Even with the shift towards more story-first systems and mechanics in recent years, there are still too many gamers that are stuck to their ideas of winning, losing, and playing spreadsheets against one another.
I agree.
This is only a problem when those gamers judge story-focused systems and content like they've come straight from the Devil's ass.
They have though.
People have a weird view of the relationship between GMs and players. I can only imagine this is caused by terrible experiences, but it doesn't change the fact that it results in some horrendous takes.
Mostly because good GMing practices are still an oral tradition that are typically disconnected from the game in question. And because half the people you see with these views have never actually played and only engage with the games secondhand. Moreso a DND problem than the hobby as a whole, but it affects other games too.
People that think that story-first systems make 'bad stories' are either bad at creating stories themselves, or they play with bad players. That's no fault of the system and it's wildly egotistical to think that it is.
I think it depends on the game. I for instance voraciously despise what PBTA/FITD games try to do and what they end up vomiting out.
Firstly because writing is already fun to me on its own merits, and I don't have any desire to gamify it. So the writers room aesthetic is just abrasive and really speaks to how those games hook their appeal into sounding really cool when they're kinda not.
And secondly because how they foster their gameplay loop does in fact make for pretty ridiculous stories if allowed to play out without intervention. Its a case of genre emulation taken so extreme it breaks the underlying logic for why those genres are constructed in the way they are.
In other words, constant injections of bad things if you don't roll high enough, even if theres still a success attached, is not actually emulating the genres these games try to touch. They essentially hand over the idea of stakes over to randomized rolls and it takes people stepping away from the game to reign it in, at which point the system evokes the dreaded question of "why do I need the game?"
And thats without getting into the fact that games need gameplay, and these games do not have a lot of it all that often, and those that do aren't much to chew on, impacting the longevity they can reasonably confer.
