So, his character said a business existed that didn't actually exist and which the player had no expectation under the game rules would exist. His player didn't say that a fictional business, that hadn't previously been part of the game world, was real and his character was an employee or owner, nor was the GM forced by the player nor obligated through some rule of player authorial control to add the idea of said business to his setting.
The GM accepted that "The Balrog Times" was a plausible business within the game world. Because the expectation was that if the player came up with a sufficiently entertaining idea that they would do so.
The idea that the world is hardcoded rather than something that exists at the table between the group? That came later. All of you making things up you consider fun.
Just because some GM, even one of the first GMs, did something that seemed similar to a storytelling game element doesn't mean it was part of the rules at that point in RPG development.
What are rules? It was certainly part of the unwritten rules. Or do you think that only that which is in the text counts (in which case oD&D needs Chainmail for starters).
Naw, chocolate cake isn't a lime popsicle because chocolate cake has sugar and lime popsicles have sugar.
Indeed. But story elements
are sugar. A story is "an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment." (first definition on google).
Which of that doesn't hold? There's no account, or you don't roleplay for entertainment?
No one has said that two types of games cannot share any of the same or similar elements. The crux of this discussion is that player authorial control over setting was not an integral part of (trad?) RPGs but rather players affected the setting through their characters.
And this has absolutely
nothing to do with story.
I'd say you're talking about what I'd call "Entitled GM Games" - which are a subset of Trad RPGs. In an Entitled GM Game the GM has the sole right and responsibility to determine the setting and anything the players are permitted to know about the setting
must come through and be approved by the GM. The characters have no knowledge of the world they live in that allows them to act with confidence unless such has first been approved by the GM. They have no bounds of expertise that live anywhere except on their character sheet. They do not live in their worlds so much as they have been inserted there as near-blank slates, having fallen through from another world; their knowledge of the world they live in is starkly limited.
I won't get sidetracked into what constitutes LARPing, and regardless of the validity of your point regarding LARPing being a progenitor of RPGs, I should point out that neither LARPing nor wargaming require player authorial control over setting to be honored by a GM.
And in
Spirit of the Century the GM has explicit veto over Fate Points being spent to make declarations. The same applies in
Fate Core. In fact the only RPGs I'm aware of where the GM doesn't have a veto over such things are GMless. The difference is on expectation. Whether the players are expected to contribute and it is expected that the world and setting are shared or whether it's purely owned by the GM. Indeed that's a big part of why games that have GMs have them.
The argument here is whether we have Entitled GMing and that it's the GM's world and the GM's story to which the players are graciously permitted to contribute, or whether the game belongs to the table as a whole - and while the GM has the final authority it is expected that they use this sparingly and the setting comes from the combined contributions of all the people in the game.
