How big should the 'blanks' be in Dungeon World? My group has decided that they want to play dungeon world next...

>To give so much creative power to the players while NOT giving it to the GM.
That's always been the Apocalypse World system's "thing," for what it's worth. The world is this kind of vaguely themed blank slate when the game starts and gets fleshed out through a combination of GM improv and player input on the spot, in play. Dungeon World is a particularly weak Apocalypse World game, in my opinion as someone who plays a lot of pbta stuff, but that user's description of how worldbuilding works isn't too far off for all but a few standout exceptions.
In circles outside of Veeky Forums, he probably means.

Is dungeon world not liked here? I've only ever heard good things (though I will admit never from Veeky Forums). I suppose the fact that its never talked about, from what I've seen, could have tipped me off but it never occurred to me.

First, how is the setting being dependent on the players a bad thing? RPGs, as a social activity, tend to rely on the participation of the entire group and involving everyone in the creation of the setting ensures that there's something interesting for everyone in it.

Second, of course the setting revolves around the players, or rather their characters. Since the players explore the setting through their characters, the setting is only ever relevant in how it directly or indirectly affects them. Plotting out the war between two powerful empires is nice for the GM and all, but if the PCs are on the other side of the world and never even catch a glimpse of that, it amounts to little more that intellectual masturbation.

Dungeon World is just a failed attempt at porting D&D to Apocalypse World's engine that got everything of importance completely wrong. The reason Dungeon World is so greatly lauded is because it contains Apocalypse World's excellent GMing advice and general concepts (however mangled they are) in a context that is much more popular than post-apocalyptic fiction, written in a less abrasive tone, and not because of any merits of its own.

never played (or read) apocalypse world either, what makes it so much better than dungeon world?

>It's another "players should have no narrative control" episode

Oh boy, my favorite.

Probably misunderstanding what's going on, though it sounds like you don't like it anyway.

The idea isn't to remove gm creative power, its to incorporate players with the process instead of everyone playing the gm's novel. Adapting your fronts as a gm is key to making it a world that they players are doing things in, drawing on their ideas so they have shit to care about, but also making it seem reactive.
>player input gives idea of dark empire scaryhead
>make a front for evil empire, add some of your ideas, play it over sessions, describe effects, ask players what they do.

Makes there be a world doing things, still involves players, gives the idea things would happen without them. But it is a game geared for heroic epic fantasy, so sounds like a thing you don't want anyway.

It got memed hard a few years ago. So hard it triggered a banned namefag into making a rap on youtube about it. Veeky Forums basically assumes its bait now.

DW is a shit implementation of pbta that has a lot of bandwith because its boilerplate epic fantasy. The Freebooters on the Frontier hack for it works a lot better. Still kind of a shoehorn, but if you're interested in the mechanics but don't want epic fantasy its worth looking at.

Never thought about it this way. Since Apocalypse World is the original and Dungeon World its derivative work, it's much easier to use the former as a reference and describe how the latter fucked up the former's core elements.

Better than DW... Well, generally speaking, Experience serves as an actually controllable incentive tool, Moves have actual consequences instead of HP and Stats are meaningful in and of themselves rather than just being copied from D&D. And as I have just realized, having focused previously on the player side of things, the first session set-up isn't bollocks.

>it's much easier to use the former as a reference and describe how the latter fucked up the former's core elements.

feel free to tell me how trash it is compared to apocalypse, too, I just learned about dungeon world first so I think of it first, even though I know it used the system, not created it.

Basically the idea is that the world gets built collaboratively, but you as the GM "lead" the world with your Fronts. So at the start of the game you make a dungeon with some traps and monsters you think might be neat. Let's say that you put an evil wizard at the end of the dungeon. You ask the wizard's player st the beginning of the session
>Ysolde, what caused you and the dark wizard to become enemies?

And the wizard's player thinks for a moment and goes
>"We studied together once, but he made a pact with a dark patron for power. I could not agree with his greedy ways."

Now you, the GM, know that there's an evil entity (some sort of "dark patron") that tempts wizards with promises of power. You make a front to represent the dark patron, circumstances under which his plot progresses, and gradually introduce new threats to the world based on how far along it's clock gets, but the important part is that DW is all about coming to the table with the barest frame of an idea and then farming the players for the meat: the whole idea is to give them a story they're invested in.

All aboard, pleb. No brakes on Mr. Bone's wild ride either. Now know your role and shut your hole.

>feel free to tell me how trash it is compared to apocalypse, too, I just learned about dungeon world first so I think of it first, even though I know it used the system, not created it.

Apocalypse World is a very narratively driven system. Dungeons and Dragons is a very mechanically driven system. Instead of being "High Fantasy Apocalpyse World," dungeon world tries to be D&D meets Apocalypse World, and the end result is a system where the D&D aspects feel really clumsily welded onto AW's framework.

For example, almost every Apocalypse World driviative uses "harm clocks" to represent how injured a character is which tick incrementally towards "midnight," with single action rolls meant to represent extended scenes worth of combat. DW uses linear D&D health pools, which turns combat into a back-and-forth series of individual exchanges that doesn't mesh well with the fact the conflict resolution system calls for signifvang narrative consequences whenever there's a failed roll.

Well at least you're honest about railroading

PbtA is a fun system that can propel some dynamic character-driven stories--but Dungeon World gets it all wrong by squandering the potential of that design for the sake of aping the most uninspiring parts of D&D. Altogether it misses the point.
For examples of how PbtA games can shine just look at Masks, or The Sprawl.

If you really want something like Dungeon World, where it collapses the trappings down into something where mechanics are all inherently and explicitly narrative devices, my advice would be to dump it for Fate Accelerated where the approaches are Str/Dex/Con/etc. Just have any 10+ options trigger on "success with style," and that's all the heavy lifting out of the way.
You can also ripoff what interesting class moves the game does have and run them basically as-is as Stunts. Hell, you could even transplant DW's spell system virtually as-is.

I should copy and save this somewhere, considering how often I find myself typing this out...

>Stats
AW's stats each represent a different and distinct approach (with force, composure, smarts, persuasion and weird shit) to any given situation and are tied to one or two of the game's basic Moves each.
DW's stats are blindly copied from D&D with three of them (Str, Dex and Con) covering the same approach and one Move being shared by all the stats, making the separation between somewhat pointless.

>Basic Moves
AW's basic Moves categorize almost every genre-appropriate action the characters can take, taking intent into account, tie them to the stats and provide interesting consequences for them that significantly change the situation they arose in and push the story/game forward, no matter the roll result.
DW's basic Moves that are not just copied wholesale from Apocalypse World are modified or created so that they often fail to produce interesting consequences and for many 10+ results just outright solve problems without giving any new impetus. And then there's the aforementioned Move that is shared by every stat and can apply to almost every possible action in addition another Move, completely missing the point of Moves.

>Experience
AW awards experience for rolling one of your two highlighted stats. Stats are highlighted at the start of each session, one by the GM and the other one by another player. Since stats each represent different approaches, what this means is that you get rewarded for doing what the group wants to see you doing.
DW awards experience for rolling a 6-. What this means is that you get rewarded for ignoring your strengths and intentionally flubbing calculable risks, giving the whole game an unintentional shade of slapstick.

Damn. Nice break down. Will be modifying Streets of Marienburg accordingly.

Nice. I hope you didn't just copy this shit from someone's blog.

Thanks.

And nope, I swear (for what it's worth) that these are my own observations I made playing Apocalypse World after having backed, run and played Dungeon World.
Though you can probably find this post in a similar form in some archives, because as I said, I've explained this a couple of times before.

>Move that is shared by every stat and can apply to almost every possible action in addition another Move, completely missing the point of Moves.

Can you elaborate on that, please? What exactly is so bad about Defy Danger?

It's shared by every stat and thematically overlaps with all of the other basic Moves, thus completely going against the original purpose of both stats and Moves, as I think I have described in my post.
I'm not sure what exactly about that is unclear.

Eh, I'm okay with this. It's effectively a risk behavior, which every PC will often run into. A PC with a higher Dex score outruns the boulder in the Mayan temple while a ridiculously high Str score means they can just punch the boulder in a QTE.

I don't think you understand.
The issue is that almost every possible action a character in DW can take is both Defy Danger and another Move at the same time. Moves in AW are written so that almost every possible PC action can be unequivocally matched to exactly one Move.
Additionally the clear association of Moves to stats serves to provide a clear image of what both entail. Defy Danger just muddles everything.
It is the single worst designed move in DW.

Not him but then what's the point of having Defy Danger as a move when all those actions can technically be accomplished as the default function of the stat?

I mean, if you gutted Defy Danger and scrubbed all references to it from the book, and made each Defy Danger ability an innate ability of a stat, would you say that anything really changed as a result?

Eh, not really. Check out Perilous Wilds

.>AW's stats each represent a different and distinct approach (with force, composure, smarts, persuasion and weird shit) to any given situation and are tied to one or two of the game's basic Moves each.

Not really. Both Going Aggro and Seize by Force -and by extension Cool and Hard- are pretty much about using force (albeit in different ways, sure). Not to mention shit like Unnatural Lust Transfixion in which you seduce with Weird.

>certainly not the best PBTA or even best fantasy PBTA, will not dispute that

Go Aggro and Seize by Force are both Hard. Cool is about (not) dealing with pressure.
And stat swapping Moves obviously exist to break that system.

> every possible action a character in DW can take is both Defy Danger and another Move

You could say (nearly)the same for Act Under Fire though, outside of battle. Key difference is there's no character input on how they do it there. It's always +Cool. Putting the PC in charge of describing how they Defy Danger let's them cater their description to put the spotlight on their character's strengths. Obviously, it's up to the group or DM fiat if someone uses Dex to try and run in knee deep mud.

> What's the point of having Defy Danger as a move.

I just use it as a default catch all for something not explicitly covered by another Move. If someone in AW wants to scale a wall, what are you going to use? Best I can find is Read a Sitch for +Sharp, but in this case, Defy Danger with +Dex seems to feel better.

Obviously, this can allow exploitation, say where a rogue attempts to convince someone with rhetoric or something. But that's up to the table or DM to mention that someone who's been skulking around and stealing shit probably would be out of character dropping some pathos, logos, or especially ethos.

I was thinking about the Battlebabe, sorry. Hard wired with that one move.

But my point stands: if a Battlebabe aggros with Cool, Cool is also about about violence.

But that is a playbook-specific Move that expressly breaks the usual stat system to reinforce the playbook's themes. It is not the default assumption.

No, Act Under Fire is fundamentally different from Defy Danger (and from the other approaches).
Defy Danger is, like the other Moves, about actively dealing with a danger. Act Under Pressure is, unlike the other Moves, about actively NOT dealing with a problem.

So what? I can have that at character start. It does mean that the Battlebabe can aggro with Cool, and thus Cool means violence (possibly, at least).

Cool is (I quote): cool under fire, rational, clearthinking, calm, calculating, unfazed.
Does Keep An Eye Out, with its use of Sharp, break it? I wouldn't think.

>this is all pretty bizzare - I don't think anyone would say The Veil doesn't work because stats are totally at the choice of the player

This would be great, there's just one issue and it's the reason I can never play these types of games: I'm perma-GM because my players are by and large uncreative and don't want the responsibility. The biggest problem I ever have is that my campaigns end up being too open-ended and the players get lost when I try to let them act on their own agency. GMing changes hands between me and the other guy willing to do so on a roughly yearly basis, and we're both about the same competency, but of the group, we're the only two that really do so. One of the others tried once, the campaign was a total mess, and he hasn't GMed since.

> fundamentally different
"Whenever a character does something that obviously demands a roll, but you don’t quite see how to deal with it, double check first whether it counts as doing something under fire. Come here first."

Sounds like you should try some of the more "PC has shit on his plate" PBTA, like AW itself. Or Undying, or Sagas of the Icelanders, whatever.

If they're not totally creatively bankrupt, they will LOVE their little dealings, cults, projects that they told themselves they have.

And then you will rejoice in fucking with them.

>how is the setting being dependent on the players a bad thing?
since the players can't individually prepare a good, coherent setting, the results are spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment-tier stuff.
anybody who thinks that you can produce quality world-building or plot creation that way, must think authors can shit out a masterpiece novel every week.
granted, if your GM doesn't pour some love and detail into his setting/adventures, it makes not much of a difference but...

>It's another "players should have no narrative control" episode
it should be limited for good reason. writing good plot and a good setting takes time.

I'll see about it, but desu they tend to be more "Give me an adventure and let me fight hordes of goons with a big bad guy at the end" type of players. They're not murderhobos or anything, they'll give me a line or two of backstory, quip when they do something cool, take an interest in the villagers they save, they just aren't really worldbuilding types, aside from the other guy that GMs.

>you can produce quality world-building or plot creation that way, must think authors can shit out a masterpiece novel every week.

100% agreement about love and detail. Key difference here is I _know_ I'm not crafting novel quality work in a TTRPG. If I can get the PCs to care a bit about an NPC through decent conversation and repeated appearances, then I can maybe get some quality tension by making them sacrifice something to save them.

So improv from the players guided by established archetypes from the setting is usually how I role.

The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast strikes again!

Wait a second, did you try to brainstorm the worldbuilding?

No, really. Not necessarily from session zero and without a map: try something like Fellowship's approach. Say that the elf player are in charge of (suggestions about) elves and ask him details to build on. But make them count, don't ask him about how they weave baskets - ask him what the war with the Illithids was about a session, and reuse this hook.

I'll try that sometime, but I think the player contributions will probably end up heavily lopsided.

It depends. I think that usually players contribute when they have something personal at a stake.

See some of the playbooks for AW like the Hocus or the Maestro'd for see what I'm talking about.

The point of group world building isn't so much the coherency, but the player buy-in. For players that like to make gigantic ass back stories that no one reads, the GM now has visible plot hooks that the player has to justify how it fits in the world scheme of things. For the other 90% of the player base that has better things to do with their free time than make gigantic blocks of text and call it backstory for a never-played character, its applying the Endowment Effect in hopes that players would care two shits more about the world the GM lovingly crafted as the player has now placed a stake on something in there

This method isn't new - hell, its in D&D 4e second DM Guide, only its because the writer (forget if its Robin Laws or Kenneth Hite that wrote this one) has a group that did make shit up on the spot and the GM yes-and the scenario to get a new plot hook.

DW/PbtA games aren't the only ones to do this, FATE does it in a manor that's more tied to how the game is mechanically run. There's also The Quiet Year which is a game entirely based around group world building based on what cards players draw and how their communal society deals with said problem.

If you're genuinely interested in at least seeing how this all might work, check out RPPR's actual play of The Quiet Year

actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/category/systems/misc/the-quiet-year/

Long story short for this method, it doesn't have to be taken wholesale. Its good for one shots where there's a start and end goal and leave the details to player creation that you as the GM make the final decision on how obviously included player created content is during the actual running of the game

It's worth remembering also that many times more minds work better than one.

How would one go about fixing the game?

Just try Fellowship as well

How exactly does the Finish Him mechanic work in that game, anyway? It comes off as super broken

Have you tried reading the book?

Is there a fantasy Apocalypse World game that doesn't have D&D stuff, sticking closer to the original?

I dunno, there are hacks that are to an extent a reskin of AW if that's what you're asking for. But murderhobos are pretty different to AW characters and what they do.

Why does a fantasy game have to be about murderhobos?

What to AW people do that is incomparable with fantasy?

>Actually writing out a plot for your game.

You're already fucking up famalamadingdong.

>it's another "all RPGs should be STGs" episode
Go back to /r/rpg

>The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast strikes again!
what does that have to do with anything?

i have played FATE before, i am familiar with it. it is suitable for the pulp style of SotC but outside of that i wouldn't recommend using it abundantly.

not really. published adventures have been doing that ever since and some of them are pretty good.

Ok, mechanically, what's stopping the players from 2-shotting literally everything? Considering 'Advantage' is 'any means of fictional superiority,' what's keeping Jimmy the stockholmed teen from knifing Batman because his drunk deadbeat dad got a lucky gut punch in? Does the GM go 'no, its fucking Batman, that's not enough of a disadvantage,' yet when Batman is replaced with just another no name, then the teen is successful at executing the killing blow? What if the dad hit him with a car, is that enough? How about a chair over the head? PbtA is retardedly lenient on success and bonuses, so mechanically, the teen with a knife is going to have a real easy time killing Batman the moment he's considered disadvantaged, so what's keeping all of this from being heavily reliant on GM fiat?

Yes user, if you so much as ask a PC to flesh out an important NPC or a setting, Gary Gainax's ghost will rise from the grave and haunt your kitchen. The only known method of exorcism will be to throw away every die in your home and start a shitty college D&D themed improv group with an annoying name like "The Harpers' Lee".

I'm sort of new to the whole __world series of games, but I like Blades in the Dark's take on the mechanics. It's closer to the Dishonored vidya game than normal fantasy and is very gang focused, but I've been running it for my group and it's been working pretty well even though we ignored its packed in setting.

Hot shit, I know it was just a slip of typing but I'd so be down for a game where the return of Gary is Third Impact and the answer to prevent this is strapping teen D&D classes into armor-leashed iconic monsters that are on the brink of going berserk

...

I think if you made the Evas biomechanical representations of classes and replaces angels with iconic monsters you could probably make that work.

Probably less dumb than pulling a Fate and trying to cram various historical figures into D&D classes.

I played it once and it was refreshing compared to just more 5th edition. I liked that we could just say what should happen next instead of being bored.

I admit that I haven't gone back to D&D after running a few campaigns, but I agree with those here that say it could be better than AW with a coat of Gygaxarneson.

I've always wanted to do this since 4th edition came out,
Do a Pacific Rim style D&D game.
have the PCs be mech pilots, the Classes are giant warframes, the Powers are special ammo they can use, and the monsters are various otherworldly invaders. The dungeons are city blocks.
Use the game rules verbatim just scale up the squares to be 50' instead of 5'

I have seen quite a few people say this, which is why I'm surprised that there isn't one out there. There seems to be some kind of demand.

There probably is, but considering that Dungeon World has a lot of marketing and awards behind it these little hacks and small publications likely get lost.

So as a fantasy player who is interested in more narrative, rules-light games, should I skip Dungeon World and just go for Apocalypse World to see how it works?

learn to be a better DM

Yes. Especially since Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires covers your fantasy needs.

Yes, Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires.
Same rules (mostly), different playbooks.

This is exactly the kind of intellectual masturbation I was talking about.
The point here isn't to create a "good", coherent setting, it's to build an efficient and effective one.

Fantasy pbta off the top of my head
Fallen Empires playtest, basically 2nd edition apocalypse world test bed that never got finished but is close enough. Helps if you've played other stuff before.
Dungeon World. Not great, not the worst, epic high fantasy. Has a decent dm guide to look at just for that part.
Fellowship. LotR journey based, not interesting to me, haven't looked at it much.
World of Dungeons. Rules light 2 page expirament making hypothetical old school rules for Dungeon World. Actually not that bad, very fast and lose.
Streets of Marienburg. Warhammer Fantasy hack, seems pretty fun, also seems like the rules for healing aren't that clear.
Blades In The Dark. Pretty far from baseline pbta, very procedural in interesting ways, gaslight fantasy heists and gang war.
Deep Forest. Fantasy revamp of The Quiet Year. Based around scarcities and hardholding/settlements in pbta, more a group cartography game with some pretty depressing material.
Perilous Wilds/Freebooters. People working pretty hard to make dungeon world more playable as exploration and gritty osr style fantasy. Freebooters has a really slick magic system.

There's a big ass list of pbta hacks that should show up if you google it.

The devil is in the details, as they say.
Such as Act Under Fire having its own stat and phrasing that doesn't make it a catch all for every possible situation already covered by the other Moves.

What about "not the default assumption" and specific exceptions is so hard to understand?
Or do you argue that Dex, Con, Int, Wis and Cha all represent physical strength in D&D because they can all be used for attack rolls under very specific circumstances?

>Apocalypse World: Fallen Empires
Excellent, will have to check this out. Thanks!

>"good"
>efficient
>effective
You do realize that the purpose of a creative person is to produce something that the consumers/clients/players never knew they wanted? Until they see it for the first time? You realize that?
You make it sound like PbtA is
>Risk-averse-Film-Studio-That-Mass-Produces-The-Same-Crap-Movies-Over-And-Over-Again: The Game
You can call that efficient and effective until the cows come home. The safe and tried and true way. I call it uninspired.

In RPGs, there is the added aspect of not knowing what the setting or a locale or an NPC is like and EXPLORING it through gameplay.

Finally, I'd like to remark that the whole notion seems to be born out of ignorance of how to achieve player buy-in. A Game of Thrones has achieved a lot of viewer buy-in in its early seasons and the viewers had no say in any of the show's content. Later seasons seem to squander that buy-in a little bit.

How and why does it happen? PbtA designers seem to not know. Their answer is: let the players make up part of the world. It's intellectually laziness.

Let me ask here:

What's with the sex moves in Apocalypse World? Just to be more "adult" or something?

Because the game designer wanted sex (more specifically, FALLOUT from sex) to be a thing you thought about in your character relationships.

You never actually RP out sex in AW. You just RP out the emotional results.

AW is heavily about the primal needs of people (water, food, shelter, love, sex, medicine a little bit of luxury) and what they'll do to get them (violence, sex, manipulation, theft, banding together).

Either way, you should be concerned if manslaughter and violence is something you're totally cool with in an RPG, when you're incredibly unlikely to do something like that IRL, but the mention of consensual sex (in a game made for adults) makes you cringe when it's something that the vast majority of humanity does.

No, that's a fine reason to have it. Especially if it is deliberately trying to bring out the worst in folks due to scarcity. I guess there are people willing to trade sex for food, etc.

Personally, I just find sex, touching and general biological organisms gross and only interested in interacting with them at range.

>Either way, you should be concerned if...
Should you really? Because depictions of violence are generally regarded as far more acceptable than sex. Not saying it's right or it makes sense, but most people are going to be more comfortable with shooting a guy than sucking his dick, especially at a table with their peers, and especially if they're the socially awkward type. The idea that (at least fictional) violence is an acceptable topic while sex (even fictional) isn't is something media reinforces all the time.

>the purpose of a creative person is to produce something that the consumers/clients/players never knew they wanted

Nah, man. Way too narrow a defintion. Commissions are extremely common in the creative arts, and nearly any conflict you generate in your setting will have been done better in a format like movies or novels.

Anyway, some people can't imagine playing a game of WFRP that doesn't follow the fiction exactly. You can run a PbtA in that setting and tell the PCs to focus on NPC motivations instead.

But some people are going to enjoy telling their wizard PCs the shitty magic rules, possession rules, and that mages are distrusted and seeing what they come up with that ties those three high level rules together.

Yeah, sometimes you end up plagiarism like Xavier's school for mages (looking at you, Bioware) but sometimes they come up with great ideas that you never even thought of.

its more 'blank' rather than 'blanks' but if that doesn't suit you or your group then take a look at inverse world, it manages to make a setting but leaves enough stuff open ended so your players can still have input, should give you an idea of how much to make if you're interested.

Like people have said, DW isn't an amazing use of the apocalypse system but its not terrible, better than DnD anyway.

>If you and another character have sex

I think the codified "position" and "effect level" is actually a very elegant way to model contextual modifiers; most PbtA games have little to no means of variable difficulty and in that regard Blades in the Dark shines.

>most PbtA games have little to no means of variable difficulty
There is variable difficulty. But it's in a Move's consequences, not its roll.

>Commissions are extremely common in the creative arts
I have commissioned art myself, I am aware of that. In this case, the artist is just outsourced skill that I as author do not possess. So it's a bit of a false equivalency here.

That said in commissioned art you generally leave room for the artist and quite frequently the artist has cool ideas that you didn't have and you allow them to stay in.

It is by default user. You can start up with Cool for Going Aggro, you need to be ready to describe the stat that way.

And it actually works just fine - would say that in DND Dex can work out perfectly fine when it's used for melee damage, actually, like in AW.

You do it Under Fire if it is difficult, generally consider the GM moves more or less hard, etc.

Not the other guy.
Are you operating under "default" as in merely being "an option at level 1"?

Usually what people mean when they say 'default rule' is "the rule as it is when you don't break it with a specific circumstance" like where it defines "Go Aggro" as "When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard."
That'd be the default method (Hard) of Going Aggro, until a rule specifically changes it.
And you don't even have to get that Move ("Ice Cold") as a Battlebabe, so it's not even really the default for the playbook itself.

What do you mean with that DND Dex comment? That doesn't seem to answer his question. DnD defines, in its combat section, a melee attack as being D20 + Strength + Mods versus their AC, but there are ways (specific rules that change the normal rule) so rather than Strength you use eg Charisma. Does that mean Charisma is the default for melee attacks, or Strength?

>That said in commissioned art you generally leave room for the artist and quite frequently the artist has cool ideas that you didn't have and you allow them to stay in.

You do know the DM has say in DW too, right? That's his spin.

>Because depictions of violence are generally regarded as far more acceptable than sex.
That's really only the mentality of north america, and specifically the U.S.

Would you say the more narrative games like this lend themselves more to play by post games?

More than "less narrative" games?
Possibly, if only because longer periods of action can be resolved in one roll. In addition PbtA games are decently explicit when you do and don't roll, which means the players don't generally need to wait for the GM to say "roll for that" or whatever. They can just do a thing, notice that thing says you have to roll, roll, and then end the post, awaiting the GM adjudication.

More than playing in real time?
No. Not anymore than anything else does, really.

I'm talking about how DND definies Dexterity. Or doesn't, actually I can't find it in 5th.

So, exactly like a monk usese Dex to do his kung fu, Cool can mean using violence in AW.