Sage's examples make sense to me. In general I'm a little leery about how quickly people seem to jump to the "lies are Defy Danger with Charisma!" position. To my mind, Defy Danger ought to be about defying a specific fictional danger. "Not being believed" isn't always a danger. If the consequence is an NPC thinking "huh, there's some goofball here claiming to be someone he's not", that's not a danger. I can definitely imagine situations in which lying or fast-talking to extricate yourself from a sticky situation would be Defy Danger, but situations shouldn't magically become Defy Danger because your D&D-based intuitions say "there should be a role here." (But I guess I'm off in the wilderness on my dislike of the Defy Danger = catchall move idea, so I should stop harping on it).

Personally, I'm not too concerned about the lack of a lying move. Telling lies doesn't give you magical powers, and most people aren't sitting around waiting to pounce on liars, so "telling a lie" isn't always some critical juncture in the fiction that demands special attention. Lies are sometimes a means to an end, and I think Parley ought to be fine most of the time for proactive bluffing or trickery if people weren't importing expectations from other games. (Expanding Discern Realities to include some choices that were easier to apply to people-reading might be something to consider, though. If people know they have avenues of trickery that are guaranteed to work on someone they'd probably be less skittish about pursuing fiction that doesn't map to an explicit move).

We haven't tried beta 2 yet, but one of the guys in the game I'm running keeps getting hung up on the "there's no bluff move!" thing. I'm not sure I have a handle on it exactly, but I think the problem is that he has trouble framing what he wants in terms of directing the NPC to do a specific thing -- since I don't notice anything implied for the NPC to do when he's "bluffing" I don't say "that sounds like Parley, roll+CHA", and when he doesn't get the mechanical reinforcement he expects based on intuitions he's built up from other games about when the dice get rolled he backs off, saying "oh, there's no bluff move..." instead of pursuing what he was doing in the fiction. As an analogy, instead of "Listen guard, I'm the new captain, and you need to report to your new post right now!", it's more like "Listen guard, I'm the new captain! <looks at GM expectantly.>". (I also think the "ask you for something"/"promise" phrasing makes the move read like it's only about explicit verbal requests, so that may make it harder for people to parse implied ideas into the framework of the move). The wording of the move changed a bit in the new beta so maybe it will be smoother for us now.

Dungeon World is a game of action, where so long as you can still get into a position to cast it healing is always around the corner (with a roll).

Maybe it's an artifact of the small party size of my group and the classes they chose (2 players, Paladin + Thief, still first level), but I don't think healing has felt abundant to us. Are we just outliers, or are we maybe missing some easy source of healing?

I posted another episode with the third session. At the end of this one I talk a little bit about how I'm interpreting the agenda and principles and how that's informing my GMing of the game.

You play Dungeon World in a "step on up" manner

No, this is 100% wrong.

Both of us read the "Be a fan of the players" and say "hell yea, I'm a fan of the players!", and then go about being fans of the players in two totally different ways. Dungeon World works for both playstyles.

Does it work for both? I don't know. I think I go about "being a fan of the characters" the way the book tells me to:

Treat the players' characters like characters you watch on TV. You want to see how things turn out for them. You're not here to make them lose, or to make them win, and definitely not to guide them to your story. You're here to portray the interesting world around them and see how interacting with that world changes everything.

I'm still interested in seeing your answer to the question I asked.

The best advice I can give is to stop worrying who's playing "by the rules" and play the rules as written as best you understand them.

For a released game I would probably be better able to ignore people who are "playing wrong" (from my POV). Since the game is in beta I think that changes things a bit, since I assume it's useful for the designers and the community to understand how different people are interpreting the text. If this were a released game I'd probably not bother posting thoughts like mine in this thread since it would seem like a moot point to me.

As to the tightrope, again my best advice is not to worry about it. If a character dies, they die. There's nothing in your agenda or principles about keeping them alive. (There's nothing about killing them either, of course.) You're there to present a fantastic world, if that world happens to kill a few unlucky adventurers so be it.

I agree with that to an extent, but saying "I didn't tell you to worry about that!" isn't the same as crafting a game in which it isn't one of the psychological factors weighing on my mind. Generally I don't have a problem because I don't keep track of player HP (they do that themselves) so I have no idea if the damage is lethal or not, but if the damage per hit is high enough it sort of becomes obvious whether I'm deciding if they live or die and it starts making me feel guilty. But that's probably best discussed in a different thread.

That sounds like a disagreement with Josh. Some people find fiction-first preferable, that's fine. I don't see why the game needs to be any more clear about this

Yes, it's a disagreement with Josh, not something you need to address. Remember that you asked me to expand on where I differed with Josh, not where I differed with you or with the game. This was one of the places.

So I guess the problem is people are excited about it but it's not something new? Again, I can't quite see the issue that needs to be addressed. The rules say who has narrative control over what. Some people find this new and different. Others won't.

Problem? Addressed? I wouldn't frame it like that. But when I hear people gushing about how the player narrative authority in DW or AW are so mind-blowing it makes me think that they have a very different take on the games than I do.

The full game has all the tools to make that. Or is there something in your vision that you feel is contradicted by the rules?

Contradicted? Maybe not. I found it difficult with the current Fronts rules, but a lot of my understanding of the current Fronts rules were based on inference and assumption rather than a robust understanding of the procedures. I know those have been updated for beta 2 so I've been waiting to see the new text before trying to articulate my thoughts about dungeon creation.

A few direct answers to Dan: I don't quite know what the definition of Sandboxy is here or how in media res runs counter to it.

The way I'm using the term involves players always deciding where their characters go and what they do. Starting play in the middle of a dungeon or other action scene involves the GM making decisions for where the characters have gone and what they've done before play begins. An in medias res opening seems to be more focused on crafting the experience of a scene, which isn't what I normally think of as a sandbox approach.

Actual play is sandboxy, I guess? I'm still not quite sure what that means. Sandboxes are boring, they just sit there. In Dungeon World there are bad things happening, things which the GM is going to make evident. You're going to stop them for gold and glory, or they're going to get right in your face.

To me sandbox doesn't read as "static". The things you say about bad stuff happening in the world is totally consistent with how I read the term. The most important things for my conception of sandbox play is the causal consistency of the fictional world (this is in contrast to something that is more story-like, where the consistency of the world merely has to be good enough to provide plausibility for the narrative to hang together). Once something is established in the fiction (either because it's prepped or explicitly comes up in play), it proceeds on its own course whether the players interact with it or not. The focus of play follows the PCs, so stuff may get more "clock ticks" in their vicinity then the rest of the world, but the world isn't there to provide a specific experience (and definitely not a narrative) for the players or the characters. You don't prep "adventures" so much as you prep interesting places where adventurous stuff might happen if the players go there. Most of the principles, etc., of DW seem to me to be entirely consistent with this (which is why I assume this is the way the game is meant to be played) so the few things that don't kind of stand out to me.

I don't see where the Front rules say anything about making them relevant to the players

Maybe I'm reading too much into the first session section? Personally I have a really hard time understanding what I'm supposed to do with that section. I'd much prefer the game to just tell me to prep an interesting dungeon for the first adventure and find ways to hook the player contributions to what's already prepped, but I got the impression that the game doesn't want me to do that.

It'd be great if you could explain what you find vague. I've edited the hell out of the GM chapter again, but I didn't find much vagueness to begin with. What's not clear?

I don't have any specific ideas in mind right now. Maybe I'm reacting more to the fact that I see conflicting interpretations that aren't compatible but which don't necessarily outright contradict the text? I could maybe reread the text and find some things that are contributing to my sense of vagueness, but that seems like it would be kind of a questionable use of time since you've already got a new version about to come out.

I haven't had a chance to list the The Podge Cast yet and likely won't get to it for a bit, could you give me some ideas what you heard that doesn't mesh?

Some of it is about tone. Josh seems to think the game is way more over-the-top than I do. The damage thing is definitely part of it (I'm not fond of the "most boring" characterization of damage -- I hate it when games want me to walk a social tightrope about when I'm supposed to use certain options that the game presents to me as valid. I want to use damage when it's fictionally appropriate to do so, and not feel like I'm being boring, or ruining someone's fun, or doing anything else that I ought to feel guilty for when I do it). He seems to really dislike the idea of using the mechanical moves as starting points for player decisions, but I think that's half of the game (i.e. it's perfectly fine to use the mechanics to inspire you to do something in the fiction, or to do something in the fiction that may or may not translate directly into a mechanical move -- both are valid, neither is privileged). He seems to think that "player narrative authority" is the killer app for the game but I think that's kind of incidental and the most important thing is how the game structures interactions. There might have been other stuff. Basically, he was totally gushing about DW, but the game he was describing seemed to be dramatically different from the game I'm familiar with so I had that "maybe I'm the crazy one" reaction.

It reads a fair bit like the Bloodstone Idol, actually.

There's a good chance that I'm the odd one out here, but there was a lot of stuff about the Bloodstone Idol that didn't make a ton of sense to me, like the armies of lizardmen and goblins. It seems like your vision of a dungeon might have a "crazy beehive of activity" element, whereas my mental prototype of a dungeon is a lot closer to something like the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I posed a new episode of the podcast with our second session of the game.