Aaron Berger okay cool, good questions.

I started reading/planning/plotting probably in a similar place as you: broadly familiar with PbtA, not specifically steeped in Dungeon World. DW is different enough that I find it very hard, personally, to intuit how it works.

So, yeah, very front-heavy. I think it’s kind of similar to Magpie’s Chaos Worlds stuff. I mean fronts show up all over the place but good call on Headspace. It’s influentially similar. Say versus the halfassedness of fronts in Urban Shadows or, really, most of the PbtAs that I play and enjoy (Sagas of the Icelanders, Apocalypse World, Night Witches, etc.). On the one hand, that front focus is terrific and probably necessary for planning and interweaving all the weirdness and implications. OTOH it’s hard for my brain because it’s hard to improvise around. Again, I think it’s a skill you can develop — I’m gonna try the one-shot rules, I’m pretty sure, at a con next month and I’ll have no choice but to improvise.

End of session: yeah, same. It’s way more Dungeon World-y than I was thinking, because I was focusing too much on the SWvM moves. But now that I’ve actually played, I can see that a lot of the moves either reference the new economies (Alienation, Integrity, etc.) or rewrite original DW stuff. I do expect that level 2 will happen next session.

PvP is a little juicier in SWvM but it’s still essentially Dungeon World. Like, parley references only NPCs. But but but! There are things that nudge and influence PvP activities built into everyone’s playbooks. The Lover has heartstrings, which are incentives for those s/he Loves (term of art!) to do what s/he wants. Space Wurm treats everyone, literally everyone, as either treasure or currency, which warps Bonds pretty hard. Moonicorn’s got all kinds of weird tweaks to how intercharacter activities play out, but I believe in you is fairly straightforward and effective. In our game, The Other’s telltale heart stuff has been weird and interesting and very uh… I don’t know, kind of dom/sub.

But there are no new rules for PvP per se, no. If you think hack&slash is janky in DW, it’s just as janky in SWvM. This is definitely somewhere that my lack of deep DW fluency is tripping me up, as facilitator. I just don’t care enough about the blow-by-blow stuff, but I need to because it’s tied really hard to advancement. So I need to pull up my jodhpurs and grind out fights.

In our game, The Lover and Space Wurm’s spat was just table talk. But it was still good and effective! But not tied to rolling or advancement, really. And because The Lover’s heartstrings is one of those weird meta-moves, she doesn’t roll so therefore doesn’t stand to advance when she engages it. I’m still feeling stuff like that out.

Apologies for the babble but I’m sipping a rare coffee and I’m juiced out of my skull on the spice right now.