If you conclude that Czege, Edwards, Baker, Crane and crew "dont' actually like RPGs", I think you need to go back and re-read.
I suggest you take your own advice, given you're both projecting something I never said while simultaneously missing some important context.
As I've said to you before, you should ask questions if you don't know what someone means.
The fact that you can't see player-driven, protagonistic RPGing through any lens other than "bad DMs screwing over their OC characters" makes me think that your conception of RPGs not only centres, but is confined to, GM-driven stortyelling of the sort that became predominant in the mid-80s or thereabouts.
Case in point, this is a very shallow surface level interpretation of what I said that, frankly, just betrays the fact that you skipped my entire post and just skimmed the parts where I got critical of the forge.
And just for the sake of argument, because we are online and thats what we do after all, as I related in my post, player-driven gameplay is
fundamental to all games. Its what makes them games, and even the most barely interactive visual novel video games are fundamentally player driven.
There is no story without the players.
That simple truth is universal, and remains so even in my own system, where the only interaction required from the players to allow all kinds of stories to begin emerging from the gameworld is that simply play the game, thus allowing Time to advance and all of the mechanics to start kicking off of each other.
So in the descriptive phrase "player-driven protagonistic", the first half of it is revealed to be so broadly applicable as to be completely meaningless, and effectively serves the purpose of being a bespoke synonym for "game".
I'm sure you'll try to point out the term is in reference to the story being told (despite the fact that in other arguments you've vehemently denied that story telling is what you prefer to do), but even from that perspective, it only supports my original point. Those same bad DMs are also the ones who stopped running
sandboxes in the 90s and started trying to do Dragonlance in all but name.
The Sandbox is the original form for RPGs and every single one in existence runs at its best as a sandbox. The issues that arise from poorly designed Modules or GMs trying to shoehorn in a plot all, fundamentally, stem from the industry wide incapability to teach these games to their players. Which, I'll add, stems from something I've argued in the past, as the improv game thats fundamental to all RPGs is still taught from person to person, and few if any games ever try to touch on it, nevermind comprehensively and in a way that teaches people how best to do it.
Anyway, I've already addressed the other half of that phrase as complete hooey rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how game protagonists work, no doubt again only done out of desire for bespoke jargon to apply to a completely unrelated problem. That being the idea of characters not being satisfying to their players, which can come from all kinds of places mechanically, but in this context is pretty clearly rooted in a pre-conceived (re:
storytelling) notion that the character will or will not be X,Y, or Z and any deviation is a fault of game design or GM mismanagement, and not the competance of the Player and their willingness to embrace the game itself as an equal player in the improv game.
As a supporting thought, in video game land there's a definite trend among long-term "hardcore" gamers where eventually they have to learn to play a game on its own terms. Rather than booting up, say, Tears of the Kingdom and rushing all the best stuff and getting all the towers, what Tears itself wants you to do is to get lost in the world, particularly because it assumes you've played Breath of the Wild, and you will naturally be compelled to go visit the more iconic places of that game to see whats changed.
And you're rewarded when you do this. The slower intended pace of the game leads to far more of the games best content, and the environmental storytelling is incredible, and something you can only appreciate when you stop coming into the game with preconceived notions about what you, as Link, are going to do and be.
You can go to any video game with this philosophy, and it will be a much more enjoyable experience, even if the game itself is truly mid or even bad. Its almost like game designers had a vision and you can ruin it for yourself if you fight too hard against their grain.
Coming back to Tabletop Land this same advice doesn't just apply to Players, but to GMs too. After all, one of the biggest hurdles GMs have to deal with is learning to trust the dice, and their games always come out for the better once they do.
When one suggests that their character and their story as it was told wasn't satisfactory, I'm willing to bet its deeply rooted in simply not trusting the game itself, and the GM is simply the unfortunate middleman given for most games they facilitate the game being run at all.
Thats actually pretty core to why I appreciate Ironsworn, because it was designed from the ground up to be run without a GM, and so there's no actual way to lose sight of why a given character and their story didn't work out. And in those games in particular, you'd be missing out on a lot of the experience they have to offer if you stop trusting the game, and that doesn't change if a GM gets involved.
After all, system matters right? And the GM is a part of that, like it or not, and the system matters whether is Apocalypse World or DND5e. If you don't trust the system, you don't trust the game, and you're gonna have a bad time.
Which, is why my fundamental philosophy is to just stop faffing about with all this esoteric stuff and to
just play.
