I just now had a chance to read through the big apocalypse world "digression" on the non-combat rules thread. It's something I was really interested in when it broke out, because Apocalypse World is the RPG I have personally had the most fun actually playing, but I didn't have a chance to follow the discussion as it unfolded. As it happens, I think it's unfortunate that the discussion ended up revolving so heavily around "MTP," which I think missed something important about player empowerment. Here's how I look at it:
THE BLACK BOX MODEL
Let's think of a resolution mechanic, like "d20 vs. DC" or "2d6 vs. table of improve guidelines" as a black box that takes in some game mechanical inputs and spits out some game mechanical outputs. Those mechanical inputs themselves come from fictional inputs and the mechanical outputs are translated into fictional outputs. All told, task resolution is a five-step process. (Fiction->Mechanical Specification->Black Box Function->Mechanical Output->Fictional Interpretation) Let's look at a D&D example
I think when people say a game is "magic tea party," what they mean is the mechanical inputs are not closely associated with fictional outputs. Somewhere during the Black Box->Mechanical Output->Fictional Output chain, specificity is being lost. For instance, there's no reliably way in apocalypse world to predict that "2d6+Cool =9" would lead to "Bears!" rather than "bees!" or "Leprosy!" or "Awkward conversation with your ex!" There's room for almost anything to happen along the way. D&D, by contrast, keeps a very tight lockdown on that. Once you get to "Attack roll 30 VS AC 25, Damage roll 16 vs 10 HP remaining" MC has very little leeway. He can probably decide whether you kill the dude by decapitation or disembowelment, but the dude is going down. This is a scale. We can think of "Absolute Tea Party" as "a black box that creates no relationship between mechanical input and fictional output; in effect, there are no mechanical inputs" and perhaps something like "Newtonian Physics (NP)" as "a black box that deterministically generates a fictional output from a mechanical input."
Apocalypse World is way out on the Tea Party side of the spectrum. That just seems obviously true to me and I don't see how anyone would contest it. However, Frank Trollman asserts that "An MTP mechanic should not take up dozens of pages or be sold for real money" and "AW's reliance on MTP does unacceptable damage to player empowerment." Those are the claims I want to contest.