I suppose I need to clarify some things about my Boxing Day post concerning role-playing and the search for a 'holy grail.' Really I am looking at this from a GM and EFL teacher's point of view, as I have been mostly a GM these past 5 years or so, playing with my students pretty much on a weekly bases.

Dungeons and Dragons is a very fun and interesting game; it has been off and on a very important part of my life,  and will always be a part of what I bring to the gaming table whenever I play or run a fantasy game. If there is no set setting, for me it is understood in my mind to be the Forgotten Realms. This is the default, and it is what my students expect.

So in terms of structure versus agency this has usually been very clear with my students; they are used to having absolutely no control over what is put in front of them in school (believe it or not this is school for them, the school of D&D) and so GM Fiat is what they come to expect, and perhaps what they are most comfortable with, and it is  what they get most of the time in D&D (be it 3.5, 4E or Pathfinder). But this is really a reaction to what the coastal wizard has turned the game into: "Rules Bloat."  I don't think that the GM really has a lot of control in fact in D&D today, because the game has grown into a very rules heavy system. I often felt that my hands were tied in situations, especially in 4E,  where "there isn't a rule for that." Now a good GM will just push on forward and make a judgement call. He will improvise, and that's fine it doesn't break the system--GM Fiat. And of course this is why we have D&D Next.

The ultimate result of all this is that it has encouraged my players to remain very passive. Their 'agency' is limited to hack and slash (and min/maxing their character at character creation). What I really want to do is turn them into more active imaginative players. And perhaps this is my mistake.

Fate Core didn't really accomplish that because the social contract is so alien to them. The idea of building a game from ground up, however interesting it seemed to them to be at first, proved to be impossible. This is largely because they are constantly looking for 'the correct answer' whenever I ask them a question (a result of growing up in a test worshiping society).  And here there are no correct answers. Agency in FATE is tied directly to the 'table authority,' a very democratic system of rules interpretation which again was too progressive for my students to grasp.

And so in Dungeon World we have a system that is in fact rules heavy, it's just that the rules are geared toward GM Fiat. That sounds strange when we see GM Fiat as really a breaking of rules. GM Fiat appears in rules heavy games, games that try to think of a rule for every situation such as tying a knot or rigging a sail and it pops out its ugly head when there isn't a rule for the current situation. Dungeon World is rules heavy in the sense that rules are very important, it's just that the rules are primarily there to drive the story forward, not to merely test for success or failure as we see in other systems (d20 for example) but also to create complications (success at a cost such as we also see in FATE core).  

In DW the game is driven forward mechanically with what are called moves. There are some moves that are pretty straight forward like 'hack and slash' (roll+STR , 10+ deal damage, 7-9 deal damage but monster gets to attack you, 6- fail and trigger a monster move or GM move), but in most cases the GM decides what move applies from context by selecting from a list of general, GM, and dungeon moves he has at his disposal. 

Now this may seem that the characters don't have much say but this is deceptive. Moves are only triggered by what the character describes, thus giving the players a lot of control where the story is going. And many of the moves require the players to make a choice, or ask a question. The emphasis is always on the 'fiction' so the player aren't supposed to say, "I attack the monster with hack and slash". The player needs to describe what he is doing. It could be, "I stab the gnoll with my rapier screaming, "die canine scum!" and the GM could say  "Ok, that sounds like a 'hack and slash' move, roll+str. However the GM could also say that the gnoll has a halberd (reach) and that in order to get close enough to him you need to avoid that by dashing forward making the player roll a 'defy danger' move first. So for the purpose of getting the students to be more active and less passive DW works great, and perhaps more importantly in my old age,  doesn't require us to always look up rules.

Dungeon World may not be for everyone. It does require to GM to become creative with GM moves, especially ones based on player failure. And power-gamers/munchkins/min-maxers don't like the lack of customization at character creation. But for my students it has allowed to come out of their shells a bit and participate in building an imaginative fantasy world.