“[W]hat I’m thinking about: an rpg that is not intended to ‘tell stories like X,’ that does not rely on genre shorthand to frame situation or tension or resolution”
This is preposterously hard to do. And the hard part actually isn’t the “what do the characters do when they’re on camera?” It’s the stuff that comes before that. It’s the “What elements need to be present in our shared imagined space before we turn to the characters and see what happens?”