It's more that I feel some GMs not only prioritize narrative and/or challenge over setting logic and fidelity all or nearly all the time, they also seem to feel that not doing so is some kind of fault.
I care about those things too. I just always want the world to "make sense" as my wife says, and be internally consistent
Again, who do you think doesn't?
I mean, I know of examples of D&D play that don't worry about an internally consistent world: dungeon modules like Castle Amber, White Plume Mountain, Tomb of Horrors etc. The real "funhouse"/"deathtrap" ones. But no one in this thread is talking about that sort of RPGing, as best I can tell, not even you the OSR enthusiast.
But even the G-modules and D-modules set out to present a broadly naturalistic world, albeit one full of giants' kingdoms and dark faeries underground pleasure-palaces.
When it comes to what you call "fault", which to me seems closer to a difference of aesthetic opinion, I think you're looking in the wrong place. (At least if the "some GMs" are the ones you interact with on ENW. Maybe you're referring to other conversations that I'm not party to.) In this thread, for instance,
@hawkeyefan has made the point that (i) the GM builds the setting, presumably along lines that they think are interesting/worthwhile, and hence (ii) extrapolation of events and situations from setting is apt to put a lot of focus on things that have been chosen by the GM because they express what the GM is interested in. This is not a diagnosis of
fault; but is a discussion about whose priorities are likely to be foregrounded in heavily setting-driven play.
But the fact that the play is setting-driven (ie that a lot of what happens is decided by the GM extrapolating from their setting authorship) is different from the setting having an internal logic/consistency. My Prince Valiant play, for instance, is not setting-driven at all - the setting (of a romanticised dark ages/early-mediaeval Europe, North Africa and West Asia) is mere backdrop. But that doesn't stop the setting from being logical, nor does that mean that events lack setting fidelity.
IMO mechanics should focus on modeling things and events in that world in a logically consistent way. Ideally for me, that's pretty much all they would focus on, modeling the fiction of what happens in the world with which the PCs interact.
And this is quite different from saying
the setting should be consistent/logical. It's a preference for various techniques of scene-framing and resolution. And as always when you post this, I wonder why you are trying to do this with D&D. I mean, I know your answer is because that's what your players want: but if you're compromising on your own goals, I don't know why you seem to keep insisting that D&D is a game that can achieve those goals.
For my part, I had a similar preference to yours for a while, but 19 years intense experience of RM play persuaded me that those techniques aren't all they're cracked up to be.
EDIT: This post, although it contains a few rhetorical flourishes, basically sums up my own experience:
I think you have a point here. What ends up happening though is, you take D&D, a game fundamentally designed to handle the sorts of fairly stereotyped situations constituting dungeon play, and you try to extrapolate it out to any situation. It doesn't hold up well at all.
Around the mid-80s people had grown frustrated. Procedure focused games suck a lot of the life out of character and story. Everything is focused on time, space, gear, etc. Those are interesting up to a point, but if they are the primary focus, then characters and personalities and narrative remain as secondary elements. The focus has always to be on physical space and such primarily. And these games must necessarily grind along on detail.
And when this sort of game 'breaks free' of those constraints? It becomes incredibly hard to make it work. This is exactly why such games always fall down in high level play. When the characters have exceeded all mundane constraints, there's nothing left, the game is out of gas and you have basically pure Calvin Ball. Yes, it will now focus on narrative and character, but without any elements of being a game anymore.
We wanted heroic stories of derring-do, or epic struggle, tragedy and triumph. What we got was 10' squares, counting gold pieces, and deciding if Alarm would work here. Processes that failed entirely when moved out of the dungeon.
