All of those are important to me. My group loves worldbuilding! But we also love character development and dramatic plots. (My longest-running Fate character changed every one of his aspects except his high concept, some of them multiple times. My current one has already changed two.)
I think so, yes. It sounds like you want to emulate the narrative and genre more or less, so things that support that work better for you. For me, I want to emulate a "real" world with fantasy elements, and things that make that world less real but aren't part of the fantasy aspects bother me. Setting is more important than plot and character to me, and worldbuildibg is my favorite part of gaming.
Plot and character are absolutely important. I just put setting on the top of the list.
To be fair, I do think that's a generally held position. The difference is more in where you put the player side incentives. I generally prefer games where the goal is to try and ensure everything goes right, and my choices and planning can lead to that as an outcome. Games that use narrative structures for pacing/resolution tend to suffer from the opposite problem, in my experience, where they insist things must go wrong, so as to be "interesting." I want to allocate resource, makes contingency plans, and ideally steamroll through obstacles through my skill....I also, of course, want to fail to do that and have to think reactively when it call comes crumbling down and goes bad, but that means the obstacles can't be structurally impossible to defeat that way, and that I can actually be rewarded with that kind of easy success when I earn it.
Huh. Fate, which is my go-to example, doesn't exactly force things to go wrong for the characters. It's more that bad die-rolls are inevitable in the long run, in which case one must either "succeed at a cost" or else take one's lumps. Of course, Compels can bring about bad situations, but in areas you signed up for, so to speak. (And reward you with precious Fate points!)
The mechanical underpinnings behind Fate and base design of the game is so alien to my way of thinking about TTRPGs that I have a hard time even seeing it as the same hobby sometimes.
I won't argue that playing D&D 1e and playing Fate feel very different! I was a little dubious of Fate myself before playing it. All I can say is, it WORKS! It works really, really well. It makes dramatic story beats just kind of happen, without major effort on anyone's part. (Though time taken in crafting good aspects is time well spent!)
Same thing, different trade dress. Honestly I think FATE is degenerate when you try and optimize it this way. A player doing that would be trying to provoke compels that are as inconsequential as possible, and/or basically lie about their character's intended gameplay, so that their aspects are tagged negatively in ways they don't care about.
Sorry, what? Who is trying to optimize it what way? Are you criticizing my play without knowing anything about it?
No, not at all, I'm saying that is structurally unsuited for the kind of play I'm talking about. "Degenerate" in that the incentives would lead to the game being unplayable or unpleasant of you treated it that way.
This is the point, that the structure of the game is to provoke dramatic situations and react to them, while my impulse would be to avoid them, or attempt to minimize their impact. It is a game calibrated to produce a specific kind of result that doesn't rely on all players striving to "win" in the way that so called "gamist" games so. There's a different bargain at the table and a different set of assumptions in the magical circle about behavior and decision making.
