Saul T

(With respect to this post there.)

I won't say it's universally the case, but there's definitely a small but highly vocal subset of the tabletop-RPGs-as-storygames fandom who want their games to feature conventional character arcs and well formed three-act structures and themes with clear through-lines and such, but have a positive horror of accepting any constraints at all on their own creative freedom, often due to some latent paranoia that the GM is secretly trying to railroad them. You can sometimes slip player scripts under the radar via frameworks where players are expected to take up existing pregenerated characters (e.g., as seen in certain supernatural slice-of-life games like Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine or Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast), but in my experience, players in this particular slice of the storygame fandom are liable to refuse to play pregens in the first place.

The big-name podcasts are able to make it work for two reasons:

They do, in fact, use explicit player scripting to varying degrees. They've got workshops and writers' rooms, and sometimes they even have major plot beats planned in advance before anyone sits down at the table, with full understanding and buy-in from the players that the GM is going to fudge the dice rolls to make those beats happen. Basically, they're able to compensate for the fact that the systems they're using (i.e., typically Dungeons & Dragons) lack any direct support for player scripting by assigning homework – which is easy to do when the participants are getting paid to be there, but not so much in a typical pickup game.

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