No, not at all. I’m surprised that’s what you took away from my post.
My point is that the world doesn’t actually react, the GM makes decisions or uses procedures to depict how the world reacts. Which may seem silly to point out, but I’ve noticed a tendency for some folks to attribute such things to the world.
As you say above, which I bolded, the GMs make their worlds react.
A GM avoiding ownership of that decision making is what I was calling BS.
Imagine a land filled with warring nations, until some powerful figure unites them into a single empire with them as the Emperor.
Now imagine a group of PCs who, in the midst of doing PC things, kill the Emperor. And their spouse. And their heirs. And their goatee'd vizier, quite possibly only because he has a goatee. They also make a big announcement to the public, so the public knows what a good deed the PCs just did. (Look: PCs are not always that bright.) They adopt his dog, though--they're not
monsters--and name it Snuffles Throat-Ripper. They may or may not try to actually take over the throne, but it's just as likely they just go on to the next adventure.
Realistically, the land should quickly go back into warring nations, right? At the very least, some of them will want to take advantage of the power vacuum the PCs left behind (or the PC's own lack of experience in leading an empire, should they try it). There will be ripple effects in adjoining nations. People that the empire had oppressed may rise up in the chaos and try to take back what is theirs, while people who had prospered because of the empire's protection and patronage are likely to suffer without it. Etc., etc. Even if the emperor and their family got raised from the dead, there would be at least
some changes.
This, IME, is what people generally mean about the world reacting on its own without the GM. They aren't claiming the world actually exists outside of their heads or on paper. Nobody actually believes that their fantasy world is real, unless, as I said, they have a very specific type of mental illness. Nobody is
truly trying to say "I have no control over my world."
(Except for those occasional creeps who use excuse in order to include noxious elements like "it's realistic that women are second-class citizens who get raped a lot!")
What the GMs
are saying is that there will be at least a somewhat logical chain of events that should naturally happen after a major event happens, and that not following that chain of events wouldn't work. Like, in the empire in the aforementioned bout of murderhoboism. If the GM decided that, afterwards, the entire empire
immediately becomes a corpocracy simply because the GM thinks that would be cool to turn it into a fantasy cyberpunk thing and magically hack crystal balls, at the
very least skepitcal eyebrows would be pointed in that GM's direction, because that doesn't follow from the previous events.