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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6366796" data-attributes="member: 4937">A bit more, because this sort of "You are dead wrong because argument from authority" crap tends to set off the pedagogue in me and all the hours of thoughts I spent arriving at my conclusion come tumbling out.If that analysis of DW is wrong, consider the alternative way they could have structured their examples of play.  If fiction matters more than rules, why not demonstrate that repeatedly by example rather than the reverse?  Or at least why not mix up the lessons you were trying to teach in the examples of play?It would have been completely possible to write the DW rules where in every example of play one person declared a move rather than a fiction, and in every case have another player remind the first player to state their proposition in the form of a fiction.  You could have even had examples where the player stated a move, the GM reminded them that the move wasn't important but only the fiction, and then had player state a fiction that implied a different move and agree that this was cool and actually better than what they'd originally imagine.   And you could have done that long before you'd ran out creative "Derp." jokes at the GM's expense.   The fact that the examples of play weren't written in that way (the way I'd probably have more naturally thought about problems within play) and for all I know weren't even considered as options firmly establishes that the designer is tightly focused on ensuring the that rules are properly applied, and that the fiction is secondary and arises out of the proper application of the rules.  This is a designer that is tightly focused on "System matters." theory.   The goal appears to be to produce a particular sort of rules machine which, when you insert moves into it, dutifully cranks out interesting stories of a certain kind with minimal reliance on the sort of DM preparation and myth making normally associated with making interesting stories of a particular kind.The degree to which it succeeds in that I couldn't say exactly, though I admit to being quite skeptical of its basic mechanic as the basis of a generic system.  It's very hard to tell whether rules really work as intended until you see them in practice and the range of fictions I see the system generating seems really narrow.  Looking back at the 4 years of fictions my own D20 based game has produced and I think at the very broad level, I could have run the story in DW but a lot of the particulars of play would have never occurred to me under a DW system if I'd started there first.   Looking at so many of my sessions, the exciting drama involved a chase were standard consequences of failure amount to 'lose a turn' or particulars of time and space that DW is little concerned with or even deprecates (if time is important to the myth, doing nothing is a complication - "They are getting away!").  I think I could do it with the DW rules set, but only because I've come from other rules sets and have prior examples and structures I could adapt the DW rules set to.  If I had to guess I'd say that within a narrow range of goals and with a certain sort of GM, DW probably does pretty well but you have to have a particular set of expectations.</blockquote>

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