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Apologies if it's too late to reply to this but I was thinking of this recently and realized that this idea of platonic session often differentiates between the games that I found most useful as books and the games I had to do the most work to get interesting. Some nonstandard older examples, good and bad:

Over the Edge 2nd edition provides 3 different adventure models and has a discussion of how these approach three different types of things the players can do with the setting as well as discussing the variety of other ways things can spin out of control. 


Puppetland is one of my favorite never played games. It doesn't do this very much in the original edition (I haven't read the newer one yet) despite being very short. It's a very interesting game that I looked awt, want to play, and have no idea what to do once I start. 


Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st edition doesn't give much on this front but the sample adventure stuff and gm advice leads to a model of "give the pcs (who are usually underprivileged and poor) something they really shouldn't have possession of and react realistically to what they do." It's not the most flexible but I never felt lost when trying to run this. 


Dream Park had explicit design instructions for adventures with what makes the best for each stage of the play session from introducing the world to tying up the lose ends. Which is rather meta since you are playing people at an rpg adventure park. But you get very detailed mashup genre guidance in making sure your adventure is good and a time is had. 

Feng Shui is one of the best/worst combos since you have so much guidance on the world and how to do scenes and even how to get characters into the beginning of the story. "They're there. Why? Now a fight breaks out." But after that I've had pretty solid 50% chance of either a gripping storyline happening or it fizzling out because we're not following the genre and get lost. 

Dogs in the Vineyard and In A Wicked Age do some of the most explicit work in this regard. Dogs guides your prep and tells you how to use your prep hopefully helping you create a solid jumping off point no matter hwat happens. Wicked Age is more flexible but still you follow a range of stories that have been specifically tonally focused and guided so you know what scenes matter and what to do next at pretty much any given time.

D&D barely acknowledges this in the core rules resulting in the standard loot and treasure hack which can be done well or poorly, but at the same time peopel constantly trying to push it into other spheres to do something different or interesting with wildly varying results, even from official writers. The Ravenloft line, for example, has adventures that veer from the near-aimless and very confusing to the perfectly executed pinpoint shot through the heart. Most of the former could have been the latter had they provided a little bit more of a framework and didn't just focus on the dungeons that cropped up on the adventure. 

Amber tries to do this by talking about campaign styles in detail and giving ideas. When not played as a PVP rpg, it gets very confusing and often peters out because of the lack of clear narrative engine and guidance on the long term. I always want to play it but never know what to do to run it (a  common concern of mine for many of these games). 

Monster Hearts, Apocalypse World, and most of the better pbta games end up having a constant narrative engine that pumps you towards new actions till you find a note to end on, focusing on actions and scenes more than the session. This is a very serviceable way to do it and ends up being very powerful. 

Finally, Sorcerer. The game that tries hardest to do this yet I end up most confused about. I don't understand Bangs at all as a reader meaning I don't know how to prepare them and that's after reading each book 10+ times and having run the game several times. I think there is a level of narrative guidance or instruction that would really improve the experience and help me as a reader know what to do. This is curious since the books are great, the rules are great, and the author is explicitly trying to help me create games that focus on stories that are going somewhere. It might be user error.

Just a few thoughts as I flipped through my bookshelf.