I think a lot of people prefer the feeling that there is objective fictional reality that matters, and thus the DW approach might rub them up the wrong way.
I don't know what work you intend "that matters" to do - the fiction in DW matters. From experience, I'm confident that the fiction in Burning Wheel play is, by default, more intense than the fiction in exploration-oriented D&D play.
In both systems, and especially in DW, the fiction is also fundamentally significant for framing and adjudication. It's notorious, for instance, that some D&D combats unfold with only dice rolls and adjustments to hit point totals, and perhaps the location of tokens on a grid, with no reference to shared imagination at all. That can't happen in DW. (It can happen in some, though not all, of BW's complex resolution subsystems.)
Anyway, I don't know of anyone who plays RPG and doesn't want the fiction to matter.
What is not a part of DW or BW play is the players "poking" at the setting to find out what its author (the GM)
really intends it to be, or has decided that it
really is. You don't declare "I open the door" in order to find out what the GM has decided is behind it. It's not part of the point of play to discover the content of someone else's imagination.
That's not to say that in DW or BW play you don't discover the content of others' imaginations. From time to time you do. But that's a means to an end, not an end in itself. It's not what play is
for.
This is interesting... I was always under the impression from previous discussions that a game like DW wasn't supposed to rely on secret DM knowledge or pre-determination of facts and prep... but it seems here you are saying it does in fact allow for that (in fact you seem to be claiming it must contain such). Am I perhaps confusing this witrh Forged in the Dark, and/or is this just one of two (or more ) ways DW can be ran?
As far as I know, DW's approach to prep closely follows AW's. I posted some of the relevant text in another recent thread:
Vincent Baker is clear about the purpose of Fronts, so we don't need to guess or speculate. The AW rulebook says (p 136):
A front has some apparently mechanical components, but it’s fundamentally conceptual, not mechanical. The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say.
He goes on:
As MC you’re going to be playing your fronts, playing your threats, but that doesn’t mean anything mechanical. It means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do.
He also says the following (pp 109, 136):
ALWAYS SAY
• What the principles demand (as follow).
• What the rules demand.
• What your prep demands.
• What honesty demands. . . .
Creating a front means making decisions about backstory and about NPC motivations. Real decisions, binding ones, that call for creativity, attention and care. You do it outside of play, between sessions, so that you have the time and space to think.
Preparation of fronts doesn't
change how any move is resolved (though it may introduce a custom move, which typically will be in lieu of what would otherwise be a GM soft move, or perhaps the more generic Acting Under Fire). It certainly doesn't
dictate how any move is resolved. It does bind the GM, by reference to prep, as to what interesting things ("badness", "spots" and "opportunities", in the AW parlance) the GM introduces into the fiction.
Vincent Baker says the following about how to author Fronts (from AW p 136):
[W]hen you create a front, follow your own inspiration. Choose the things that are suggestive to you, that put you in mind of apocalyptica, romance, violence, gore, danger, trauma. Choose the things you’d just <expletive deleted> kill to see well done on the big screen, and skip the things that don’t spark your interest.
That said, he also says this (on the same page):
Creating a front means making decisions about backstory and about NPC motivations. Real decisions, binding ones, that call for creativity, attention and care. You do it outside of play, between sessions, so that you have the time and space to think.
So whim ("inspiration") is expected to play a role, but not be all of it. Attention and care are also important, because this stuff is
binding.
The difference between prep in DW/AW, of the sort Vincent Baker is discussing in the passages I've quoted, and the sort of prep advocated in D&D as I take it to be widely played, is this:
In D&D, a GM can decide a consequence - including a hard move - on the basis of their prep. To put the same point in a slightly different way, the GM can decide that something is not uncertain, and hence does not warrant a check, by reference to their prep.
In DW/AW, prep is a reservoir of material for making soft moves and hard moves, but it does not change the rules about when such moves can be made.
Prepping a front in DW/AW is a particular process that
doesn't include things like (say) deciding that a particular person is immune to being swayed. It might include deciding (say) that a particular person wants a particular sort of thing. That prep might then inform the answer to a question asked on a successful attempt to Read a Person (say, "how could I get your character to __?") or might inform what the GM decides a NPC askes for if successfully Seduced/Manipulated ("When you
try to seduce or manipulate someone, tell them what you want and roll+hot. For NPCs: on a hit, they ask you to promise something first, and do it if you promise. On a 10+, whether you keep your promise is up to you, later. On a 7–9, they need some concrete assurance right now.").
