NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8646979" data-attributes="member: 42582">This post is a bit tangential, but was prompted by what kenada posted about fronts:My understanding of fronts - based on reading, not play - is that they are intended to act as a source of material for GM moves. And not just any sort of source, but a "structured" and "indexed" source.I've used scare quotes because the meaning is a bit approximate. I'll try and explain what I've got in mind.A common concern I see voiced about no-myth or low-myth RPGing is that the resulting fiction will be inconsistent or even incoherent, potentially meandering or unfocused, etc. I see fronts as a type of prep intended to insure against those risks, while at the same time maintaining the no-/low-myth character of the game. They don't serve the traditional role of GM-authored backstory, namely, as establishing constraints on framing and even on resolution in virtue of establishing fictional positioning that is often secret from the players, or at least prior to and independent of their action declarations. But they do provide material for the GM to draw on for making moves (both soft and hard) so that the game has a sense of "living, breathing" antagonism with an agenda and a presence that comes from outside the immediate concerns and action of the PCs.I'm more familiar with Burning Wheel than AW/DW. It doesn't use fronts, but it does have a concept - for Circles checks - called the Enmity Clause, and you might have encountered the same notion in Torchbearer. The Enmity Clause, together with hostile/inimical relationships, and Beliefs about opponents/rivals etc, serve a broadly similar function to fronts in the sense of guiding the GM towards content to introduce to establish and maintain adversity without drawing on that traditional pre-authored backstory that establishes player- and character-independent fictional positioning.To relate this to your "story-based" remark: I think the BW way of going about things is highly "story-based". Characters encounter their nemeses, and conflict with them, are sometimes bested by them and sometimes overcome them. It's Gandalf vs Saruman, Pippin vs Denethor, Sam vs Bill Ferny, the Noldor prince vs Morgoth, etc. It's nearly always personal. For me, at least, this is part of what I love about Burning Wheel.I think fronts are not as personal, or at least not in the same way. I see them as a way of getting the feel of "the world doesn't just revolve around the PCs" in a game in which nearly everything the GM says is in response to an action declared by a player for their PC. So while their deployment is "story based", their content is not quite so much. I think this is a very clever bit of design. In my Classic Traveller game I don't literally use fronts as AW would tell me to, but I find I have to do something similar - use particular groups, institutions, personalities, whose agendas and inclinations I have a general sense of (the Imperium uses its Navy to strike out at psionics; Lt Li's conspiracy uses its Naval and Scout connections to build its bioweapons capability; etc) - as the sources of adversity that I reach for, in order to keep the game going without it just drifting into what I would feel to be aimlessness.For what you're doing, it seems that you are more willing to have non-player/PC-centric backstory act as a constraint on fictional positioning, both for framing and resolution - using random tables to generate it in the course of play, so it is novel to you as well as the players. To me that doesn't sound like fronts, and so it makes sense that you're using a different approach.</blockquote>

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