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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8238472" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] has described DW content creation. The procedures for DW are based on the procedures for Apocalypse World, and these are very precisely set out by that game's author (Vincent Baker) - they are not all novel ones, but more than many RPG designers he describes the processes very clearly and matter-of-factly.Working out the starmap in Traveller has some resemblance to "drawing maps, leaving blanks". It is less collaborative than in DW, though not entirely GM-driven: I gave the example upthread of our starting world (Ardor-3) and the world of Hallucida is on the map because one of the PCs is a baron from there (Vincenzo von Hallucida).The servitor Athog (a quasi-anagram of Thug A) was invented in my BW game when a consequence for a failed Circles check was needed (as described upthread). This is similar to Manbearcat's corrupt investor and plot. The reason that Athog gave for the PCs to leave town was a cursed item the wizard PC was carrying - and that curse was itself a consequence of an earlier failed check, so there was an element here of what Baker in AW calls "snowballing" - fiction building on fiction with a trajectory and logic that is not pre-planned but is established via the processes of play.A commonality across all this is that the GM is not using as-yet unrevealed elements of his/her notes to decide whether or not an action declaration can succeed; and is not using behind-the-scenes decision-making by way of causal extrapolation (of the sort that [USER=205]@TwoSix[/USER] and [USER=23751]@Maxperson[/USER] described above) to decide when and how complications manifest themselves.That's not to say that there is no "thinking offscreen" (to use Baker's phrase from AW), but it is being done in play, not in prep. In BW, I think offscreen - Jabal has learned of the curse and wants it out of his patch, so he sends his servitor to run the PCs out of town; we see Manbearcat thinking offscreen, about what other forces could be at work and have designs on Eliza and her status as a dragonslaying hero. This will snowball into further events - in my BW game there was the surprise announcement of the wedding to take place between Jabal and the Gynarch of Hardby; two of the PCs ended up in Jabal's pay as bodyguards; his tower was the place where one of the PCs got revenge on her evil former master, the Balrog-possessed brother of the wizard PC. I imagine that [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s offscreen elements will come into play again down the track (or may have already done so - I'm not sure how much this campaign has been played yet).I think this is why I agree with [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] that, at least in the ordinary meaning of the words, these are "living, breathing worlds" although not serving the same gameplay function as the GM's world in a classic sandbox.</blockquote>

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