Maybe it's "Authored" vs. "Emergent"

[Quertus]

Personally, the idea that the DM shouldn't know or care about the player characters, their personalities, etc is, to me, missing the entire point. We're discovering the story of those characters. And I can't play the NPCs properly without knowing that.

Can you also not roleplay a PC without knowing the NPC's personality, stats, and intended role in the narrative?

(Presumably, that's not what you're saying -> "what do you really mean?")

Right. Players should be able to (in anything I'd like to call Emergent mindset) shape the game. But restricting them to only doing so via the medium of the characters and gameplay sharply limits that ability. I want them to be able to shape the game even before play starts as well as between sessions or during sessions. By everything including
* Discussions around where we want to start and how all the characters know each other
* Character backstories [1]
* Character mechanics
* OOC discussions during non-session time
* OOC discussions during sessions
* Contributing ideas as to worldbuilding both IC and OOC[2].
* Actions taken by the characters during sessions.

Restricting the possibilities to only that last bullet point seems the epitome of having a straight jacket approach and results in unsatisfying games because you can't actually plan anything (even factions or NPCs) with any eye towards hooking onto a player character's exposed eyebolts. All you can do is create random ones. Which has a really high failure-to-engage (with the setting, NPCs, or anything) rate. Sure, it's all you can do if you're pre-writing a sandbox module for a generic audience. But you're guaranteeing that you see fewer interesting emergent events and more frustrated milling around or boredom. It's the difference between a canned lecture without interactivity and a one-one-one or small-group tutoring session. You're giving up most of the power and potential of a TTRPG out of some obsession with "purity". Which means that restricting "emergent" to that one narrow niche makes it seem much less interesting generally.

Or build more connective factions and PCs?

So, take... Harry Potter, the 4 houses of Hogwarts. Then take some of my characters chosen "at random" (OK, not really, just the first ones to come to mind).

Most show my bias as a Slitherclaw, and would connect with Ravenclaw, or maybe Slitherin. A few could connect with Hufflepuff, or even Griffindor.

Most, it's easy to see how they'd form connections (positive or negative) with one or more professors. The students? Eh, that's a little... most of the student body is a little less interesting, IMO - few connections are quite as obvious there for my characters.

Or take Marvel, where you've got SHIELD, the Avengers, Hydra, the Illuminawhati. That's... much less interesting, from an arbitrary character PoV. Few of my characters would want much interaction with any of those organizations.

The 5 factions from Divergent (etc)? Erudite, Candor, Dauntless, Amity and Abnegation would all see takers (obviously, some of my characters are Divergent ).

The MTG color wheel? Nah, the Ravnica 10 guilds. Hmmm... Izzet, Dimir, Selesnia, Boros, Rakdos, maybe Simic - yeah, I can quickly see my selected characters getting involved with those organizations.

The Forgotten Realms deities? Eh, that one's a bit harder, as most of my characters already have a defined religious stance (even if that stance is "get your superstitious mumbo-jumbo away from me" or "why, yes, I did create the universe, but I prefer to go by 'Steve' these days"), so it's harder to imagine them interacting well with alternate religions.

But characters who don't have a strong religious stance? Hmmm... they might check out Mask, Azuth (and laugh at the notion of Mystra as a valid deity), Balal, one whose name I don't remember, and... Ilsensine, oddly enough. I doubt they'd be instant strong converts (Balal, I think, would be very not what that character was looking for, once they got into the details), but there's religions in that world that would pique their interests.

That's what I want when I look at someone else's world - enough sufficiently interesting elements to catch my attention. Repeatedly. No matter what character's PoV I take. A world worth interacting with.

Put another way... I can see how the Illuminati is cool for Doctor Strange. But if his player drops out of the game, that's so much work that's now wasted, now useless to the players.

Whereas, if the mad scientist / environmentalist / half-angel half-daemon leaves the party, Izzet / Golgari / Orzov still has an active presence in the world - one that the party can see, and might want to interact with. And, even if that player/PC are still present, the rest of the party may still find the guild's actions to provide them motivation, independent of the one PC who is "most interested" in the guild.

The key difference between authored and emergent, however, is that an emergent DM is planning timelines speculatively, with the possibility of branch prediction failure[3], where the authored one is committing to a finite set of possibilities that will come to pass one way or another.

[3] As in a CPU, which predicts which branch of code will get taken multiple steps ahead but starts doing the work down both branches, being prepared to throw one away when it really finds out which path was taken. Emergent-mindset DMs aren't tied to their planning in any way, where Authored ones are to at least some degree. In the pathological case, they refuse to deviate from their plans to the point of forcing everyone back into the "one true path".

FWIW, I think I tend to plot out one (or more) timeline(s), and then get proactive enough players to guarantee that said timeline does not come to pass. But running through that timeline gives me practice roleplaying the NPCs, knowledge of their history and motivations, so that I can roleplay their interactions with the PCs.

Not sure if that helps or muddies the waters wrt doing a "chicken / not chicken" test for Authored vs Emergent in that regard.