What you seem to be missing is that there's similar assumptions for story-oriented play!
Again, I don't see how. You keep
saying that it's there. I'm trying to see
how it's there.
If you are engaging in story-focused play there's an assumption that you're trying to make a coherent, interesting, and entertaining story out of the bits you have.
"Coherent," "interesting," and "entertaining" are
dramatically more subjective than "tactically sound" or "logical for the character," though, and that's kind of my point. "Coherence" is
anything you want it to be, when you are the author who is currently writing the story. You can make literally, genuinely, absolutely ANYTHING "coherent" with enough authorial effort. And that's why I said there are no rules.
Oh, sure there are rules. Go to your local library. Section 801-809, as enumerated in the Dewey Decimal System includes literary critique and criticism. There's tons of stuff there about what makes for good and bad storytelling!
When you analyze a story that's already written, yes. But a story you are
currently writing, you can do anything with. You can make literally any move work, if you work hard enough. There is no such thing as "nonsense in context" actions for story-writing, because
you have the power to make ANYTHING make sense. The author,
while writing the story, IS God; it is only
after the story is written--once it is expressed text, no longer clay on the potter's wheel but fired and
fixed--that literary criticism can begin. That's, quite literally, why we care about the "Death of the Author" and such; once the text is released from the author, it is independent thereof.
Before it is released, however, the author retains infinite freedom and the story retains infinite potential.
You have limited bits - a genre choice that lays down expectations of what's a valid approach to story. You have a number of characters, each with their own fictional positioning. The game rules lay out things you can and cannot do to manipulate the story.
"Genre choice" is something you can change as you're writing. You can always decide that you're going to pass the limits of a genre while you're writing the piece--who can tell you
not to inject some fantasy into your sci-fi if that tickles your authorial fancy or paves the way for the thing you want to achieve as an author?
As for the second and third bits--those are literally the things I already called out as the limits of "roleplaying" and "game." They don't come from storytelling-
qua-storytelling.
Miss Marple, when she has all the suspects in the room and is about to announce whodunit, is not going to whip out a laser sword and announce, "Aliens did it! ATTACK!" even if the rules allow it, because that's a frelling stupid way to end an Agatha Christie mystery.
Sure, but there's two problems with this. First, you're only able to say this because there's a significant body of Agatha Christie mystery canon to draw upon. If she had chosen to do that with her
first mystery, this criticism would have no ground to stand on other than critiquing whether Christie had earned such an ending....but an author can always work harder
before publication to earn such things. Heck, even WITH such a canon, you can change the direction of a series if you like,
with effort.
Asimov's
Foundation novels start out as vignettes of sociological analysis on real and utterly vast populations (psychohistory), but pivot into far more speculative, high-adventure stories later ("mentalics," Gaia and the potential for "Galaxia," etc. and following Golan Trevize as he escapes death in various ways). Or consider
Dune, where the first book is focused on planetary ecology and noble houses etc., and then pivots into philosophical musings on the conflicting desires and behaviors of humanity. Ending
Dune with a quick summary of Leto II's Golden Path and how it saved humanity from extinction would've been a handwave of the highest order and very poorly received, but with two full doorstopper novels to tease the ideas out, it works perfectly well.
Second, we're talking about a pretty closed-door thing. You don't need to appeal to whomever-might-read, like a book author does. Really, you only need to appeal to
yourself and your DM; the other players are optional, though it is quite nice when you can appeal to them too. It's a hell of a lot easier to convince
one person that whipping out a laser sword and announcing, "Aliens did it! ATTACK!" is the correct thing to do, than it is to convince whomever-might-read. That's a pretty vast difference between the kind of post-publication storytelling that literary criticism addresses, and the pre-publication storytelling that is relevant for TTRPGs.
This is what I mean by "you can go anywhere you want." Unlike tactical decisions or extemporaneous roleplay, storytelling at the level of "what is the most interesting/satisfying narrative direction I could go" has no time horizon. You can build up to the story you want for as long as necessary. You can add elements gradually, introduce genre shifts by supporting
that the genre should shift. With tactical decisions, your behavior is limited by a fixed, discrete clock of turns and rounds. With roleplay decisions, your behavior is limited by a discrete, non-fixed clock of scenes and scenarios. But with storytelling? There is no time limit, you can build toward things for any amount of time you like.
What tactical decision-making allows you to hit pause, go off and earn more XP and treasure elsewhere as much as you like, then come back and apply that to that
specific turn? What roleplaying allows you to step out of the scene, experience as many entirely different scenarios as your heart desires, and then step right back into the scene you had left? With storytelling, you can set your end-goal story for tomorrow or next week or next year or next
decade for all you care, and you can stretch out the time between in-story "now" and in-story "after" with nearly absolute freedom (truly absolute if things like magic or sci-fi are in play, what with time travel and the like).
Well, there you go! There's a rule: "Don't be formulaic."
I could continue, but I think these are the constructive bits for the moment.
Except that I didn't say
all formulaic writing is bad. Because it's not. Disney's
Sleeping Beauty, for example, is one of the most utterly formulaic pieces of animated cinema ever made. It's also one of my favorite Disney movies. At the time, it was panned for being "sentimental" and even trite, but today it's understood to be a beautifully-animated ultra-classic love story. It checks all the boxes, has all the features, but because they're executed
well, it works.
Formulaic writing is often
risky, in a specific sense, because formulae are, of necessity, simple and straightforward. Just as, for example, composing a chiptune is artistically risky, because there is
nothing standing between the listener and the melody. You
have to have a melody worth listening to in order for it to be compelling, because kickass orchestral or choir sections can't carry any of the weight for you, nor can 1embellishments and finery dress it up. It becomes really
obvious if a formulaic story is bad, because you can see exactly where it goes wrong. But that doesn't mean formulaic works are axiomatically bad--because
nothing is axiomatically bad while you still have the ability to write more (and, as noted, this can include even such things as stark genre shifts
if you take the time to build up to them first.)
Greek tragedies follow an extremely rigid formula, for example. (Introduce hero of high stature; establish the hero's
hamartia; show how the
hamartia leads to the
peripeteia; feature the revelation of the change; conclude with the hero destroyed, often killed, as catharsis.) I don't hear people saying that
Oedipus Rex is bad due to following the Greek tragedy formula to a T. (Can you tell I just watched the OSP video on this subject? Hah!)