Note that this article isn’t fully written yet, but I figured I may as well release it anyhow.
This is a problem where a complicated story attempts to be told through a medium that simply can’t accommodate that kind of story for one reason or another. For example: Warcraft telling a story while forced to include the player characters as actual characters in the story (which they have been bad at) or the World of Darkness dealing with inter-game crossovers and, again, keeping the player characters important…or just allowing some wiggle room for characters.
This is a problem in those cases, since gameplay and player participation are kinda important.
This is a problem because a player’s immersion may be in jeopardy if their actions aren’t integrated into the story properly. The Storyteller (in this case) will also have trouble coming up with a story, which may become a nightmare if you keep working with it.
Crossovers in WoD were particularly bad.
This is probably understood by Onyx Path, which is clear from their Curseborne I can’t believe it’s not Chronicles of Darkness!
game-line which doesn’t have a meta-plot.
They don’t explain exactly why this is (can only skim right now), but it’s pretty obvious to me why they did this.
1d6chan includes a page about this sort of thing called Your Dudes, but I think it misses the fact that the lack of an advancing story-line
is kinda…yeah, it fits into the problem basically. If it is about ‘your dudes’ then there wouldn’t be a story/meta-plot at all, à la CoD/Curseborne. For that reason, Onyx Path may be slightly more intelligent than Games Workshop.