It doesn't have to be D&D.

[packbat]

It's almost difficult to remember what it was like to just ... assume, on a bedrock level, that D&D as we experienced it was just What Tabletop Roleplaying Games Meant.

We actually didn't start with D&D - our first system was SLUG (Simple Laid-back Universal Game) - but it was very easy for us to go from playing SLUG as a kid to playing D&D and acculturate to the latter. The social structure of the table is the same in both cases: each person at the table owns a single character except one, who owns the entire rest of the universe and is usually called the DM or GM instead, and it is the job of the character players to use their characters to successfully traverse an obstacle-ridden story created by the universe player.

It functions. It facilitates a kind of storytelling focused on preparation by the universe player - massive sprawling networks of tunnels and rooms, full of secrets and setpieces, with challenges designed to strain the abilities of the protagonists - and that's wonderful. Our hours spent exploring such spaces were not wasted.

I suppose it was technically collaborative. It didn't feel that way. When we first read the rules of Fate Accelerated Edition, we found them completely alien - the players get to write the same kind of "this is what is true in the universe" cards as the GM? It was the world turned upside-down and we were not prepared for it. And when a DM tried to get the players to do some authorship in the form of adding worldbuilding details, we felt terrifyingly anxious and out of place - we did our best but we felt overwhelmingly that it was not our place. Our one GMless game was ... well, it was a farce, which would have worked if we'd gotten the joke, which we didn't.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019 our feelings changed. I'm not sure by what.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we tried games which were both themselves and not D&D, which helped. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we had conversations with people laying out all the myriad ways in which D&D is an incredibly specific tabletop roleplaying game system and not generic at all. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we internalized some ideas about game design and aesthetics of play. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we realized we were trans and transitioned, which helped us developed a better degree of connection with ourselves and, we suspect, more capacity to play characters we chose as opposed to just Packbat's Dude Cosplay. Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we gained an appreciation for games that openly acknowledged their limitations, as contrasted with games that purported (and failed) to be unlimited in scope.

Somewhere between 2013 and 2019, we changed from the kind of people who had no way of understanding what Fate Accelerated Edition was trying to do, to the kind of people who could make decisions about what we would want to use Fate Accelerated Edition to do. We could recognize a system that approached the question of "how do you create the pieces needed to evoke a world and tell stories within it?" through freetext concepts instead of formal systematized mechanics, and which incorporated the Session-Zero "what kind of game do we want to play?" questions we previously didn't know needed asking into the act of player character design. And tried to encourage and also force players into staying in character very clumsily - the compel rule feels like one that would be useful to stop minmaxers from trying to maximize all the numbers but framed as a general game mechanic, and we'll probably houserule it away because compelling players to play their characters in a specific way is not something we want at our table. But we understand it.

We don't have a conclusion here. We just kinda started typing without knowing where to go.