Some do, some have veto mechanics. The ones that do rarely result in troublesome play. The group usually goes, “WTF dude!?!” and the person either learns to stay within boundaries or finds themselves not playing. It’s really no different than the “trust” players have that the DM won’t be dickheaded and throw 3000 giants at the party in one encounter.

But, here, let me give you a simple example of a rule that helps the system support story, instead of going against it. In Dogs in the Vineyard, there is a rule called, “Say yes or roll the dice”. In D&D, if a character does a mundane action, you don’t roll. But in Dogs, it doesn’t matter if the action is mundane, or exceedingly difficult- the question is if it’s interesting to bother rolling the dice about.

So, if a party is trying to clear a cliff, you would roll in D&D, because it’s a difficult action. In Dogs, if you don’t really care about the cliff, you don’t roll the dice. Even if it’s really really hard to climb and it’s raining. Just narrate it and be on your way.

Now, in play, you’ve stopped rolling dice and wasting time on things you don’t care about. The story is that much easier, instead of spending 10-20 minutes figuring out how to get up a cliff or taking falling damage and healing, etc. when the real fun stuff is at the temple at the top.

Notice that the shift is in priority- realism? Who cares? Good stories are interesting more than realistic. Because that’s a baseline rule in Dogs, already the system is designed to engage for story instead of realism, so the clash is knocked out right at the gate.

…ignore the ways in which RPG systems come into conflict with storytelling.

It may interest you to know that a lot of game systems conflict with storytelling because the mechanics are built to do something different than storytelling (yes, this includes WW’s “Storyteller” games as well).

As Jon points out, there are games whose mechanics DO support storytelling, and the rules do not come into conflict with the goal of creating a story at any point. Aside from the two he mentioned, you may wish to check out The Pool, Polaris, With Great Power, or a number of other recent games whose mechanics focus less on “what your character can do” and more on setting up pacing and drama.

There are plenty of games that have rules to support good storytelling, but they might not be the kind of games you are familiar with. I was in a similar position to you a couple of years ago: I had a hard time visualizing how the kind of play that they talked about on the Forge worked. It wasn’t until I started playig the games (which went somewhat royughly at first) that I grokked how it worked. For instance, while it is true that the story can “go haywire” in any game, it is very unlikely in games like Primetime Adventures or Dogs in the Vineyard for this to happen (if you and your group are following the procudures in the rules). The story might not go where you had intended it to go, but that is part and parcel of playing games of this type.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had very good luck running Primetime Adventures and InSpectres.

Best,
Jon