Story Mechaincs

Story mechanics sound like something you call in when your story is broken.

We have so many new games now with "narrative mechanics" as if tens of thousands of years of human storytelling were somehow broken, and game companies need to reductively sell us the most basic of game activities. 

Storytelling does not need narrative mechanics. 

GURPS gets it, since it is more an old school game, it puts all the focus on the most important pieces of the puzzle - the characters. My character has a weakness or compulsive behavior, and these are the same things an actor needs to know when making a movie, then the game gives us rules for that. There is a slight gamification on the power of these "inner motivators" and the story is the combination of the referee reflecting the current state of the environment, the plot the NPCs are  trying to drive, and the natural chaos of the characters inserting themselves into the situation.

While there is no "script" in GURPS since the game is more of a "simulator" - there is a "script" for the adventure for NPCs, motivations, maps, keyed locations, and events that will happen in the future at certain times. So it is not a "set story" that the referee is trying to tell, and there are no "pool mechanics" that players use to alter the course of events.

So the referee is like the director of a movie, but the script does not lay out what is to come as strictly. That is up to the players.

GURPS gives the players the best character backgrounds in role playing. This is the stuff actors need, the strengths, weaknesses, skills, history, and background of the character. Who they are. Where they came from and what they have done, and the choices made during character creation reflect that. A game like Traveller may have random tables for life events and service terms, but GURPS goes a level deeper, not using the charts but giving us full control to "write" a character and reflect that with our choices for them.

There are times I am struck by a typical B/X style OSR character, you know, class, race, and 3d6 down the line for character statistics, and how hard that is to role play. Who are they? What got them here? What are they like?

We need to fill that in ourselves, and nothing in the rules reflects our choices. Sometimes this "100% role playing" is hard to get started with, and I can see why people like the "life-path generators" of Traveller, or even the funnels of DCC. We are taking nobodies and turning them into somebodies.

The "nothingness" of D&D is what makes the game great for some, and impossible for others. 

But past that, when we have our character, and we are like the actor trying to bring that "person only on a sheet of paper" to life, we have complete freedom. We don't need pools, dice, story points, or anything else to interact with the world around us. The world acts as it should. Just like the world.

We have a generation of games with "doom, fear, malice" or other points that gamify the story and world, as if we needed to put another set of training wheels on creativity. Perhaps being a game master is that hard, and nobody really knows "how to do it" and the industry is dumbing down the experience to a board-game where everyone has rules for what they can do.

Refereeing isn't refereeing anymore, it is the "story master" who has cards and can never imagine something into existence, they can only pull a card from a deck and "make the text on it happen." I can just see the Kickstarter for that game now, and it making a few million dollars as another snake-oil solution for all our imagined role-playing problems they keep telling us we have.

This is also why D&D YouTube is so toxic, the constant barrage of referee advice makes you think you are not doing it right, and that you are somehow inferior to the anointed masters. YouTube advice channels hurt your self-esteem and willingness to "just get out there and do it" and force you into a dependent habit of buying more and more advice. These charlatans of self-improvement and professional advice came from the books telling writers how to write, and how to unlock the magic formula for a bestselling novel. Amazon is flooded with them, and they all end up endlessly complimenting you and telling you the same thing: get out there and do it.

All the "how to write a story" frameworks are horrible. You will follow a scaffolding and your story will be just another similar empty shell. The story won't come from you, it will come from the framework, and the author of that supposed self-help book. Same thing with story mechanics. While you may "fill in the blanks" the story tools tell you to make happen, the story won't be yours anymore. Or the players. The story will be what the game wants it to be.

Humans don't need to be told how to tell stories.

We are born with that ability.