What’s really interesting to me here, though is that I’m not sure the distinction is just editorial vision.

It would be hard to imagine a game that enforced editorial vision more vigorously than My Life with Master or Dust Devils. I loved both of those games. More recently Psi Run managed to achieve that level of “this is the thing this game will be about” and there is virtually nothing you can do but do that thing. I love all those games to pieces. So I think there’s more to it than that.

This is me pondering out loud here, so I may just be waffling in the wind…but I feel like AW is more of a bait and switch. The heavy editorial vision of MLwM, DD or PR is right there, unmistakable. The buy-in is upfront and honest.

AW goes a long way into pretending to be something else. I mean the most brilliant part of AW is the GM advice. It’s pure hard core “how-to-GM like an OSR GM”. It takes the magic of old school GMing distills it down to core principles and then bullets it out in easily digestible nuggets of wisdom that allow anyone to run a game the old school way.

But then the game doesn’t support that sort of play…at all, except in the perverse way of defaulting to “GM fiat for everything not covered by rules”.

Beyond even that I think some of the problematic rules are problematic not because they enforce a vision, but because they’re just poorly designed. The problem with Going Aggro vs Seize by Force isn’t in the vision, or even the overly cute naming convention. It’s that the thing the move does (the list of options to choose from) doesn’t match the description of what the move does. Similarly, hardly ever have I had a player try to read a sitch where they thing they were actually interested in learning is on the list of questions they’re allowed to ask. The disconnect there is abrupt and absolute.

I’ve never been a fan of the phrase “immersion breaking”. But I can say I’ve never played a game that so regularly and thoroughly breaks any sense of immersion I’ve had while playing.