seems like useful and straightforward advice tuned pretty carefully to the context. An example front and some of its dangers forms a running example.Finally we are introduced to a systematic list of types of dangers, which we can pick from. These are first categorized into general types like "Planar Forces" and then more specific types like "misguided good" are suggested, with a possible impulse suggested to go with it. Again, this all seems fairly solid. A list of possible GM moves for each danger category is also given.Finally some other descriptive elements of dangers is discussed, a cast of characters and danger description, custom moves, and then grim portents. All of these get several paragraphs. Finally dooms are discussed, the actual manifestation of badness from a danger in the world, with examples given and a discussion of how they take place and their nature.Finally there's a bit on describing the stakes. Each front has some stakes questions, these describe the sorts of things that make good stakes and how to describe them.Then there's a section on 'Resolving a Front' which simply tells us how to wrap up a front and what that entails. Lastly there's a bit of a discussion about the dynamics of multiple adventure fronts being in play at the same time. This last part is just kind of basic common sense, but it does give us some interesting ideas/advice.Honestly, the whole thing seems fairly solid to me, and I had few substantive questions when I implemented it. Its a couple thousand words, maybe, covering 10 pages. I have basically no clue why it would be either confusing nor hard to use. Rarely do RPGs get more plain than this, really.EDIT: looking at the final writeup of the primary example campaign front, I do find it rather wanting in some respects. Some of the information is contradictory, and it is super unclear what would make a good ordering of grim portents and thus dooms between the 3 dangers presented. Partly I think this is the fault of the example itself, but it does illustrate the one area where I think fronts can be obtuse, and that's in terms of these portents.So, each danger provides certain portents, and a doom, but it would probably be better, IME, if the dooms and portents were associated with the front as a whole, so that the front becomes a script. This is especially true of campaign fronts, where things may take a long time to unfold. Fronts with a smaller scope, the adventure fronts, IME are less subject to this, but it could still be a problem. I'd simply provide an overall script that orders when the dooms should be triggered WRT the entire front, and/or insure that the front description is coherent enough to explain the causal relations and interactions between the various elements of each danger, especially when the dangers seem actually be in opposition to each other, as in the example.</blockquote>

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