I think we can all agree that, while there is definitely a continuum involved, in a broad sense, there are two styles of RPGs. One focuses heavily on telling a collaborative story and the other, uh, doesn't.

And that's the problem, right there. It isn't defined by what it does, it's defined by what it doesn't do and so, people just call those "Traditional" RPGs because the games explicitly focusing on telling collaborative storytelling came out later in RPG history (though one could certainly argue some early games like Pendragon might be considered predecessors) and these "traditional" games were just already there, doing their thing.

I really hate the term "traditional" for this. It is extremely loaded and unhelpful. It feels somehow insulting to both kinds of games because it implies that story-focused games are weird or aberrant while simultaneously suggesting these kinds of games are old, stagnant, lacking innovation, outdated, etc.

The thing is, "traditional" games are still being made. They are still innovating and evolving and don't deserve to be thrown in an "old school" bucket. There's new ground to be trod in RPGs that aren't about telling stories.

Can we come together as a community and create some better terminology for this stuff? While we're at it, we can come up with a better term for story focused games, too, since I feel like people dislike the term "storygame" as well. It would really help a lot with people trying to briefly describe their game, elevator pitch, market to the right people, etc.

Edit: To be clear, I personally am uninterested in RPGs that aren't on the "traditional" side of the spectrum, so, I need help here with naming it. I hate seeing stuff called "trad," but I want to avoid being disrespectful of the other side of things here. I want both branches of game design to exist without anyone thinking theirs is the one true way for roleplaying games, and I want a way to identify the kinds of games I like without choking on my bile as I say it's "traditional." My ideas, however, for the term are not going to work, because the words all have multiple meanings and will probably just confuse things further (things like Immersive, Emergent, Experiential, etc.)

Edit 2: The best attempt so far to recategorize has been calling the other side structured story games. So, let's try working from there. Is there fruitful ground with the continuum looking something like this:

Natural, emergent <-------------> structured, curated, or designed storied