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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8440082" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe, if you look at it from the "afterwards" perspective.But from the point of view of "beforehand" - ie when the GM has to narrate something - the difference is in respect of the sort of reasons/considerations the GM is having regard to.I don't think so.In Edwards's <a href="http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/setting_dissection.pdf" target="_blank">essay about setting</a>, he contrasts GM constructs a story • GM learns setting in some detail with Introductory Color • Environment & look-and-feel. Don't get too hung up on "constructs a story" - that's not relevant in this post - but rather the idea of a setting with detail supporting a construction, with "colour" and "look-and-feel". I use Greyhawk for colour: we need a town name (Hardby), we need some geography (when we started our first campaign, the player of the wizard PC had downloaded a picture of an Indian castle and said this is the tower referenced in Jobe's background and I said I think that's in the Abor-Alz and he agreed.The difference is that colour doesn't determine action resolution outcomes. It's just flavour, "look and feel", filling out the sense of the world. In BW, all our movement is resolved either via free narration (not map-and-key resolution) or via appropriate checks (eg Orienteering checks to navigate safely through the Bright Desert).Likewise in Marvel Heroic RP - when I narrate the fight between War Machine and Titanium Man which started out over Washington DC as having ended up with War Machine falling to land in Florida, while Titanium Man returns to his secret base in Khazakstan, this is not an input into resolution. No one is comparing mph of their rockets with a map of North America or Central Asia. It's flavour.Of course colour can be transmuted into something carrying more weight. In a subsequent session, when War Machine wanted to disable a supervillain, he declared that he was grabbing her and hanging her by her costume at the top of the Washington Monument. The check succeeded, and he disabled her with a Dangling From the Top of the Washington Monument complication.If you're playing Tomb of Horrors, the contrast between backstory and colour/"look and feel" probably doesn't come up much. (It can, though - say someone asks more about the details of the tapestries in the shaking room, the GM has to just make something up, and it won't matter to the play of the module. This goes back to my example, upthread I think, of the GM establishing impromptu the Orcish graffiti underneath the table - a good ToH GM knows how to narrate colour so as to sustain the players' sense of the fiction without misleading or confusing them as to what matters and what doesn't.)But if you're used to GMing ToH or similar and want to think about how you'd GM Apocalypse World, then thinking about the contrast between backstory and colour becomes a bit more important I think. For instance, if you've narrated the shed being on fire, and the player declares that their PC rushes into it to try and grab the water canisters that are still inside, that's Acting Under Fire, and the check has to be made. From pp 190-91:When you do something under fire, or dig in to endure fire, roll+cool. On a 10+, you do it. On a 7–9, you flinch, hesitate, or stall: the MC can offer you a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice. You can read “under fire” to mean any kind of serious pressure at all. Call for this move whenever someone does something requiring unusual discipline, resolve, endurance or care. . . . On a 7–9, when it comes to the worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice, you’ll need to look at the circumstances and find something fun. It should be easy to find something; if there weren’t things to go wrong, nobody’d be rolling dice. It can include suffering harm or making another move. However, remember that a 7–9 is a hit, not a miss; whatever you offer should be fundamentally a success, not fundamentally a failure.If the player whose PC rushes into the burning shed rolls a 7-9 then obviously taking harm is one legitimate option (eg a hard bargain: It's HOT in there - if you really want to go through with it, you'll take 3-harm (ap)) but so would be something else if it seems to make sense (eg an ugly choice: As you rush towards the shed, you see the fire is spreading to your workspace garage - you can grab the water, or try and stop the spread, but not both; or a worse outcome: You grab the canisters, but the plastic has started to melt - that water is going to be a bit tainted if you drink it).That's an example of the contrast between "backstory first" and "situation first". In the AW adjudication, the colour of the situation - that includes the fire - is being used to help establish consequences in accordance with the resolution processes, but it is not backstory that settles the resolution outcome (that the water is tainted, or that the fire inevitably spread, or that the PC inevitably suffers burns).</blockquote>

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