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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8371820" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe the contrast I was drawing is covered by your reference to more clarity of purpose?Anyway, here are a couple of responses that I think illustrate the contrast:These both seem consistent with drawing maps and leaving blanks, but they also look to the map - as a piece of GM-authored fiction - as a significant contributor to play: I need a mountain; there's some sort of ruined city!?Here's a bit more from DW, in the "First Session" chapter (pp 177, 179):Think about fantastic worlds, strange magic, and foul beasts. Remember the games you played and the stories you told. Watch some movies, read some comics; get heroic fantasy into your brain. What you bring to the first session, ideas-wise, is up to you. At the very least bring your head full of ideas. That’s the bare minimum. If you like you can plan a little more. Maybe think of an evil plot and who’s behind it, or some monsters you’d like to use. If you’ve got some spare time on your hands you can even draw some maps (but remember, from your principles: leave blanks) and imagine specific locations. The one thing you absolutely can’t bring to the table is a planned storyline or plot. . . . You don’t know the heroes or the world before you sit down to play . . . If you’ve come to the table with some ideas about stuff you’d like to see in the world, share them with the players. Their characters are their responsibility and the world is yours - you’ve got a lot of say in what lives in it.Now I think there is some tension, if not flat-out contradiction, in this: I don't quite see how the in-advance drawing of maps and the in-setup sharing of ideas with the players, together with the world being the GM's responsibility, fits with you don't know the world before you sit down to play. These doubts of mine are reinforced by some more concrete advice given to the GM about what to bring to the first session (pp 178, 180-81):During this entire process, especially character creation, ask questions. Look for interesting facts established by the characters’ bonds, moves, classes, and descriptions and ask about those things. Be curious! When someone mentions the demons that slaughtered their village find out more about them. After all, you don’t have anything (except maybe a dungeon) and everything they give you is fuel for future adventures. . . . Start the session with a group of player characters (maybe all of them) in a tense situation. Use anything that demands action: outside the entrance to a dungeon, ambushed in a fetid swamp, peeking through the crack in a door at the orc guards, or being sentenced before King Levus. Ask questions right away - “who is leading the ambush against you?” or “what did you do to make King Levus so mad?” If the situation stems directly from the characters and your questions, all the better. . . . The best part of the first session is you don’t have to come with anything concrete. You might have a dungeon sketched out but the players provide the real meat - use it. They’ll emerge from the darkness of that first dungeon and when they do and their eyes adjust to the light, you’ll have built up an exciting world to explore with their help. Look at their bonds, their moves, how they answer your questions and use what you find to fill in the world around the characters.Taken as a whole, the DW advice seems to lean more towards collaborative world-building, or GM world-building that is sensitive to cues provided implicitly or expressly by the players. In the examples of the "tense situation", I see GM authorship first (eg an ambush, a trial) and then player input in response to that (eg who are the ambushers?, why are you in trouble?) The GM will build up an exciting world with the players' help. There is express contemplation that the GM will have prepared a dungeon, at least in general outline.In contrast, the BW advice emphasises that it is the elements that the players bring, via the stuff on their PC sheets (setting details like gear and relationships; PC orientations in the form of Beliefs; PC capabilities in the form of Circles; etc), that is at the centre of setting. Everything else relates to, and has a purpose in service of, that stuff.There is a risk with the BW approach. Whenever I mention that risk I also mention [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER], because he's the poster who has articulated it most passionately. The risk is that the play of the game and the articulation of the fiction becomes "distorted" or even (to use a strong word) "corrupted" in service of player wish-fulfilment and pre-conceived character arcs. I think BW has devices to protect against this, most notably a very high incidence of failure for checks (compared to, say, any recent version of D&D). But it's still something to be aware of.DW (like AW) has features of its action resolution process and its "framing" process that militate against the risk found in BW - intention and related notions like PC Beliefs are not considerations in resolution. But there are risks in the DW approach (moreso I think than AW, but I won't go into that in this post) which is that the core conceits and elements of the fiction become hostage to GM control and pre-authorship in a way that (as I have said) I think is already hinted at in the advice I have quoted.That's the contrast I'm seeing.</blockquote>

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