The rulebook isn't required to build off the assumption of being familiar with D&D, true, but so many gamers have that as their grounding that not doing so has the potential to leave a large portion of their possible audience behind.
That's probably true. For me, the difference is that while a D&D snob will quote the rules at you to prove their "superiority", a PbtA snob will--and I have experienced this first-hand--tell you you're actually gaming wrong without trying to explain why.
@John Lloyd1 I agree with this. Certainly Apocalypse World 2e is a bit more polished game than Dungeon World, but DW is quite solid, IMHO. I like the fronts and associated stuff, they seem fairly straightforward to implement and allow the GM to provide some strong meta-plot without it necessarily taking control of play. I get why various people feel like it can be an easier game to subvert, simply because it borrows a milieu from such a strong trad game and you can certainly easily mutate fronts into a mechanism for applying GM plot to drive the game vs 'finding out' what the story is in a less forced way. You really just have to follow the advice given assiduously. I think it would make sense to get, and perhaps play, AW 2e, and then maybe read and play DW through that lens. There have been various attempts to modernize DW, but the original authors apparently are not likely to do it, and I guess other efforts have spun off into their own rather different games.
As you can see, DW doesn't employ any catch phrase, but it plainly states the same concept pretty succinctly, and gives a very basic straightforward example. This is on Page 18 of a 400 page rulebook, so right in the basic introductory material (the Chapter is called "How to Play"). Page 19 then follows on with "How to Make a Move" and "The Basic Move Outcomes." At this point, on P19 of 150+ pages of player facing rules you already know ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW to play DW! Pages 7-12 told you what its about and described the characters in fictional terms, and 12-18 explains what sort of game it is (why play this game) and an overview of the structure of the rules and play, with the rules really starting on P15 telling you "
In my experience the 'moves' architecture isn't really the problem. When I ran PACE (a diceless lightweight system which just gives each player 2 traits of their choice to leverage) the players had been playing 3e for ages and had basically the same sort of issue. They wanted some sort of 'attribute check' or something that would mechanically describe the outcome of an action in pass/fail terms and seemed frustrated that they only had "2 skills" each (and the sorts of traits they chose initially were very mechanistic, like "strong" or "quick witted"). After a couple sessions though the idea of a more narrativist sort of "tell us what your goal is" and then describing how the opposition shapes up, etc. became routine. Now, that game is certainly not PbtA, but I would say the way I ran it was pretty much like "the core of the onion" in VB's terms. Its a conversation with a few (very few) rules which help to tell us what happened. Moves are just sauce on that. They add a lot of good stuff, but triggering them is not what the game is ABOUT.
Even so, "if you do it, you do it" is a good foundational principle for almost any RPG to use, including typical D&D: declaring an action commits you to (at least attempting) that action in the fiction. No take-backs, no "well, actually I would have...", or any of that nonsense.
No. "If you do it, you do it" is not system agnostic. That's the point - in particular, it contrasts with Vincent Baker's second-best known RPG, Dogs in the Vineyard, which is not "if you do it, you do it" but rather "say 'yes' or roll the dice".
"Say yes or roll the dice" reads to me as advice/instructions to the GM. "If you do it, you do it" reads to me more as cautionary instructions to the players.
They are both addressed to all participants. And they can't be in place at the same time because they are contradictory.
