Manbearcat
Legend
How does a Scene Bang differ from Good Adventure Writing? If you're not following the theme or giving the PCs evocative choices to make, aren't you just boring your players?
It differs in a few key ways:
1) In Story Now games that feature scene-based resolution, there is no such thing as "the Adventure" or "the plot." There is a structure to play whereby provocatively framed scenes are resolved by player <> GM <> system interaction which have both immediate and downstream effects which feed into the framing of the next scene; rinse/repeat. Through that snowballing process you'll have a play experience where, as a retrospective, you'll be able to say "ah yeah, that was the Adventure/plot." But there is vanishingly small amount of "Story Before" in this alchemy.
2) Good Adventure writing is absolutely writing that gives the PCs evocative choices to make. However, the difference of a "Bang" (outside of what I outlined in 1) is that there is no deft game of Telephone being played here. There is no interpretive element. We're going straight to the players and giving them authority to provide the inciting incident or the provocative framing of the situation/scene that is to be resolved. The GM's job is then to (a) lead a functional, efficient, structured conversation that propels play, (b) play that opposition to the absolute hilt, (c) manage/render Complications/Costs and Failures (with Successes being "the player gets what they want") in accordance with the rules/agenda/principles and action resolution mechanics of the particular system involved, (d) with the whole of it leading to an evolving gamestate and fiction until all questions about the scene are resolved.
Low cognitive overhead to me is answering questions instead of raising them. If I wrote "weird/faith/obligation" on my map, I'd be pretty curious as to what I was thinking when I wrote it.
You use whatever pithy shorthand works for you for provocative, yet capable of being dynamically interpreted, obstacles/problems. You don't want the equivalent of a module box text info dump because that fails the "capable of being dynamically interpreted" litmus test. You want something that provokes the GM's creativity, hews to genre logic, and then you trust the GM to effectively render the obstacle/complication in accords with the system parameters (agenda, principles, structure, action resolution mechanics, authority distribution).
If pithy, provocative descriptors doesn't do the necessary work for you, then you develop some other methodological shorthand (that reduces cognitive workload, keeps table handling time down, yet stokes GM creativity).