Where Did Fiction First Come From?
Tracing its Origin in TTRPGs
Several people in a chat I’m in were discussing my last blog post and someone asked “Where did fiction first come from?”. I was going to start looking into this myself and write a post about it, but they decided to do some Internet archaeology, and in a few days had largely pieced it together. The results aren’t quite what I expected. I asked if it was okay for me to compile the rough timeline into a blog post, and here we are.
What does “fiction first” mean, and where did the phrase come from? It’s one of the most commonly used terms in tabletop RPG design discourse today, and there is a lot of confusion, assumptions, and even misconceptions about the boundaries of the concept. Unsurprisingly, its origins turn out to be as murky as the discourse. What follows is a timeline reconstructed from a collective deep dive into old forum archives, game texts, blog posts, and memory, in an attempt to trace this piece of jargon back to its roots.1
In its current usage, “fiction first” carries at least two distinct meanings, and untangling them is part of the story.
The first is procedural: you begin in the fiction, turn to the mechanics when needed, and return to the fiction to interpret the result. This is the sense used in Blades in the Dark and, arguably, the original technical meaning. As Chris Clouser put it in his 2013 Sixth World hack: “Everything that happens in a session starts with the fiction, proceeds to rules (if necessary), and ends with the fiction.”
The second is hierarchical: when the fiction and the rules conflict, the fiction wins. This is the sense popularized more recently, particularly in actual-play and trindie communities — what Brand Robins calls “the Sorenson Scenario,” after podcaster Sam Sorenson’s use of the term. Sam’s interpretation is representative of the very extreme interpretations I’ve seen, and contributed to not only his claiming that Blades in the Dark is not fiction first but prompted me to write a critique of his podcast episode.
The procedural meaning likely came first, with the hierarchical meaning accruing later as the term spread into broader use. The evidence uncovered broadly supports this, though the picture is far from complete and the distinction isn’t sharp.
Two Terms, Two Timelines
One of the key findings is that the history of “fiction first” is really the history of two related but distinct lexical shifts, and you can’t understand the second without the first. First, “the fiction” had to become a specific term of art, replacing the Forge’s older “Shared Imagined Space.” Only after that shift was complete could “fiction first” emerge as a compound concept.2
The timeline below traces both shifts, since they are deeply entangled.
Before 2008: The Conceptual Groundwork
The underlying ideas long predate either phrase. The Forge’s theoretical vocabulary included concepts like “Shared Imagined Space” and the positioning of fortune (randomizers) relative to narration — “fortune at the beginning, middle, or end.” Two of those three fortune positions were arguably “fiction first” already, since you started in the narration and shifted to the randomizer only later.
Before roughly 2006–2007, most games used “fiction” in the ordinary literary sense. Games from that era or earlier — My Life With Master, Dust Devils, Trollbabe, The Mountain Witch, Primetime Adventures — use “fiction” only when talking about the type of fiction that inspired the game, not in the sense of the shared game world. Several other Forge keystones, including Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, Bliss Stage, and Grey Ranks, don’t use the word at all.
The shift to using “the fiction” as jargon — meaning the game world and its events as they unfold at the table, absorbing some of the meaning of “Shared Imagined Space” — appears to have happened through blog discussions and forum conversations on the Forge, Storygames, Knife Fight, and surrounding blogs between 2006 and 2008, driven by voices like Emily Care Boss, Meg Baker, and others.
Early published examples include Steal Away Jordan (2007), which uses “fiction” firmly in the shared imaginative space sense, and In a Wicked Age (2007), which contains phrases like “you make the world of your game’s fiction more intimate” — though even here the usage isn’t fully “jargon-ified” yet. A few more casual but potentially influential uses appear around 2009, such as in “A Penny for My Thoughts”. Ron Edwards uses the term somewhat in the annotations for the 2012 edition of Sorcerer, but not in the original text.
This shift is strikingly evident between editions of Burning Wheel. In the first edition, the word “fiction” appears in phrases like “players take on the roles of characters inspired by history and works of fantasy fiction”. But in the later Burning Wheel Codex, it references, “This process also produces a result in the shared fiction of the game: something happens in the story,” and “Lifestyle maintenance cycles depend on the pace and passage of time in the fiction.” The Codex even includes a footnote about “fictional positioning” in Adam Kobel’s foreword.
Emily Care Boss’s 2006 article in Push magazine doesn’t use the phrase “fiction first,” but lays the groundwork for discussions about fictional positioning — the idea that a character’s available actions are constrained by their situation within the shared fiction (as a very simplified example, if a player wants their character to shoot someone, the character needs to be fictionally positioned to do so by having a gun). Her 2007 post Leverage in gaming on the Fairgame Archive also explores what she calls “story capital”: the idea that fictional positioning creates real strategic weight in play. As she put it:
“Kickers, interests, conflicts, advantages, attributes: all these mechanical things are there to help us find story capital. And also, mechanics enforce the weight of elements we make up to act as leverage.”
An early Forge thread on Legends of Alyria (2008) explored the question of whether traits constrain the fiction or the fiction constrains traits — what Seth Ben-Ezra framed as “Before” versus “After” Traits. Seth’s definition draws on some of the Forge language and paradigm, and the thread is similar to current conversations about the fiction and mechanics.3
This concept — that fictional elements carry real mechanical and strategic weight — became a key building block in the conversations that would eventually produce “fiction first.”
2008-2009: Respecting and Leading With the Fiction
A crucial 2008 post on Vincent Baker’s Anyway blog, Respecting the fiction, laid out many of the ideas that would evolve into the concept. Vincent described how indie RPGs had become “hypermechanized” — like a couple dancing strict ballroom, where the game mechanics are the man, and he leads. He argued this wasn’t a problem per se, but that promoting this feature up to a universal design principle was a mistake. In his own games, he wrote, “the fiction is relatively coequal with the mechanics,” and in Poison’d, “the fiction actually leads.” The phrase “lead with the fiction” was used frequently on Story-games.com from 2009 onward. Vincent also repeatedly used the phrase “fictional causes” during a 2008 interview on Clyde Rhoer’s podcast. While this isn’t identical to “fiction first,” it clearly influenced the thinking.
John Harper responded in the comments with a phrase that would prove prophetic: “’Leading with the fiction’ is a great way to say it, which I will happily steal.” Harper went on to observe that some games want you to lead with the fiction and sometimes with mechanics, and that figuring out which is which “comprises a huge chunk of ‘how we play’ and which games click for you and yours.” This 2008 exchange appears to be the moment when Harper first latched onto the idea he would later codify in Blades in the Dark. If you’re specifically interested in the definition that ends up in Blades — the procedural one — this Vincent/Harper exchange is where you find its conceptual framework, even if the vocabulary isn’t there yet.
Meanwhile, on the Forge, Jesse (who was involved in the chat discussions diving into “fiction first”) posted a thread titled System Transforms Situation… And Situation Informs System?, and wrote:
I’ve seen two basic attitudes about that. One I call System First, the other I call Fiction First. The System First approach looks at this and says I want my character to be Mean a lot so I will make his highest score Mean… The Fiction First approach looks at this and says when my character is Mean, I want him to be scary effective, but the score itself says NOTHING about how often or how much they desire the character to be Mean.
The meaning here isn’t quite the later procedural or hierarchical definition — it’s more about player attitude toward the relationship between attribute scores and character behavior — but the familiar language is there. In the same thread, Jesse explores the broader idea of how “the emotional commitment of the players to the SIS can be relied upon as a limiter for engaging the more mechanical aspects of the game.”
Callan S. used “fiction first” in posts on the Forge in 2009, in threads about the nature of “system” and discussions of Spione. Callan’s usage is more about where rules are introduced and called upon in reference to events in the fiction. It’s closer to the procedural meaning, but still entangled with the same logic previously applied to the fortune-positioning conversations.
Brand Robins’ own 2008 blog post captures the zeitgeist of those discussions, and Brand notes he wasn’t at the leading edge of the conversation around “fictional position” or “the fiction” at the time.
These early Forge uses of “fiction first” carry a different meaning than the term would later take on in wider publication. The early uses were embedded in long-running theoretical conversations where participants shared a degree of joint reference — making the terms less crisp than their later, published formations, but also more tightly connected to specific debates about how play actually works.
2010–2011: Apocalypse World and the Paradigm Shift
Apocalypse World (2010) proved to be a watershed, not for using the phrase “fiction first” (which it doesn’t contain), but for introducing many of the ideas that would become part of the overall concept. The game talks extensively about “the fiction” and commits to the logic of the fictional setting and characters, but some of its text actually runs against the grain of what “fiction first” later came to mean. Clocks tick and trigger events without fictional input; checking a box gives you a gang. Things work both ways, which is why Vincent Baker has disavowed the term in connection with Apocalypse World. As Vincent put it:
PbtA doesn’t begin and end with the fiction, it begins and ends with the conversation. ‘Fiction first’ is an idea that came to PbtA later, from I don’t really know where.
By 2010, “the fiction” in its modern sense had spread into many Forge diaspora games, driven largely by the paradigm shift that Apocalypse World caused, and carried through the Storygames and Knife Fight forums. But “fiction first” as a discrete term was still finding its footing. During this period, the surrounding discourse included substantial discussion of “Color First Design” and play, a parallel concept within the same constellation of ideas about what should lead or drive the experience at the table. A 2010 essay collection titled The Bones, featuring writers from more traditional and trindie backgrounds such as Kenneth Hite and Will Hindmarch, discusses similar concepts without using the term.
John Harper’s 2011 blog post about hard moves in Apocalypse World doesn’t use “fiction first” either, but it contains the core idea:
When you engage with the game, start with the fiction, roll some dice, and look back and center what happens in the fiction.
Also in 2011, Simon C. commented on Vincent Baker’s Anyway blog, in a thread about Ben Lehman’s “Rules and their Functions” guest post. Simon wrote about classifying rules along several axes, including what he described as “Fiction first–Real life first” — whether a rule asks questions of the fiction or of real-life things (dice, numbers on sheets, who’s sitting where). As Simon put it:
There’s this whole other bit we haven’t really talked about, which is rules which ask questions of the fiction, vs. rules which ask questions of real-life things.
Simon again defined “fiction first” in a discussion around “Color First Design.” These uses represent the earliest known instances of the phrase being deployed with any kind of taxonomic precision. Simon’s usage on Anyway does make the distinction between fiction and reality rather than fiction and mechanics, which is a position that hasn’t been strongly carried forward.
Vincent Baker draws a similar distinction in his Designing PbtA series, preferring to talk about “real” things rather than “mechanical” ones because it’s sharper, and focuses on what the player is actually interacting with. Apocalyope Worlds playtesters may have used “fiction first” as another way to characterize Apocalypse World’s “to do it, do it” principle.
2012–2017: The Term Coalesces
Dungeon World (2012) expanded the conversation enormously, pushing Forge diaspora ideas into contact with more traditional RPG communities. The game discusses the fiction extensively, and its relationship to mechanics, and its community was a major vector in the development of “fiction first” as a concept, with the Something Awful forums playing a notable role alongside the Storygames and Apocalypse World forums. This was likely responsible for “the fiction” hitting games outside the storygames scene.
Sage LaTorra’s 2012 blog post “A 16 HP Dragon,” quoting a forum post by Stras Acimovic, became a touchstone for the community. The post made the case that a dragon could be terrifying with only 16 hit points if you let the fiction do the heavy lifting — describing the dragon’s fiery breath washing over the streets, melting armor, and people burning alive while holding children turning to ash in their arms. As Stras wrote: “The moral of the story is it’s not about the hitpoints.” Brand recalled it dominating community discussion for about a year.
The “How to Play Dungeon World” zine (2013) likewise comes very close to stating the principle without using the exact phrase: “When in doubt, look to your established game fiction first to see what makes sense.”
Chris Clouser’s Sixth World Shadowrun hack for Dungeon World (2013) also contains a clear, well-defined use of the term:
Everything that happens in a session of Sixth World starts with the fiction, proceeds to rules (if necessary), and ends with the fiction.
By 2013, people on the Storygames forum were already pushing back, asking whether “fiction last — what does it ruin for you?”, which presupposes a “fiction first” to react against. Multiple posters in the thread attributed the concept of fiction first to Vincent Baker, indicating that even then Vincent was associated with the underlying ideas.
Between 2012 and 2014, “fiction first” doesn’t appear as frequently as one might expect. While first-generation PbtA games (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, Sagas of the Icelanders) discuss the fiction and its relationship to mechanics, none use “fiction first” as a term of art, and even as late as 2016, it remained rare in games. But John Harper was becoming a leading voice in the broader conversation. Having been involved since the early days of the “leading with the fiction” discussion, Harper was putting significant effort between into both developing his own games and teaching others to play Apocalypse World and Powered by the Apocalypse games, and developing frameworks to discuss the paradigm differences between their modes of play and more traditional approaches. During this period, there were few examples of Harper using the specific term “fiction first” — he may very well have on Google+, but those discussions are forever lost — but Harper was clearly developing the thinking that would culminate in Blades.
2017 on: Blades in the Dark and Mainstream Adoption
Blades in the Dark’s publication in 2017 appears to be the first game to print a definition of “Fiction-First gaming” as a named concept. It played a large role in providing a solid lexical definition that could be shared across multiple communities and began to spread to other Forged in the Dark games.
By 2019, many games were using “the fiction” in the modern sense. Over the Edge 3rd Edition is an example. It appears appears in Monte Cook’s games. Fate Condensed* (2020) uses “fiction first” in the same way as Blades in the Dark, contrasted with the original Fate Core (2013), which had the definition without the term. The Fate SRD has a page on the concept, defining it as the idea that character actions should start with the fiction, be described in terms of the fiction, and only then be interpreted into mechanics. “Fiction first” even appears in Daggerheart.
At this point, both “the fiction” and “fiction first” have become part of mainstream TTRPG conversation, except possibly pure D&D and very traditional circles.
Missing Pieces
The Forge, Fairgames-rpg, Story-Games, Google+, the Knife Fight forums, Something Awful’s RPG threads, and other discussion spaces and forums were major venues for RPG design discourse, and many of the archives for these are difficult to search, incomplete, or even missing entirely. Combined with the fact that the foci of TTRPG conversations are now on social media sites such as Twitter or Bluesky, the post-2014 trail becomes particularly difficult to follow.4
Conclusion
“Fiction first” as a concept slowly emerged from over a decade of conversations — about shared imagined space, fictional positioning, and what it means to “lead with the fiction” — and many of which had been circulating in various forms for even longer. The two meanings that people ascribe to the term reflect that journey. The procedural sense — start in the fiction, use mechanics when needed, return to the fiction — is very well defined, coming down from Vincent Baker’s “fictional causes” and “lead with the fiction,” Harper’s latching onto the concepts, and eventually its codification in Blades in the Dark. The hierarchical sense — the fiction wins when rules conflict — is much murkier, and more prone to being contentious and having very personalized interpretations.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that jargon travels faster than its definitions, and easily fragments and becomes localized within TTRPG communities. Neither the procedural or heirarchical definition of “fiction first” is technically right nor wrong, and neither definition strictly came “first”.
Finally, this post wouldn’t have been possible without Brand Robins, Ara Winter, Jesse, C.W. Griffen, and others for plumbing the depths of the Internet (and their memories). The sacrifice will be remembered.
What this isn’t is an academic study on the roots of fiction first. This is the result of several people in a chat deciding to spend a few hours poking around. ↩︎
As Brand Robins put it in his final analysis, “‘Fiction First’ as a term follows after introduction of ‘the fiction’ but along a more uneven path that seems to take longer to make it to publication as a specific lexical term.” ↩︎
Ara Winter reaches even further back, citing Charles Strotten’s Strategos: “The Referee, therefore, should generally require a positive statement of intention, as the basis of his decision” ↩︎
The Storygames forum archive survives and is searchable via a GitHub repository maintained by Jeff Schecter, but it wasn’t exhaustively searched. The Forge archive is searchable but clunky. Deep-diving into either of these would be a project in itself. ↩︎