Using Spout Lore to reveal a detailed, pre-created world is contrary to the rules.
There is a caveat I should make here. I'm going to talk about rules the GM has to follow. You're welcome to not consider them binding rules, but DW as designed does. If you don't follow the GM rules, you're "voiding the warranty" on the game and it will not operate as advertised. You're on your own then. (Incidentally, this is a close paraphrase of the designers [on p. 159 and in various conversations] – it's not just me saying so.)
For reference, these are the GM's responsibilities:
- Describe the situation
- Follow the rules
- Make moves
- Exploit your prep
… plus following the Agenda and Principles.
So part of your job is to "exploit" your prep, as in mining it and twisting it for the benefit of the current game session. You also have to follow the rules, which includes your agenda. And your agenda is (p. 161):
Your agenda makes up the things you aim to do at all times while GMing a game of Dungeon World:
- Portray a fantastic world
- Fill the characters’ lives with adventure
- Play to find out what happens
Note that doesn't say create a fantastic world – "portray" is a very deliberate word choice, as we can see by continuing the same quote (emphasis mine)…
Everything you say and do at the table (and away from the table, too) exists to accomplish these three goals and no others. Things that aren’t on this list aren’t your goals. You’re not trying to beat the players or test their ability to solve complex traps. You’re not here to give the players a chance to explore your finely crafted setting. You’re not trying to kill the players (though monsters might be). You’re most certainly not here to tell everyone a planned-out story.
So that's the trouble you're having: Spout Lore does let you, the GM, reveal a detail, but Dungeon World itself doesn't permit you to have revealing a big pile of pre-crafted details to be part of your agenda. Spout Lore isn't a opportunity to infodump on your players. In fact, it encourages the opposite with the agenda "Play to find out what happens." That includes about your world.
So why does Spout Lore not work well with pre-crafted worlds? Because in many subtle ways, the answers that players get won't be as interesting to them. The setting detail revealed existed before the PC did, so it's only maybe relevant or interesting to them and their adventures. (Note that Spout Lore requires the GM to say something interesting about the subject.) You are quite understandably going to be way more excited by pre-created setting details you reveal than the players are. If the Spouted information isn't as interesting as it could be, their motivation to use the move decreases. If it decreases below a certain threshold, they'll start seeing it as a "dead" move – one not worth taking when the risk is getting a miss. Other moves become much better value propositions for the same amount of risk.
Something created on the spot or quickly adapted to current circumstances and the flow of the game will be much more relevant and interesting to the players and their characters. By holding your world lightly in your mind and being willing to kill your darlings, you are serving the GM's agenda better. You're serving your players better, too. You can more easily come up with details that are pertinent, and more easily adapt the loose details you do have in your prep to your players' current game input, and as a result come up with something that's way better because it's leveraging the collaborative-narrative design of Dungeon World.
Mind Your Follow-Through
Note that Defy Danger starts out with:
When you act despite an imminent threat or suffer a calamity
Getting rushed by screaming kobold fanatics who've set themselves on lightning* is pretty calamitous, and if you hit on a 10+, that's great! But what it means is that the threat doesn't come to bear right now, not that it vanishes forever - "defy" doesn't mean "eliminate".
Yes, you are encouraged to start setting up the scene with softer moves, but all of these moves are things that are actually happening in the fiction. The players aren't trying to, like, counter and eliminate your moves or anything, they're also taking actions in the fiction and accomplishing their own things. They can manage to be both momentarily safe and still very much in danger.
So, you hit on a 10+. The screaming kobold fanatics haven't gone away. It's just that when the first one rushes into the innocuous-looking jar/carefully positioned Leyden mine and they both go up in a cloud of electroclasm and smoke, you're not right there with them.
Awful lot of jars in here, aren't there?
* no one ever said the path of the blue dragon fanatic would be easy
Mind Your Setup
Tell them the requirements or consequences and then ask is often underestimated, but it's an excellent way to extend the results of moves without having to write entirely new ones.
So if, for example, Stringfellow surveys the upcoming holosparkst, decides it's time for the better part of valor, and says he's diving out the nearest doorway, that does sound like Defy Danger too, doesn't it? But you can always say:
Sure, but things in here are ramping up rapidly. If you make it out, getting back in to help everyone else won't be nearly as easy.
Or:
Sure, but whatever that just kicked off is already cascading around the exits. You'll be taking 1d6 damage through armor just to try.
Or even:
Sure, but, gosh, there's all this smoke in here and your ears are still ringing from the blast. You can get out somewhere safely, but it's not entirely clear to you where that's going to be.
And then end with:
Is that alright?
And if it's not, then Stringfellow isn't going to dive out the door in the first place. His turn in the spotlight will be spent doing something else. And if it is, then even a 10+ on a Defy Danger will still leave Stringfellow in a bad position. It doesn't violate the spirit of the move to do this - accepting those known bad outcomes is just the cost of making the move in the first place.
Mind Your Prep
And, of course, if you knew all along that there'd be kobolds in these ruins and they laid traps like the dickens, you can sit down and craft custom moves to deal with this and take Defy Danger off the table as an initial reaction. Something like:
When Lightning's Claw springs their ambush on you, say who was the most cautious among you and have them roll +WIS. On a 10+, they pick 1. On a 7-9, the GM also picks 1. On a 6-, all 3:
- You're right where they want you. Everyone takes -1 ongoing to all rolls to dodge or escape, until you're out.
- You didn't see this coming. Pick someone else in the party to take the brunt of the first attack; the GM will make a move against them.
- They timed this one perfectly. All their damage is best of 2 rolls, and when they gang up it adds +2 damage instead of +1.
But you don't need to haul something like that out all the time, just for when you want it to be a sufficiently big deal that a regular Defy Danger doesn't seem like it should be able to resolve things satisfyingly on its own.
Best Answer
There are many things that can encourage hesitation. None are unrecoverable though, and some are avoidable.
Asking the whole group
Ironically, one common source of player hesitation is asking the group as a whole — when you do that, nobody in particular has to answer so everybody has permission to keep letting someone else answer. “What do you do?” is a fine question when it's obviously already addressing one character, but when it's the group, it works better to pick someone to answer (at least at first) based on whose next action is most interesting* in the situation:
As a bonus, if the answer is non-committal, you can then ask another likely PC what they do / what their reaction is, as if you meant to do that all along. “Okay. Bard, the footsteps sound like they're about to round the corner. What are you doing?” (In move terms, let's say the Fighter responded with “ready my sword” or something else OK but not moving the action along, which is doing something and then “looking to the GM”; so you got a GM move and used show signs of an approaching threat again.)
Who you ask also will tend to (but not always!) bias the answer in a particular direction. If you ask the Fighter, you'll probably get an answer that is fighty or preparing to be fighty; if you ask the Thief you'll get something more sneaky, perhaps; if you ask the Bard you might get something more social. It's not a guarantee, but you can nudge the action toward a certain directly this way. As a bonus, the hint that it's a Fighter-y (or Thief-y, or Cleric-y, or whatever) situation can signal the players a bit more about what they're facing, and may relieve the players' indecision enough for someone to leap forward with actions.
So: ask a specific character what they do instead of the whole group, since asking everybody can often be the same as asking nobody.
* “Interesting” can be “most obviously relevant” (i.e., the Fighter's response to a hostile threat), but it can also be very interesting to ask a character who is not obviously the lead for certain situations, like asking the Bard what they do in the face of armed hostiles. Mix it up, and the game will be more varied and interesting.
Alternatively, recovering is totally possible
Avoiding it is easy, but in the moment you might do it anyway and ask the whole group, or maybe that just seems like the most sensible thing to do at the time. When the whole group hesitates significantly to answer a question, give yourself permission to wait. The in-game action might be fast and furious, but the out-of-game action is a conversation, and sometimes some thoughtful silence improves conversations.
So although it's likely not your first reflex, relax and let the silence draw out. If you don't seem rushed, that can actually quickly wash away the group's collective hesitation and give people permission to stop thinking “ah, I don't know, I'll let someone else answer!” and sit back and actually create an answer they might offer to continue the conversation.
So letting them take their time to move the conversation forward is sometimes just fine. Give yourself permission to have quiet spots, even if the in-game situation is tense. (Believe me, Dungeon World sessions can be an exercise in sustained intensity, so a moment of quiet in the middle of a tense bit of action can actually be a welcome change!)
A player freezing when put on the spot
This one isn't so much something to avoid, as something to be confident the game can handle. The recovery can be pretty much the same: let the player collect their thoughts if they have to, by patiently giving them a moment of quiet to back away from the on-the-spot panic and thoughtfully engage the question.
Often (more often than you might think), that won't detract from the pacing of a situation at all, and will do the trick. Sometimes the player is really stuck though, or the pacing really does want an answer nownownow. In that case, ask for confirmation, in the form of tell them the requirements or consequences and ask:
They get a chance to decide no, I am not just standing there! and say what they're doing instead. If so, cool! The game proceeds. They also get a chance to instead beg off the question, but that also results in an in-game action (hesitating, lost in thought or study of the phenomenon) and that's a tiny bit of forward action. (You also get the chance to practice a rare low-pressure consequence — not every GM move has to be world-shattering.) While they hesitate in-game, you ask someone else:
or maybe…
Giving another character a chance to react lets you paint what they're all seeing through a different character's perspective, giving them all a bit more context for their decision-making.
It also just gives the group another opportunity to do something interesting before “sudden DOOM” results from one player's uncertainty.
The second example I gave just there is a “non-action-y” question, in that it will likely result in some lore rather than an action, but that's OK too — the Thief's answer will add nuance to the situation, and possibly prompt someone else to take action! And if nobody does, still, you can reveal an unwelcome truth or show signs of an approaching threat or whatever suits the danger/opportunity that the phenomenon represents.