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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8994493" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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: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.").</blockquote>

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