What system was
@EzekielRaiden's campaign using? Perhaps it was mentioned, but I couldn't find it.
Dungeon World, though I've had several discussions where various people either straight-up say I use it wrong, or suggest my usage of it runs counter to its purpose. (I have, for example, used house-rules to ignore the "after level 10 you retire or change playbooks" rules, based off stuff a friend once did for a game where I was a player. Overall, it works quite well.)
I'm not 100% sure what this would look like.
Examples are hard since it's a rare failure state I desperately avoid. But let's use my "murder among nobles" analogy. Assume the murder, and the party's interest in it, arises purely from play, no "I want the players to solve a murder" on my part. The Count was murdered. The Baron, the Duke, his lover, and his wife are all suspects.
Earlier, you wondered about my "illusionism of a different color," and this works. I dislike a "quantum killer," only resolved after observation, e.g. leaving the killer undefined until we all "discover" that it was the Countess (or w/e). But that's not the players
discovering anything, they're very literally
creating the past that led to their current actions, indeed somewhat "causing" that past and not some other past. You can't "discover" things that you, yourself, built with your own hands. It would be like saying Tolkien "discovered" Arda, or that I "discovered" the words of this post. Pretending otherwise is, to my eyes, a form of illusionism. It is the pretense that the story, the fiction, in any way meaningfully "exists" when it not only can be but
must be continually overwritten in order that whatever
becomes true
right now was "always" true even in the past.
For some things, I can't accept that. That much wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey-ball-of-stuff highlights with painful clarity
exactly how artificial and made-up it is. I surely don't need literally every factual truth of the world nailed down from session 1, that would be boring. But certain really
important facts need to exist independently--so they can be
discovered, not just
invented. So, working from the fiction, I do select someone who is the real killer--but do not pre-determine whether the party solves the case. There will be consequences based on who they blame and how strong their case is; I could never predict all such consequences in advance, so I give a rough sketch of some and we, together, find out exactly what consequences will result. Nothing ever goes fully according to plan anyway, so there's not much point in over-planning, is there?
Thus I feel a need for a knowable answer to
some questions, like "who killed the victim?",
before the players piece the evidence together. But if the answer exists, it must be accessible, and I am responsible for that. Being human--flawed and finite--I necessarily do so imperfectly. Mostly this just means my clever group surprises me. Sometimes, though...it means I paint myself into a corner, with facts that are necessary but difficult to access, e.g. even if I wrack my brain I can't conceive of more than one way to do it. I work hard to avoid such pits (and, thankfully, rarely fall into them), because that becomes Mother-May-I gaming, people just dancing to my fully-prewritten tune, dragged along by the ear, rather than a world that both I and my players contribute to and build collectively.
I suppose a jazz analogy works alright. Jazz isn't 100% improv all the time, but without improv, it dies. Without a common piece or at least a common structure (like call-and-response), it can become discordant. Yet the whole point is to show off the
performer, not the piece or composer. That tension between improvisation being where the real
life of the game occurs, and
some amount of common structure being at least extremely useful for enabling that improvisation, is where my DMing style seems to lay, at least for Dungeon World.
If you're prepping a lot of high resolution unrevealed backstory and using that as an input on action declarations and move resolution, then you're (a) doing something different than what pemerton is referring to (situation first) and (b) drifting DW play (and AW play more broadly).
But...I use both things. Frequently. Almost all of the NPCs that exist in the game, for example, are
not like Shen, and are more like Hafsa (who resulted from the first group, not the current one, looking for a trustworthy Waziri to help them). All of the siblings that take turns ruling Mount Matahat, for example, only became relevant because the players went looking for receptive Jinnistani nobles to cut a deal with. That Jinnistan exists, as another example, came out of the Session 0 discussion where we worked out some things (I didn't want "demon blood" being a readily-available thing in this setting--demons are
scary and people don't truck with them casually--so instead it became Jinnistani wine, which then led to questions asked on all sides about what Jinnistan is like.) I included some setting elements because I thought they were fun.
After it was already established that Devils and Demons are always evil (but, unlike their standard D&D cousins,
not stupidly self-sabotaging), that's when I knew I needed a
reason why they could be both fully sapient and also "always evil."
That's sort of my problem with a lot of this stuff. I feel as though I'm being told (essentially) "Oh, you
always use Story Before in a game meant for Story Now," or "Oh, so you
only use Story Now in this Story Now game?" And the real truth is...I use both. There are some Story Before elements so that (for example) if the players travel to a brand-new locale, it will feel rich and vibrant when they arrive, because I'll have basic answers to expected questions (local food, for example, is something the party almost always asks about, so I have done research on various North African cuisine so that I can give rapid-fire but not strictly "prepared" answers to such questions.)
I had some Story Before elements I wanted to include, because I think they're fun (e.g. at an extremely high level, "Arabian Nights fantasy"). My players are okay with that. But I also bend over backwards, almost as hard as I possibly can, to support and engage with whatever my players pursue in Story Now terms. Half or more of my campaign came (and continues to come) from fun things that arose through answering Discern Realities questions, or the Bard exploiting his Bardic Lore, or the Druid calling on spirits for aid, or the Wizard remembering an obscure bit of arcane knowledge that points toward a surprise or advantage.
