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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9465307" data-attributes="member: 42582">That last sentence doesn't necessarily follow.Apocalypse World has the following bit of instruction/explanation (p 109 of my rulebook):Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters.Yet AW is a precursor to Ironsworn, and certainly a paradigm of story now play. And while it's not zero prep, it is relatively low prep compared to the sort of approach you are describing in your first two sentences and your other posts.I think your last two sentences are a bit exaggerated - for instance, some 5e 2014 backgrounds seem to me to permit players to establish stuff about the setting other than their PC;, and before those were invented it was common - at least in my experience - for players to make up stuff about their PCs' family, backgrounds etc as part of the process of PC gen.Generally, though, I agree that in D&D it tends to be the GM in charge of "the setting", just as is the case for AW. But this doesn't mean that the GM can't make it up as they go along.Another game that mostly puts the GM in charge of setting is Classic Traveller. But that doesn't stop the GM making it up as they go along, and some player-side abilities (like Streetwise, as that skill is described in the 1977 edition) can oblige the GM to introduce new content. It's not hard to use Streetwise (or some other appropriate skill) in a similar way in D&D.When I started GMing Classic Traveller some years ago now, for the first time since I was a teenager, I had a few planets pre-rolled (about 10 minutes prep each) but I placed them into play as I needed them. And then I generated my star charts not in the way the rulebook specified, but rather by making a roll to see how many worlds were within Jump-1 of a given world that I had already placed. (I wrote up a chart for this that roughly matched the probabilities that would be yielded by applying the "official" star map generation rules.)AD&D can be played reasonably similarly, making stuff up and putting it into play as needed. Likewise 4e D&D. It's probably not the most common approach, but it won't break the game assuming that the game is not intended to foreground exploration of pre-established material as a priority. AD&D is a little bit shaky when played in this way, and today I would only go back to it for nostalgia reasons; but 4e D&D is not shaky at all - I think this is the sort of play for which it is most robust.</blockquote>

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