And no, that's not the same as, "If you have a 17 charisma, and choose "tell joke" in the dialog tree, the gaurd will wet his pants and you can get in the gate".
No, it is the same. That's what I'm getting at. If you walk up to a gate guard in a game, and you have never interacted with that guard before, you have no idea that successfully telling a joke will cause the guard to wet his pants and allow you to get through the gate in the confusion. In either case—whether it's an NPC guard or a DM-controlled guard—the outcome is uncertain and you don't even have an idea of what the outcome could potentially be. The story goes the same way in either case.
The only difference between the two scenarios is that you know intellectually that the game won't spontaneously make up a new way for you to get through the gate. If you get through, you know afterwards that the means you used must have been something that the developers planned out beforehand. With a DM, you might get through using an unexpected method, something that the DM allows to happen even though it wasn't part of the plan.
It's the Schrödinger's Gun concept. You know for sure that any part of your DM's universe that you haven't seen yet could change to suit your ideas. For example: you come up with the idea of finding out who the guard has a crush on, and then disguising the bard to look like her. Originally the DM didn't write up a sweetheart character that the gate guard likes, but SUUUUURE you can find someone who knows him and can describe his lady friend. For a video game NPC, there's no quantum state. If the developers didn't give Barry the gate guard a crush that he swoons over, she won't poof into existance just because you came up with a plan. And if they did create a sweetheart that you can dress up as to fool him, you know for a fact that it's a planned solution and that ruins it for you.
You like the idea of a Schrödingized world; you value a setting where you know that whatever plan worked, there are countless other plans that could have also worked even though no one could have foreseen them. You see a value in that, and that's fine. But it's a mistake to say that the inclusion of NPC actors or enemies makes it impossible to "capture the story telling aspects." You're saying that it is an absolute requirement to have only human-controlled actors, and I think it's because you are restricting yourself to such a narrow view of what story-telling and roleplaying are.
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No, it is the same. That's what I'm getting at. If you walk up to a gate guard in a game, and you have never interacted with that guard before, you have no idea that successfully telling a joke will cause the guard to wet his pants and allow you to get through the gate in the confusion. In either case—whether it's an NPC guard or a DM-controlled guard—the outcome is uncertain and you don't even have an idea of what the outcome could potentially be. The story goes the same way in either case.
The only difference between the two scenarios is that you know intellectually that the game won't spontaneously make up a new way for you to get through the gate. If you get through, you know afterwards that the means you used must have been something that the developers planned out beforehand. With a DM, you might get through using an unexpected method, something that the DM allows to happen even though it wasn't part of the plan.
It's the Schrödinger's Gun concept. You know for sure that any part of your DM's universe that you haven't seen yet could change to suit your ideas. For example: you come up with the idea of finding out who the guard has a crush on, and then disguising the bard to look like her. Originally the DM didn't write up a sweetheart character that the gate guard likes, but SUUUUURE you can find someone who knows him and can describe his lady friend. For a video game NPC, there's no quantum state. If the developers didn't give Barry the gate guard a crush that he swoons over, she won't poof into existance just because you came up with a plan. And if they did create a sweetheart that you can dress up as to fool him, you know for a fact that it's a planned solution and that ruins it for you.
You like the idea of a Schrödingized world; you value a setting where you know that whatever plan worked, there are countless other plans that could have also worked even though no one could have foreseen them. You see a value in that, and that's fine. But it's a mistake to say that the inclusion of NPC actors or enemies makes it impossible to "capture the story telling aspects." You're saying that it is an absolute requirement to have only human-controlled actors, and I think it's because you are restricting yourself to such a narrow view of what story-telling and roleplaying are.