You posted: "At the start of play the PCs have allies, rivals, and some turf". I was thinking the GM has to make all that up.
Cool, sorry if I was getting sloppy in my description. I hope I've helped make it a bit more clear. I agree with you that often when people describe things they make assumptions. Its a real curse when documenting stuff!
So, it seems like your saying "The GM makes up a ton of stuff". I get Blades is an in place closed Railroad game, the characters "can't" leave The City(right?).
Well, there's a whole world that consists of 5 islands, and the main island has several other cities on it. The other islands have SOME basic details. I guess technically you can travel to them. The other cities are connected by 'Spark Line' trains, you can go there, though I don't think they even have names. You CAN leave the city(s), and when we played we did actually do that. Outside the cities is a waste land, and you need special gear to survive. There are actually crews who scavenge out there for a living, high risk, high reward. The prison also sends out people, I guess as a work detail kind of thing. Anyway, the city itself is decent sized, for a fantasy city. We played our game for about 10 months and while we probably set foot in every district at least once, we certainly didn't run low on places to go.
I guess a player can say "oh GM my character has a cop buddy", and then the player just wanders off and the GM has to make that. Is that what people talk about with "player agency"? A player can say "wow, three hours ago, I asked the GM to make a cop buddy character...and then have just played the game as a powerless character, but this game gives me the feeling of super player agency!"
Players can invent NPCs to some degree, yes. When you create a character you invent a friend and a rival, you can pretty much make them whatever you want, but the friend (like the cop buddy) is going to be limited to appropriate capabilities. You could invent a friendship with the Imperial Garrison Commander I guess, but how much is he going to do for you, you Tier I scumbag! Plus a 'friend' like that is likely to become a liability too! Rivals are kind of fodder for the GM to drop on you as a problem, while you can try to create an ineffective rival, it probably won't work. They will generally remain at the same tier as your PC, and if you defeat them, a new one will arise.
But in terms of 'agency' or ability to have the game focus on stuff about your PC, you are in pretty good shape. I had a rival that was an old army buddy. He was also a doctor, so once I actually got him to help me! After that though he got real hostile and we had a confrontation where I ended up killing him. His daughter then came after me! Its pretty interactive, the GM is definitely going to throw stuff at you. Each character has a 'vice', a thing that they can do in down time to restore stress. My character's vice was originally hanging out with the demon that inhabited his sword (I made up the sword and the demon at character generation, the sword was also my PC's allowed fine weapon). This of course caused various sorts of trouble, like I killed a bunch of guys during downtime in a park, and then it turned out they were our allies! Little GM plot twist there! Hey, it got my stress down! hahaha.
As most "problem DM" posts across the Net show....it's common for GMs to have "Plans".
I think it is normal and expected in trad styles of play, so its hardly surprising. I'm sure there are plenty of GMs trying out narrativist techniques who might fail to give up that habit. Some actually post here! Anyway, I think its not likely that a GM, reading all the BitD stuff about Doskvol, is going to have NO ideas about stuff he could throw at PCs. Its just, either he's going to have to make sure it fits with what the players are doing and what will interact with their characters, or he's got to break the game. You can read
@pemerton's recent posts in this thread on BW play, he's making it very clear that its not set up for GM plans!
I get the feeling it would be a lot of sitting around, and I really hate that.
Very action packed actually. I think that BitD campaign had more stuff packed into 10 months of play than almost any other game I've played in years. Our character's rose from nothing to a feared Tier V crew of assassins, destroyed an ancient vampire, warred with like 5 other gangs and kicked their butts, and pulled off a bunch of other great scores. In the end though we really got too big for our britches, it was kind of 'live hard, die young'. We left it at a sort of "ride off into the sunset" kind of moment, but I HIGHLY doubt my character, for one, survived whatever came next. He got played to the hilt and it was fun!