Michael Prescott’s comment reminds me that many games — most of the ones with which many of us grew up — assume that the GM will take on the majority of the work required to make the game a “success”; the players’ job is pretty much just to show up, and if the session “bombs” it’s either a Dork Tower situation where one or more players “ruin” things, or else that the GM didn’t do the required work.

I.e., many games facilitate the narcissism. I can’t help but picture Matt Mercer running games on YouTube (which I’ve been posting about lately), and how he completely dominates the sessions — his prep, his story, his performance. This is the model so many games simplicity or explicitly present as “the way it’s done.”