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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8441324" data-attributes="member: 42582">True. My BW play resemble D&D "living sandbox" play in having a knight/paladin, a wizard, and Orcs and Elves.Which is to say both are FRPGs with their basic story elements cut from fairly traditional cloth.I don't think there are many similarities beyond those.In BW, the focus of play is always on the PCs' player-authored priorities. The game expressly tells the GM to frame so as to put pressure on those; and expressly says to players if you think the GM has missed the point, take hold of the situation and wrest it to your will! And it provides mechanics to do that - Circles checks, Wises checks (both of which I've given actual play examples of), commencing a Duel of Wits to bring a NPC around to your goals or ways of thinking (which I've given an actual play example of).To me, the contrast with a game where all the action is located - incipiently - in the GM's prep and curation of the backstory/setting, and the players' job is to learn about this by declaring appropriate actions (mostly about where they go, where they look and who they talk to) and having learned this to then work out how to trigger the scenes thy want by declaring appropriate actions (again, mostly about where they go, where they look and who they talk to) is pretty stark.And that contrast is driven home by your - in my view accurate - remark that in a "living sandbox" engagement of player priorities is "not instant" and is not the GM's job. And by your suggested example of play, that the actual playtime consequence of a PC's desire to avenge their brother's murder would be carrying out an outpost raid for a faction (ie the player-authored priority basically turns into a hook for the player getting to take up a mission from a NPC, no different in its function from the hook being I'll do it if you pay me).I have attempted to identify the mechanism of authorship that explains the difference: one is "situation first", with principles that govern the authorship of that situation emphasising the centrality of player-authored PC priorities; the other is "backstory first", with principles emphasising naturalistic extrapolation of the fiction (the "living world") independent of any player-authored PC priorities.Disputing my explanation - although I still don't really get what the disagreement consists in - and trying to argue that BW is also "backstory first" - although I don't really get what that argument is - won't change the fact that this profound contrast is there.Which is also why I dispute the claim that my explanation is an "axiomatic" one. It's grounded in an actual awareness of an actual difference in play experience. A profound difference.</blockquote>

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