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If you mean it as something like "information required for the story to hold together"—the background which makes the story's character-beats and reveals land with their full impact, and such—then I agree that authors shouldn't do that. If you write a novel targeted at mass audiences who can't be trusted to have spent the past five years reading your obscure worldbuilding blog, and then the novel's central mystery depends on information only established in the blog and not in the novel, you've made a mistake and your story will be worse-off for it.

But if you mean it as something more like "information fans might be curious about"—anything that someone might want to put on a wiki or reference in a fanfic or such, regardless of more immediate narrative relevance to the story you're telling—then I think doing that is in fact pretty routinely fine. Pacing is important; exposition isn't free; a storyteller shouldn't be forced to shoehorn their worldbuilding bible into their adventure story in places where the worldbuilding details aren't actually important to the adventure, because the more they do so the less it's going to be an adventure story and the more it's going to be a worldbuilding bible, and adventure stories are valuable in their own right, not just as imperfect grasps towards worldbuilding bibles.

It feels like often the narrative is one of clinging to a piece of driftwood because the alternative is drowning, with no emphasis on eudaimonia except in the most arid abstract. I get the feeling that there is a running thread beneath the philosophy which says "yes, life on earth is a shithole right now. But ☝️ one day it might improve and be tolerable, so hold fast to your existence because if you die it's just nothing forever."

There's been discourse lately about how modern D&D's norms-of-play put too much of the burden of running the game on the GM, making GMing substantially more effort-intensive than playing as a non-GM. This seems correct, and is a major factor in why I haven't GMed a TTRPG session in mode than a decade-and-a-half.

An obvious question to ask, looking at this discourse as an aspiring TTRPG developer, is: okay, so how can I make the system I'm developing do better in this regard?

There are lots of answers. One which I haven't seen explicitly discussed much, though, is: make it easy for GMing a game to work like leading a philosophy-conference-session.

Back when I was in college, I sometimes needed to lead conference-sessions for my philosophy classes. The trick to it was that philosophy students are a talkative and argumentative bunch. Leading a conference-session didn't require me to have any kind of comprehensive plan for how to fill the session's time; it just required me to set the stage with "here's our broad topic-area to discuss today and here are some specific subtopics within this topic-area you might find interesting", trust that they'd start asking nitpicky questions and/or arguing with one another about at least one of those subtopics, and then just sit back and let the conversation proceed, occasionally lightly stepping in to prevent the converstion from getting stuck or getting derailed into non-philosophy topics but otherwise barely needing to do anything at all.

By a similar token, then: one way to lighten the load of GMing a game is to design it so that the GM's main jobs are "do initial scene-setting" and "nudge to unstick things if they're otherwise getting stuck", while allowing and expecting for non-GM players to carry and drive the main bulk of a session, the game-mechanical affordances available to them being sufficient to determine most of the direction of events without active GM intervention.

Noterook is a social platform where your posts live on your device, not on a server. You have a Book - you write in it, and when you find something you love on someone else's Book, you staple it into yours. That's how things spread: not by algorithm, but by people actively choosing to keep something. If a thousand people staple a post, it exists in a thousand places. No single point of failure, no one entity controlling it.

The server is a phonebook, not a filing cabinet. It knows your username, your avatar, and that's about it. Your content is stored locally, cryptographically signed so nobody can forge or tamper with it, and cached on the server only as an opaque blob it can't read. When you go offline, you choose how long that cache sticks around - anywhere from zero seconds to thirty days. If the server gets subpoenaed or hacked, there's nothing useful to take.

It's built for people whose posts could be used against them - queer folks in hostile places, artists, writers, kink communities, anyone who's watched a platform promise safety and then sell them out. No engagement metrics, no algorithmic feed, no ads (user self-service ads for shilling your own commissions nonwithstanding, at a later date). You own your copies. Export your data whenever you want. The architecture is the policy: if the server doesn't have your stuff, nobody can take it from you.

It's like tumblr but if it was made by someone that doesn't hate you and has no desire to add features for the sake of adding features. I'm going to finish the site and then I will let it live in maintenance mode forever occasionally doing security updates. If I ever decide that I no longer want to do Noterook, I will open source it for the community to take over.

https://noterook.net

I don't have it. To be clear. And I say this as someone who cares about prose style and prose quality a lot, and who is extremely fond of writers with "flowery" styles like (e.g.) Lovecraft.

Examples of favorite prose-stylists of mine include Eliezer Yudkowsky, Groon the Walker, Jenna Moran, and (in translation) Nasu Kinoko. People have, on multiple occasions, expressed surprise at me about these, particularly about Eliezer and Groon. And, for a while, I was just kind of surprised-at-their-surprise without having much sense of where the gap was.

Nasu's (relatively recent) entry onto the list strikes me as important evidence regarding what's going on, underlyingly. I'm not yet nearly good enough at Japanese to read his works except in translation; but I've pretty consistently enjoyed his prose in translation—across a variety of translations by different translators—and consistently not had similar senses of enjoyment towards most other Japanese authors' translated prose. Which suggests that my enjoyment of his prose is specific to his prose—not just a general taste for prose translated from Japanese—but that it's centered on relatively high-level features of his prose—sentences and paragraphs, rather than individual words—such that it persists across a wide range of different possible translation-decisions.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

Harry was looking at a large dust ball with eyes and feet when the assassin swept into the room. That was the first thought that crossed Harry's mind when he saw Professor Severus Snape. There was something quiet and deadly about the way the man stalked between the children's desks. His robes were unkempt, his hair spotted and greasy. There was something about him that seemed reminiscent of Lucius, although the two of them looked nothing remotely alike, and you got the impression that where Lucius would kill you with flawless elegance, this man would simply kill you.

Establishes an evocative image of Snape's aesthetic, both visually and behaviorally. Also the contrast drawn between "kill you with flawless elegance" and "kill you" is a neat bit of play with descriptive negative space, fun in its own right in addition to its effect in contributing to the aforementioned image.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Project Lawful:

Are the six Malik suspicious?  How could they not be?  But the messenger does not bid them follow on the spot, only assemble in a meeting-place they know but have not visited, a small intimate pavilion whose price for one night's revelry is famously a thousand platinum coins.  Even in the City of Brass where Efreet and Malik do vie to show their pride and wealth, it is a significant expense.  With twenty such nights you could buy a Wish-diamond, even at its fair price in Brass from one Efreeti to another. If it's a trick or a trap, it's an expensive-enough one that it would be dishonorable not to spring it, to leave their enemy forlorn at the altar after such grandiose preparation that honors them by this expense.

Effective use of unusual register, with 'bid them' and 'do vie' and so forth, to lend a sense of grandiosity to its description. The "forlorn at the altar" description gestures at interesting cultural norms regarding how emnity is viewed, synergizing well with the broader paragraph's indication of how enmity is conducted in the relevant culture.

Groon the Walker, Taylor Hebert, Harem Protagonist:

Faerie and I walked unmolested for a time, sun now well-risen above the horizon, until we came to the Boardwalk, and passed it, heading towards the beach. It was a section of beach by the Boardwalk, and therefore not covered in trash like some others.

The inference from "by the Boardwalk" to "therefore not covered in trash" is a nice little punch of implicit worldbuilding, relayed concisely-and-impactfully.

Groon the Walker, The Erogamer:

You dismiss the pink-violet text, and turn right at the red light on the next street corner. There's no walk sign so you don't try to jaywalk to the other side of the street, even though it's a major street that you need to cross eventually to get home. There's no cars audible, but there could be a black-painted electric vehicle with no headlights zipping quietly along, if you try to cross against the light. You could be hit by something you never saw coming. You'll need to cross this street sooner or later, but not right now. For now you're just walking down this side of the street to the next intersection, where if the next cross-light still looks red, you'll need to make this choice again. And again. Again and again until you take the risk of jaywalking or you see a light that looks green. You could also press the pedestrian walk button that turns the cross-light green. Just reach out and flick your finger against the button. But you know you're not going to do that. That seems like a much worse idea than just staying on this side of the street for another dozen blocks. Okay, this part of the metaphor doesn't map well onto raising your stats. And then on a sudden impulse you halt in the middle of the sidewalk, look both ways for cars, and quickly skip over the street to the other side. It feels just like you thought it would. Making a big deal out of crossing the street turned it into a psychological burden. Skipping to the other side felt nice because you didn't have to worry about it anymore. On the other hand, you did not actually get run over by a black-painted electric car. This is a key fact about why you felt better afterward. If you'd been run over by a car just then, you'd probably have taken a lot of Lyfts going forwards and maybe ended up with a permanent fear of street-crossings.

Neat mapping of the narrator's immediate experiences onto her broader-and-more-abstract worries about the situation she's in. Simultaneously helps advance the plot along, via the narrator thinking through the question of how she should interact with certain plot-events, and characterizes the narrator via the specifics of the metaphor she's thinking it through with and the ways in which she interacts with that metaphor. Plus more micro-scale enjoyable writing around e.g. the repetition-to-effective-rhetorical-effect of "again" in the quote's second paragraph.

Jenna Moran, Glitch: A Story of the Not:

To miracle at something you must be able to identify it. Uniquely. You cannot miracle at the Smothers Brother. Or the Olsen Twin. You cannot miracle at the moon of Pluto. You cannot even miracle at the wall. You must know which wall you mean. At least in your inner heart. It is fine to skirt this rule. It is fine to blast “whatever is over there.” It is fine to dig out “any information that I can find.” It is fine to throw a miracle at the first moon of Pluto that you see. But “the Smothers Brother” … that is ambiguous. Ambiguity is not correct.

Delightful nonstandard-but-nonetheless-clear use of 'miracle' as a verb. Similarly-delightful choices of examples, 'the Smothers Brother' and so forth, which are effective at sounding obviously-incorrect-when-phrased-that-way in an amusing-as-opposed-to-merely-blandly-demonstrative way. In general, very characterful conveyance of expository text, without this characterfulness compromising the text's clarity-of-meaning.

Jenna Moran, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine:

If you’re being overwhelmed by a power of the Bleak Academy, you can pivot from death to a defining moment by spelling out what you believe in. Give a dramatic monologue that says what you’re gambling on in the face of death, what you’re putting your faith, love, or trust in—and then take a risk in the name of that belief. Or as much as a risk as you can, anyway—you might not have anything left to lose! In an epic fantasy, or an adventure fantasy, or any game where the players and the HG find your monologue cool enough to allow this, you can turn a dramatic monologue like that into: - a Science, Faith, and Sorcery Action - a Decisive Action or - a possible resolution to a blue Issue …and then the HG has to stop and think about what you’ve done. They can’t just go with their first reaction, whether that’s “that can’t possibly stop this attack” or “yay, you win.” They have to take a moment to let your monologue sink in to their consciousness in peace. Then they decide. And look. Sometimes they’ll decide against you, you know? This won’t always save you. Sometimes it’ll even doom you. Sometimes it’ll even take away whatever little other chances you might have had. That’s what it means that you’re gambling. That’s what it means that even faith and love and trust, even solid scientific conjecture, and certainly sorcery are risks. But it could save you. And if the HG decides that yeah, this saves you, that overrides all the rest of the rules on what beats what.

Effective conveyance of the direness of the sorts of situations the rule is meant to apply in, via the "you might not have anything left to lose" line and the "whatever little other chances you might have had" line. Effective-and-concise capture of a certain sort of standard fiction-scene, in the prior paragraph's description of the monologue-and-then-take-a-risk formula. Good use of register to make the text feel more casual-and-cozy than one would typically expect this sort of expository text to be, with the "you know?" and the "yeah" and so forth. Nice rhetorical styling with the repetition of "that's what it means" in the paragraphs near the end, and more broadly with the use of many short paragraphs in that section to encourage dwelling a bit more on each paragraph's associated thought than I expect I'd do if they were refactored into being merely sentences within a broader paragraph.

Nasu Kinoko, Fate/stay night (Mirror Moon translation):

I'm not too sure what we talked about after that. We talked about meaningless things: What she likes to eat, what she doesn't like to eat, how she likes birds and hates cats, how she likes snow and hates the cold, how she wants to play but can't, and how she doesn't like her maids but wants to like them. Ilya looks happy just to be talking. She is sitting on the bench, eating the taiyaki, and swinging her legs. …She looks like a child waiting for her father's return.

The third paragraph does some nice invocation of internal tensions in Illya's tastes to quickly build up a sense of three-dimensional characterization around her, while the specific examples of what she brings up help emphasize specific details of her character (living in a rich-but-restrictive household environment in a cold region). The surrounding paragraphs about her happiness with meaningless-and-unmemorable-to-the-narrator conversation do a good job of showing (as opposed to telling) her loneliness. Then the last couple paragraphs, of physical/behavioral description, help tie off that impression with connection to a familiar sort of body-language-associated-with-that-psychology, the imagery resonating with the abstract-shape-of-conversation in mutually-reinforcing manner.

Nasu Kinoko, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- (Tsukihimates translation):

I take a side street off the main road. Rather than a street, it's a blind spot between buildings. There are no human figures here. There is no noise. There are no signs of life. Just a rustling sound coming from deep within. The lights of the vending machines are too bright. Too many conveniences of civilization, incongruous to this place. It is too dazzling, so I walk past it. I turn my feet to the gloomier, more appropriate darkness of the night.

I don't have it. To be clear. And I say this as someone who cares about prose style and prose quality a lot, and who is extremely fond of writers with "flowery" styles like (e.g.) Lovecraft.

Examples of favorite prose-stylists of mine include Eliezer Yudkowsky, Groon the Walker, Jenna Moran, and (in translation) Nasu Kinoko. People have, on multiple occasions, expressed surprise at me about these, particularly about Eliezer and Groon. And, for a while, I was just kind of surprised-at-their-surprise without having much sense of where the gap was.

Nasu's (relatively recent) entry onto the list strikes me as important evidence regarding what's going on, underlyingly. I'm not yet nearly good enough at Japanese to read his works except in translation; but I've pretty consistently enjoyed his prose in translation—across a variety of translations by different translators—and consistently not had similar senses of enjoyment towards most other Japanese authors' translated prose. Which suggests that my enjoyment of his prose is specific to his prose—not just a general taste for prose translated from Japanese—but that it's centered on relatively high-level features of his prose—sentences and paragraphs, rather than individual words—such that it persists across a wide range of different possible translation-decisions.

Admittedly I wouldn't say I think deep challenging themes are important, in the sense that people typically use the term as applied to storytelling. They're not nearly as fundamental to a story's quality as, like, good plot, or good characterization, or such; they're much more off in the same sort of extra-frills-which-will-increase-appeal-to-a-subset-of-the-audience-when-applied-on-top-of-good-fundamentals zone as e.g. flashily-animated fight scenes or casts full of cute girls or similar. (I think interestingly-explored themes are closer to being fundamental; but many themes are interestingly-explored without being deep or challenging, as with the standard battle-shounen theme of "look how cool all these different superpowers and fighting-styles are!".)

But nonetheless I suspect I'm relevantly in the likes-deep-challenging-themes demographic whose existence you're doubting, more generally. And, as far as I can tell, it's real, not secretly about affirming themes, but also not about confidence in the goodness and justice of my lifestyle. For example, I was pretty actively pleased a few years ago when some stories I read convinced me that my understanding of happiness (which I'd been using as my core target for utilitarian trying-to-make-the-world-better) was founded on some bad assumptions about the limits of how minds could be structured, such that it was actually kind of incoherent as an optimization-target: it revealed something I'd otherwise have missed about how I was being inefficient about my goodness, and thus left me better-positioned to fix that inefficiency.