Does this mean Torchbearer completely lacks simulation or narrative elements? No; the game—like many modern boardgames with their thematic art and fluff text—would be dead boring to most players if the veneer were stripped. But its priorities are clear.
This is the main point that I think needs to be really hammered home. No game will ever be 100% one thing or another. Well, no RPG anyway. You can certainly have games that are 100% gamist, but, I doubt anyone calls for Chess or Monopoly to be included in the umbrella of RPG's. Same with Sim games. No one is calling for Flight Simulators to be considered RPG's. Not even sure what a pure Nar game would even look like. Probably something akin to improv theater I suppose. Again, not really what people mean by RPG's.
So, pointing to how this or that game has elements of other parts of GNS doesn't prove or disprove anything. Of COURSE they do. But, the question is always about intent and priorities, not about saying, "Well, this game is 25% Gamist, 70% Sim and 5% Nar. That's a pointless exercise.
Well, because it doesn’t do that. The DM is still the final authority. Which is why this is buried in a paragraph in the DMG, not the PHB. It’s an optional thing the DM can do, if they want. So, yeah. People blow it way out of proportion. Is it a big deal that there’s advice to let players author quests? Sure, I guess. But who hasn’t been doing that since AD&D?
No player before 4E said to the DM that they wanted to do something the DM hadn’t already planned for? Come on.
It was never really a big part of the game though and absolutely something that was 100% condemned by lots and lots of people. The idea that the Player could not only ask for something, but also EXPECT that that request would be honored is more than enough to send various people into fits. The whole "entitled player" schtick of the past twenty years is based entirely around the idea that players must never expect that their requests be accepted. They might be, they might not be, but, it's 100% up to the DM.
Heck, look at the absolute freak out you see when someone has the temerity to suggest that DM's allow various races into their setting, just because a player wants to play one.
Mostly correct. The history of the setting is a story, after a fashion.
A dungeon isn’t a story. An adventure isn’t a story. A town isn’t a story. They’re situations that can lead to stories or locations where stories can happen. They are setups…without punchlines. Beginnings…with neither middle nor end. It’s not a story until the PCs engage with it somehow.
There’s an evil princess over there threatening a dragon…
That isn’t a story. That’s a situation.
And that's the definition of pedantic. You have a setting, you have a plot and you have characters. THAT'S a story. Granted, you don't know how the story will end until you play through it, but, you absolutely have everything you need to tell a story. At absolutely no point do any of the players have any input into the plot or the setting. They barely have input into the characters.
It's absolutely not Story Now.
There’s an evil princess over there threatening a dragon…so the heroes went over there, faced many hardships, and eventually stopped her.
That’s a story.
The history of the setting, if it has one, is a story.
You are insisting on a definition of story that is not the one being used in this thread or even in common usage. A story does not need to be completed to be a story. But, in the interests of clarity, story simply means Plot, Character and Setting. If you have all of these being preconceived by the DM, then you are either playing a gamist or a simulationist game. At no point is that anywhere near Narativist.