Curious whether anyone in this discussion has ever run a campaign where players were given pre-generated characters. Not a one-shot. Not a convention game or a tournament game, but a campaign.
Back in the 80s we did this a number of times. A DM would create a bunch of characters that tied into the story and setting and the only player choice was a discussion of who would play which characters.
As a player I enjoyed these quite a bit. Trying to bring to life and role-play a pre-gen exercises different creative muscles.
My group and I have done this a couple different ways over the years, to varying degrees of success.
In one case I can think of, I crafted a whole slew of first level characters for the players to pick from. I made at least one for every class, and each had pre-existing connections to the setting. Very different from the way I approach things now, but the goal was to have characters who felt like a part of the world instead of the typical murder-hobos. This went over with mixed results. Some of the players quite liked it…they felt they had a lot to work with as far as motivations for their character and connections to the world. Two players disliked it. They felt like they were simply adopting a role in a story I’d already written. And although I think there was still plenty of decisions for them to make, and ways for them to go about things, I don’t blame them for feeling that way.
Another time, we collectively crafted a starting area and populated it with tons of potential PCs. Each player made a variety of characters. Each character had a place in the setting, and connections to other characters, and goals for what they wanted. We also each designed a few NPCs for the starting area, and then the excess PCs also became NPCs. We chose PCs randomly. The result was that everyone felt very invested in the starting location and the people there. The characters were all more fleshed out and well rounded than many NPCs tend to be. And the players were all satisfied with their PCs, although if anyone wasn’t, they had the option to replace them with one of the unselected characters if they wanted.
These two examples are a big part of what helped me get over my stance that “the GM builds the world”. While that approach can be perfectly satisfying, I found my group much more invested when they were more involved in the process. And I found myself much more invested. It was like a feedback loop…their interest fueled my own, which fueled theirs….and so on. It was one of our best campaigns of D&D, and pretty unanimously so.
I think the reason that there is some conflict in this thread is because many of us who want the players more involved in the world building used to not feel that way. Certainly the OP describes such an evolution. People seem a bit too focused on being offended by the word “tyranny” instead of absorbing the elaboration from the OP and subsequent posts.
I think that with that kind of shift in thinking, it’s hard not to think of it as growth or progress. So when you then discuss it with people who don’t agree with that…but who also don’t seem to have spent much time actually trying what you’re describing…it can seem a bit limiting. Not entirely fair, of course, but it can be hard to not feel that way.
