Who said they are? I was responding to a post that was saying that AW is intended to emulate or yield "cinematic fiction". And I was disagreeing with that claim.
You stepped into that discussion to put forth a particular notion of "cinematic fiction", that - for the reasons given in my post that you just quoted - I disagreed with.
You say this as if it's a bad thing that the rules of a game that is based around shared fiction reliably produce exciting fiction.
Whereas my response is much closer to Eero Tuovinen's:
he fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design, this is exactly the thing that was promised to me in 1992 in the MERP rulebook.
For MERP to deliver this, if played by the principles that its rulebook states, the GM has to decide to inject interesting stuff. The upshot becomes GM-driven play. Or else you can drift MERP to be more like BW, which is what I was did (with varying degrees of success) for 19 years.
