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Message: <blockquote data-quote="darkbard" data-source="post: 8244170" data-attributes="member: 1282">Great questions! I will use my experiences as a player in your game as well as my own as GM of this solo game for my wife in response .Broadly speaking, I was a little surprised at how numerous and diverse were the fictional elements in play that emerged in response to espoused PC dramatic needs via scene framing, the snowballing of mechanical outputs, asking questions and using the answers, and so on. It felt like desperately juggling to keep several balls aloft at once! Once both games moved beyond the initial couple of sessions, the fiction seems to have coalesced around more tightly focused elements, in response, I think, both to discovering more clearly what those PC dramatic needs are and in our human tendency to want to connect potentially separate and atomized elements into linked narrative.In our shared game, for example, I think of how when we were sketching out the setting in our first session that included a frontier town, a permafrost tundra inhabited by hags, a journey by an archaeological scholar to repair the tearing of the magical Tapestry that subtends the mortal world, and a library at the base of a magical glacial mountain, what emerged was (1) confrontation with bandits, (2) discovery of a murderous hag in her den, (3) an elven scholar, (4) a haughty noblewoman with an overzealous bodyguard, (5) a magical prodigy crafting minor creations in a market, (6) a guide whose reputation was besmirched by an exploitative employer, (7) the town crier infected by leviathan poison and some supernatural element to cry his miseries from the bell tower during a midnight routine. These disparate threads have now focused on themes of (1) saving young people from supernatural threats (it's probably no coincidence my wife's character is 17 or 18 herself and mine a paternalistic figure) and (2) fending off a Magical Incursion from Beyond. Virtually all of this has come about through the GM-PC interaction at the table during play.In my solo game, the emergent fiction is similarly diverse but coming into sharper relief. "Session Zero" discussion and actual gameplay (again, via sceneframing, acting on the answers to questions, and mechanical fallout) ranged from the unknown status of the Svirfneblin Ranger-Psion's mother, to her own continued status as slave, to the unknown role of Tieflings in this narrative, to seeking out the phylactery of an ancient lich as part of a bargain with death (all in first session or before!) to now focus on her new status as slave to a Tiefling officer and pursuing his agenda for the moment. I think this is a function of my wife's choice to cast her character as a slave, subverting her own actions as secondary to those of her "owner" in service to a dramatic need that on surface undermines her character's agency a little. I'll be very interested to see how that changes if and when she gains her freedom; and be assured, I regularly dangle opportunities for freedom (with attendant risk) before her to see how she acts.On the smaller scale and just as an observation about a specific mechanical subsystem within the game, I am surprised by how DW's spell system seems to disincentivize PCs regularly taking on higher level spells in preference for a range of lower level ones. Generally speaking, I just don't thing the power increase is worth the tradeoff. My wife's Wizard is level 6 (eligible for 5th level spells) but regularly prepares 2 third level and 1 first level spell; my Paladin (MC Cleric) is 7th level and also eligible for 5th level spells but regularly prepares 1 third level and 4 first level spells. My wife's Ranger-Psion (4th level, eligible for 3rd level spells) prepares 4 first level spells. Maybe this is entirely reflective of our own gaming preferences, but I think many of the higher level spells are too narrowly  focused to give up a range of effects. This had been mitigated, as you know, by homebrewing a few higher level spells that provide a similar power level to their canon counterparts but more diversity in application or effects.Otherwise, I don't think my expectations of play in this system as I have formed them over years of discussions here and its actual play differ. I think I am one of those rare birds who is quite capable of understanding the theory and abstract notions without playing them first (you speculated about this type of player in another thread recently). As a tradeoff, I think I have a much diminished ability to "visualize" concrete images than the average person; I rarely imagine in specific images, for example.</blockquote>

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