Neo-Victorian Gothulhucore!

Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.

I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.

What a TTRPG is for is, as what amounts to an analog computer, to take a series of inputs and give you an output combined with imaginative interpretations and creative narrative decisions in order to create the emergent property that is roleplay. In much the same that you can roleplay someone specific in a video game, games with immersive sim properties are much better at it because they give you the tools by which to more deeply express the internal agency you're applying to the game world. And even then you will be constrained by the game and its intents if what you are attempting to roleplay is not supported by the game. Deus Ex is much more conducive to roleplay than, say, DOOM. But even then Deus Ex still expects you to be Some Guy Caught Up In Conspiracy Nonsense. Meanwhile horizontal growth games like Ultima Online allow you to express a wide variety of permutations, the only game where my favorite class fantasy can be "real estate scammer" and the game and the way both the world and other players interact with it supports this. The important part about the commentary on ANIM's discussion of collaborative storytelling, which describes a specific attitude about how those stories are produced and not about their presence, is thus:

In a game where the primary analog input-output is the emergent property of semi-randomized mechanical interactions, it is very difficult to even attempt to generate the storybeats of, say, Lord of the Rings naturalistically. So you come expecting that every game produces A Fantasy Novel sort of storytelling and not something more in line with the often chaotic, often hamfisted, and meandering storytelling of, say, a weekly print comic that might have a roadmap or be partially planned but often just kind of jams in whatever needs to happen to keep things moving and ramp the drama. And even that isn't an adequate equivalent to this, as a comic can still successfully have internal rules like "The MC and his crush are not allowed to die", a thing which a ttrpg which has a mechanic about death can only do by rewriting the rules, one of the principal complaints in the entire essay. In order to create the kind of fantasy novel-esque story structure, an enormous amount of effort must go into bending, warping, and changing the rules so much that what you get at the end is at best a facsimile of the thing you went in to create, and if the efforts prove fruitless this is not the fault of either the game or of the expectations put on it to demand those efforts, but of the GM who failed to produce a game design degree via first principles.

You're talking about really broad stuff like people's expectations of games, wider trends in the TTRPG culture of play while arguing that those are mostly happening because people miunderstand the rules?

You seperate the text of the game from the folkloric understanding of the game.

The text is not the game.

What is happening during play is the game, which is heavily influenced by the folklore.

People can play this game very differently depending on experience and preferences with TTRPGs or games IN GENERAL.

Can you Imagine walking up to a group of people having fun and going "Pals, you are doing this all wrong, you could be having so much MORE fun" is madness to me ... MADNESS.

Im sorry but I feel like these arguments are really a gross misunderstanding on what playing TTRPGs is about for most people.

If you wanna try out different TTRPGs on the regular you need people in your group that find that exciting!

I dont wanna be antagonistic, I just feel these arguments are going nowhere really.

In fact, to your capitalism point, the ones who have the most to gain from an understanding of tabletop RPGs as just a set of folklore and vibes where the text doesn't matter are, in fact, the folks at Wizards of the Coast. Arguably a very large part of the marketing (not just from WotC but also from the industry that has sprung up around D&D) of D&D the game relies on the notion that D&D is good for collaborative storytelling (something it, as a text, doesn't actually primarily support) and that the rules ultimately don't matter. And when the rules of a game can be reduced to nothing but a set of vibes that are completely divorced from the game as a text this in fact mostly benefits the game that has already captured a large part of the hobby and industry.

And I don't think this should be taken to some extreme like "by actually taking RPG rules as texts worth engaging with instead of just sets of vibes that may or may not result in good gameplay you are actually doing an epic anti-capitalism," but tabletop RPGs do exist as books with rules not as an accident.

And to quote a much more eloquent person than I, the designer of Cairn: "Playing rules-as-written isn't obedience. It's literacy."

And I would honestly call "the text is not the game" one of the most absolutely disingenuous statements to ever be made. Though I suppose given D&D's evangelical background is fully in line with the sorts of beliefs the author may have had about the interpretation of texts. The cherry-pick and embrace the cultural folklore approach is what creates the confusion. Especially since the approach creates so much strife. It burns out GMs, it causes people to quit the game over the expectations they have been told they should have not being met, it causes enormous amounts of efforts to be put in in order to force it to meet those expectations, and if it didn't create an enormous amount of friction, both between the large number of people who do read the text (even amongst the people whom I engage with who are not deep in the reeds like this, maybe half of them are locked in the 5e culture of play) but also with each other.

TTRPGs are games (that's actually what the G stands for, random obscure fun fact!), and there are loads of people who like to try different RPGs because they like playing different games. Or hell, there are people who only play one RPG because they like playing that one game. And by "playing a game", I mean "engaging with a set of rules and mechanics". That's what's fun for them. If by doing so, they also tell a fun story, that's a bonus.

But then there are people who just want to tell fun stories, and often that also means telling stories that adhere to a specific structure. And then, for some reason, they choose a game with thousands of words worth of rules and mechanics to tell that story, and ignore or change every rule and mechanic that hinders the specific story they want to tell.