I wonder if we both read the same OP, or did you have like a long private talk about this that your responding too?
Perhaps you missed the below passage? It's largely what I took to be the point of the OP.
Instead of the setting as the source of situation, look to the character as the source of situation. So responsibility for prep shifts from the GM (with their setting) to the player (with their character). The player needs to set up a character that has hooks - backstory, goals and commitments, relationships, etc - from which situation naturally flows. This player prep (which need not be particularly onerous) provides the content and context that the GM draws on to frame situations and consequences. On this approach, setting - rather than being primary - becomes a secondary or tertiary concern: it is a byproduct of the creation of characters and the framing of them into situations.
And maybe you missed this bit at the end where
@pemerton specifically tagged me, in reference to the thing I then posted about?
(I'm also tagging @hawkeyefan because of some things he posted recently about playing in The Temple of Elemental Evil.)
So, biased though I may be, I think my post was pretty relevant.
So for a traditional game, the GM takes hours/days/a long time to make a game setting. It's a LOT of work. A player, on the other hand, makes the tiny amount you posted above. Maybe ten minutes of work for a good player. And that's it.
No. For a traditional game, the GM
may take hours/days/a long time to create the setting. It
may be a lot of work. But that's a choice. It does not have to take that much work. I used to prep very much along the lines of what you're describing, but over time I have moved away from that. My trad games have significantly less prep than they used to.
It's a choice to put that level of work into the game. I wouldn't like to hold my choice over others' heads. I don't think it's particularly healthy for a group of people to have that level of imbalance in their time spent on a leisure activity. Not unless the GM really loves to do all that prep and isn't going to shame others for not doing as much. Nor do I expect for players to put in a ton of prep ahead of time. I want them to be engaged in play while we're playing... what they do before we play, I really don't care about.
But on TOP of that, the player casually comes to the game with their paragraph or two and say "here GM, MORE work for you as I want you to add ALL of this to the setting". Then the player just sits down ready to play.
Well, I don't see how a couple paragraphs would be all that difficult to handle, but even still... there's a way to avoid this. That's to make the characters and the setting together. Don't make all these decisions in a vacuum, either as player or GM.
Collaboration... work on all this stuff together. Build the world and the characters as a group. Then everyone has a say about the setting, and all the characters fit naturally into it.
It's the classic group project, the GM does 99.99% of the work, the player maybe does .00001% and then the player wants full shared credit for the "shared setting".
That's not the way it works at my table when I GM, even when I run trad games like D&D. Other games do a lot more to make this possible. Plus, I don't really care about credit.
So, the OP is talking about taking all that work away from the GM. Having the players do the TON of work. But that is not the example your giving?
No, that's not what the OP advocated for. See the section I quoted above.
Yes, he said to shift some of the effort from the GM to the players. But he also pointed out how it need not be onerous.
For the Blades in the Dark character I shared above, I did pretty much the minimum required for character creation, and the GM took those decisions and used them heavily in play. Those things then triggered other events in the fiction, and had ripple effects. The game was very much about the characters involved. The GM didn't do any more prep for the game than being familiar with the game, and the setting, and then looking at the decisions we made as players.
I guess you could provide an example of this no prep game type?
In recent threads, I have offered several. So have others. The ones I've mentioned most are Blades in the Dark, Spire: The City Must Fall, and Stonetop, which is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, meaning derived from Apocalypse World. That game, Apocalypse World, is a major work in character-driven play, though there are other games that did so which predate it. But it did so in a clear and intentional manner, and it spawned a whole school of game design.
When these games get mentioned, you typically just say "I don't know that game" and then go back to your assertions that "GMs must do X amount of prep" and "players will barely ever bring anything to the table" and so on. But we've been telling you that, while that may be true for the way you play, it is not a requirement for all play.