Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
And that's fine and dandy for anyone that's going to sit down at one of your tables.

But if that player then comes to sit down at a table I'm DMing, I might have to unteach them. Because they've been given a specific gist, and now they have to learn that it's only the gist for a specific subset of TRPG play style.

Conversely, I might teach them that for this very first game, I want them to pretend their character is just them with some special abilities, and to interact with the world.

I might teach the player about to sit down to a heavily battle mat based & dungeon of the week game of D&D, it will be primarily a miniatures combat game where you delve into dungeons and kill things.

Or I might teach them this game or that game, at my table, is primarily about improvised method acting. Pretending to be someone you are not.

I might teach the players in a game of Paranoia that the point of the RPG at my table is to personally experience (ie the player) the terror your character is feeling of everyone else being out to get you if your character doesn't get them first, and not knowing enough about anything. Also, you've just been executed for knowing that much.
Indeed, "collaborative storytelling" is only the gist of a particular approach to RPGs. In and of itself this approach is neither good nor bad, some people like it, some people don't.

It's only when this approach is falsely asserted to be the definition of what an RPG is, the core of what an RPG is, or inherent to all RPG play no matter what, that things go wrong.