Luckily for you, we've kept this thread alive for all that time!
OK, so you've teased this out in relation to DW and Moldvay Basic.
I think I am making a similar claim in relation not to two particular systems, but two reasonably broad but also recognisable play priorities: players exercising agency over the content of the shared fiction by way of action resolution - a whole range of games prioritise this, but 4e will do as well as any as a working example - and players learning what setting ideas and elements the GM has come up with, and enjoying the experience of learning them by way of second-person narration - I think that this is an important aspect of a lot of CoC play, a lot of post-DL D&D module play, and a fair bit of what (in this thread) has been described as the players, via their characters, "exploring" the gameworld and gathering information about it.
I think it's pretty hard for the same episode of RPGing to serve both those priorities.
I agree that it is pretty hard (I'll go with extremely) for the same episode of RPGing to serve both of those priorities. Story Now and Story Before/Sim priorities + play principles and game infrastructure (the latter two serving the first) push in different (perhaps not opposite in all ways...but certainly different) directions.
This is the "Checkers and Chess" contrast that was mentioned quite some way back, mostly by [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]. I think it's very true.
We can talk about the good and bad aspects of either game.
Once we begin to contrast them, then it becomes a bit sticky because that's where the preferences take over rather than just examining one game and its intentions. Now, we're looking at both games, and how they perform the goals of one of them.
I'm going to extend this with another example. Let me know what you think (and anyone else).
You weren't active during the lead-up to and the 5e playtest, but there were a considerable number of conversations about prospective 5e design that we had on here that were central to the discussion of play priorities. One of the absolutely most fundamental ones was this:
Balance By the Encounter vs Balance By the Adventuring Day
With the original "big tent" goal of 5e, my position on this was/is that balance by the adventuring day is easily achieved if you start with balance at the encounter level, while the inverse is absolutely untrue (they, obviously, went with the latter). But that is just a position taken with the design impetus of "big tent" in mind. So forget that for a moment, and just consider the competing play priorities of the above two paradigms.
4e's locus of the action was the conflict-charged scene. The game's ethos and infrastructure was built around it. I cannot for sure say that this was derived directly from indie predecessors such as Fate, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life With Master, and Sorcerer, but when I read the books and ran the game, I couldn't come up with another inspiration.
This play paradigm pushes mental frameworks toward "the here and now". It emphasizes short-term tactics with a tight (and potentially punishing or rewarding) feedback loop with respect to intersecting mechanics (both player to player and players to obstacles). It engenders an experience of emergent "chunks" of story that are focused on thematic heft and that are meant to flow intimately from one to the next (again, with a tight feedback loop). GMing mental overhead is focused (and enabled to be given the balance at the scene level) pretty much exclusively on short-term feedback loops (story and mechanical).
If it does all of the things that I say it does above (and it does), then naturally, strategic agency/focus and related long-term feedback loops are going to be inhibited relative to an alternative paradigm (like AD&D, 3.x, or 5e). Its just a natural outgrowth of the paradigm. So play where players expect to express agency at a very granular level (both temporal and spatial) and where thematic heft (or protagonist-centered, conflict-charged content) is not the exclusive premise of each moment of play (or perhaps even a priority at all) is going to be somewhere between hindered and discouraged.
The "Combat As War vs Combat As Sport" threads that we engaged with never expressed their disdain of 4e in the way I did above, but that is, in effect, what the problem was. Due to 4e's ethos and infrastructure (a "conflict-charged scene" game with not_quite_exclusive_but_overwhelming focus on short term feedbacks and tactical overhead/agency) Story Now play was enabled in a few key ways shared with the games mentioned above. Simultaneously, play priorities that pushed toward "Fantasy Effing Vietnam", hex-crawling, or emulating "The Dragonlance Chronicles" sort of play that was very present during 2e's day were negatively impacted.
