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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9008761" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is very hard for me to follow.When you say "things only happen", do you mean that things are only said among the game participants at the table, or do you mean imaginary events only occur in the imaginary world?In the imaginary world, all sorts of imaginary people are doing all sorts of things. The AW GM makes notes of some of this in their preparation, which - as per the AW rules - is structured in terms of threats structured into fronts (in D&D terms, threats are NPCs or impersonal forces, and the fronts into which they are grouped are factions or tendencies or plots or unfolding disasters).But at the real world, when everyone gets together to play, the GM says things in response to the players having had their PCs do things. I don't think D&D play is usually very different in this respect. Some of the things the GM says might reveal elements of the imaginary stuff that the GM prepped: for instance, you see a dustcloud on the horizon, and can hear the sound of engines might be something the GM says (a soft move, announcing future badness) that is grounded in prep of a front that is a rival gang of some sort.In the fiction, the gang turning up is not caused by the PCs. But of course at the table, the GM telling it to the players is caused by things the players have done. In that respect, it's like any other conversation and as I said I think not very different from D&D. The difference from D&D is about when hard moves can be made: for instance, you mentioned the possibility of the PCs returning home and finding their town razed by invading forces. While it's possible to imagine a context in which that might count as a soft move, I think typically it is going to be a pretty hard one, and so isn't something that a AW GM would say - "When you return to the hardhold, you find it's been razed" - simply on the basis of prep, without making a soft move first or without the players doing something that opened up the possibility of this hard move.It seems like it might be more accurate to call "world driven fiction" GM driven fiction given that the imagined world has no motive power.But player-driven fiction is not the same thing as "things only happen because of something in the sphere of influence of the characters". They're quite distinct.</blockquote>

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