I'm not sure this is going to be useful, but I'll try once more. It's just not a good sign that you're editing my posts so thoroughly -- this indicated someone more interested in winning than discussing.
The only definition you gave is this one: "And note that curate means to act as a curator, which means you have the duty to preserve and care for a thing." This is a circular definition that gives me no concrete details, and I still don't know what the "thing" I'm supposed to be curating is (though my best guess is "story", since that is what a DM is supposed to be curating according to you). It appears to be some term of art, but I have presumed that since you have defined it by referencing itself that whatever the term of art is it can't be too divorced from its dictionary definition.
Backing up from your definition I see only a bunch of axiomatic assertions as evidence which I disagree with, both that they are evidence of the thing and that they are factual.
Right, so I did define it, you just disagreed with that definition. This isn't a good sign for moving forward, as the definition I provided shouldn't be that controversial. I think what's happened here is that you've formed an opinion that I'm attacking 5e (or D&D in general) and not trying to state a true thing about how the game plays. A game, I remind you, that I run a weekly game for my close friends, so clearly not a system I dislike or have a problem with. However, actually understanding how the game works is critical to being able to avoid any potholes. Your choice to be belligerent rather than attempt to grasp what I am trying to convey is both par for the course and not a problem with me.
For example, even if I agreed with you that fiat rulings were an especial part of D&D (and I don't), it would not perforce follow that these decisions were being made for the purpose of curating a story.
Fiat rulings are not especial to D&D. This is a trivial statement. Fiat ruling are an inescapable part of D&D, though. It's baked directly into "rule zero" and into the methods of play in every edition.
Even if I agreed "DM decides" exists as a trump mechanism, I would not need to agree that D&D especially relies on it compared to any other game or that the heavy hand of the DM was the normal way to adjudicate D&D.
D&D is does not especially rely on "DM decides" as a resolution mechanic. It is, however, an inescapable part of D&D.
Okay, now that we've dispensed with the easy strawmen that I was saying that D&D uniquely has these qualities, can we discuss how D&D relies on these qualities as the baseline assumption of how the game works, and how this differs from other game that do not?
You say, "When I run D&D, there has to be some form of story already built..." you are asserting only something about how you play. I have seen D&D run on many occasions with very limited preparation. I don't necessarily agree with limited prep for any game system but it is a valid style of play and D&D can and often is ran that way. Moreover, even to the extent that D&D does encourage heavy preparation, it doesn't necessarily follow that that preparation constitutes a "story" much less that that story is actively curated in play in order to protect it.
Okay, this is a good point to be explicit by what I mean with "DM curation of story" and even "story." Story, in this case, encompasses both the backstory of play (secret and open), and the outcomes of play. The latter is an example of bad curation -- where the DM forces outcomes onto play. The former, the curation of what I'll go with calling the backstory, is absolutely critical to D&D play. The DM sets up all of the non-PC story elements and controls them and determines what's true about them. D&D play may involve player freedom to find out "how" that backstory will be navigated, but the players have no control as to "what" that backstory is. In effect, D&D is largely about navigating the DM's backstory and resolving whatever issues the DM placed there.
Curation of story does not mean the DM railroads outcomes. It means that the DM's job is to provide the backstory for everything to the players so that they can navigate it in play. The dungeon is backstory. The NPCs are backstory. If you ever say that it's the DM's job to figure out if this guard is bribeable based on what the DM's story for that guard is, you're discussing the DM's curation of story. Curation is important to D&D play because it's what provides the consistent (hopefully) backstory for the players to navigate. It's the challenges the players face. All of this is DM curation of story.
And, to hopefully halt the strawman, this kind of play is not unique to D&D. It's just required of it.
And, this contrasts with other styles of play, like Story Now, where there is no curation of play. Everything is generated in play, and the players have a great deal of authority over both the what and how of the story. And, there is no secret backstory, no single secret keeper as you put it earlier. This is a very different style of play, and requires a different way of thinking about how the game works than D&D.
You then say, "This is further reinforced by the fact that the mechanics of D&D do not do effective reinforcement of complications -- there's no built in play spiral." This may be true, but this is an argument that D&D doesn't have curation rather than one that shows that it does. Any sort of built in reinforcement of complications or built in play spiral indicates a system built to protect a certain sort of story. The absence of one is not proof that the system requires curation, but on the contrary evidence that the system doesn't consider curation an important thing for the GM to be doing.
No, it's a strong argument that D&D requires curation of story because the mechanics of play do not have a way of generating continuing story. The story must be continually provided by the DM. Take a dungeon as an example -- the DM has it drawn out, and stocked with traps, monsters, and treasure. If you're in room 3, the DM provides the story of the passages out, the sounds, the smells, etc. Moving to room 4 results in the DM providing the prepared backstory for that room -- or making it up on the fly, the real crux here is that the DM is the sole provider of the story that the players navigate. This form of DM provided story is the curation I'm discussing. The lack of mechanics that provide new story via outcomes is part and parcel of why D&D requires such curation.
But probably the most ludicrous evidence you offer is the claim: "So, the DM has to curate the story in some manner to ensure that prep is useful and that play proceeds in useful directions."
What? I mean, how in the heck have I been playing D&D for 30 plus years and been doing it so wrong, or at least so wrong by your standards. Sometimes I wish that as a DM I was validated in curating the story so that my preparation is useful as you imagine that it is. I don't know how many times I've done 10 or 20 hours of preparation, only for the player's to jump left rather than right or go off on some highly unexpected direction and then I'm spending the whole session improvising as my carefully crafted preparations become more and more irrelevant. I've built dungeons the PC's decide not to enter, and prepared a dungeon by the three clue rule in a mystery that the PC's decided to just burn down rather than investigate. I've had side plots neglected or abandoned more times than I can count, and PC's latch on to plots and plans of their own devising that I'd never anticipated. But so what? That's normal as I imagine many GMs will attest. That's expected. That's the way things normally work, or perhaps even should work because that means the players have agency. How many times have I said, "If you want to run a Sandbox, you have to prepare more material than you will actually use."? And even then, be prepared to improvise content on the fly because you'll never have enough content - the player's will always find the edges of the map and always go into the blank areas. I wish that I could guarantee that play always goes in useful directions, but at some point either you have to let the PC's fail or else they have no agency, so you let them hit dead ends, die, and generally ruin whatever story they had been producing with actions that no novelist would ever validate as useful to a story.
Again, you have a very narrow view and mistake the intent. You do provide the backstory. You do hold the secrets, and release them to the players when you deem it's appropriate to do so. You curate the story, making sure that it progresses and is supported and is fun. You do this by listening to your players, which is commendable, and providing a story that they enjoy, and that challenges both the player and the character, which is again commendable. But, make no mistake, you do this by curating the story so that it does this. You pick the monsters, the NPCs, the behind the scene plots that the players then navigate. Even in a sandbox campaign, you've at least sketched in the story so that the players can freely choose how they navigate it.
And, again, I RUN 5E weekly. My game has very few house rules that all deal with downtime and factions (it's a Sigil game). I absolutely curate my story. I curate it by listening to my players, picking up on their cues, and then building interesting arcs on those cues. Right now, they're running through a modified Forge of Fury with gnolls instead of goblins and an aboleth in the lake. I stocked that dungeon, I have secrets to expound, I placed the dessicated gnoll turned skum in a holding cell on the first level to foreshadow the aboleth. Etc, etc. All of these things are me curating the story. What will the outcome be? Well, hopefully the party will succeed in acquiring the item they're here for, but I don't know how they'll do it or what tactics they'll use or if they'll decided it's not worth it and go off into one of the other things they've shown interest in. But, regardless of how they navigate the story beats I've laid down, I will be there curating that story because there's no other mechanism for generating story in 5e.
Contrast this to my Blades in the Dark game, run with the same group. I do no prep. I don't think about play until we're playing. Everything generates in play, as part of the play cycle, or because a player has proposed it. Having run both, the difference in how they play is very apparent. I happen to enjoy both games.
Whatever I'm curating in this manner it isn't "story", nor does it in any fashion look like the sort of thing that you say is baked in. It might be curating something (a setting?), although I must be a terrible curator considering the havoc I let the player's wreck on it. No museum curator would look at the wreckage they leave behind and hire me to protect his treasures, but that is because my treasures are not a story or even a setting.
Well, cool. You're almost where I trying to go. Story isn't necessarily outcome, it's all the pieces necessary for that outcome. LotR isn't just a little person throws something into some lava. It's depth is all of the backstory, the world, the characters. This is all also story, and this is the part of the game the DM must curate in D&D. It's the DM's job to create it, to care for it, to present it in intriguing ways. What the players do with it isn't part of that curation.
Like the curator of an art exhibit, you have to put in a lot of work to make sure the art is displayed in the best way possible, but it's not your responsibility to dictate how the attendees wander through the exhibits (or, maybe it is, and we have a rational discussion of DM force, although I don't see that one going well given how this rather non-inflammatory curation point has been received).
But regardless, all your assertions about the absolute and objective nature of D&D, are just so many claims about how you see D&D, or how you run D&D. And even with respect to the rules of D&D, it's particularly tricky to say that anything is heavily baked in because D&D typically does not hard define it's own processes of play, and even if 4e and 5e tend to be more 'modern' with respect to defining those processes of play, at the same time (and this is especially true of 5e) the game intends to be accommodating to a very wide number of different styles.
This is a very myopic view. D&D works if you play it in the styles that D&D enables. That is a number of different styles, but they all have the DM as the creator of backstory, curator of story, and deciderer in chief of the game. So, yes, there are variations within the overarching play that D&D defines, but it's still select set of possible styles. This is well and good, though -- if you think a given system should be universal, odds are you've managed to fool yourself or you're just not terribly aware of what else is out there.
I will say, however, that many of your posts recently have clearly indicated that you do not well understand how narrative-style games, like FATE or PbtA, or games that use Story Now actually function. Given that you've clearly said that your experience with FATE is watching a game (or two?) and reading the rules, I don't find this odd. Especially since you seem very deeply mired in a myopic viewpoint that the style of play that suits D&D games is broad. It's popular, but that doesn't mean it's very broad. And as you've displayed no experience actually playing styles of game that differ strongly from D&D, you shouldn't hold forth with such certainty about how broadly accepting of different styles of play D&D is. I mean, this is a hugely popular board, one of many, that focuses on the discussion of playing D&D. In this, it hosts all editions and even Pathfinder games, and yet we all seem to pretty much grok how the game plays even if we have differences of opinion on specific points of play. That's not a sign of a broad set of playstyles.
AND THAT'S OKAY. D&D doesn't have to be everything, it just needs to be D&D and do that well. Which it does, to the tune of being the most popular RPG by a huge margin. None of what I've said above is meant to be negative of D&D. It is intended to be a critical analysis of how the D&D genre of games work, what they prioritize, and how they function at a core level. D&D is about the players navigating the DM's story notes. That what the mechanics support, that's what many official play products are (adventures, hello?), that's what we largely discuss around here, and that's what D&D does well. Arguing that this isn't so is denying the nose on your face.
