"The game doesn't provide any tools to help players engage with my world, have meaningful relationships with my NPCs, engage in my storylines, or support my villains if they should be defeated too early."
I heard that said recently about D&D 5.5E.
My, my, my ...how far we have fallen.
The biggest mistake here is the very pretentious overuse of the word "my" over and over again. People come into D&D thinking they can become a dungeon master and force-feed any random group of players their theater slop, and players have to accept it because it is brand-name D&D, or any other of these story games that promise to solve the golden calf problem of "what game can I play that the players must interact with my story?"
Some games use narrative tokens and storytelling rewards, milestone leveling, and other tools to carrot-and-stick players down the dungeon master's preset narrative arc. In a sense, yes, you are a dungeon master in this case because this is a form of torture.
In "real D&D," players can kill all your meaningful NPCs, walk away from the villain and not care, ignore your world, blow off your storylines, and not care about your never-published novel, and that is okay. This is D&D; let them kill monsters and take the loot. Focus on running the combats well, and you will be fine.
Some story games are great and help me tell wonderful solo-play stories. But on the flip side, I could never imagine using those narrative tools against a group of players trying to do their own thing. Use them together with the players to collaboratively tell a story and reward story beats? That is okay, but what are you doing? We can tell a story together without all this story-game scaffolding.
Why am I giving bennies or narrative points to players for accomplishing story beats? I feel this is like treating your players like dogs and giving them a biscuit and saying "good boy!" Why do we need all these metacurrencies and out-of-game point systems? Too often, they can be used for negative reinforcement rather than the positive reinforcement the game pretends people will use them for.
And I don't need to drop out of the game and pat players on the head for doing something narratively important. They should know that in their heart and feel it. But, no, here are some story point rewards, and a narrative token for you. Good job; have a gold star too.
This is the difference between a DM coming in and expecting to be the director of a play, with the players their "hired actors," versus the DM coming in and being the neutral arbiter in the world who merely decides "what logically comes next."
Give me a strong simulation of a fantasy world and its characters, and my players can do all the rest. My NPCs have the stories, not me as the referee; talk to them if you are interested. They also have all the information about the world; if you are interested, go talk to them. Not me, the referee; I have nothing to do with this at all. I just run combats and make rulings.
Talk to the NPCs.
They are not even "my" NPCs, either; they are the world's NPCs.
If you don't and want to do your own thing, that's cool, too. Just don't expect the NPCs to react a certain way to your tomfoolery, and they will be fine. They may even be interested in what you are up to as well! You never know, and the dice will decide that.
If you can't understand the invisible wall that a DM needs to have between the world and the referee, that this is not "your world" or "your NPCs" or "your story" - that all this belongs to the world, then you will never understand what it means to be a referee. Kill the king? Fine, I don't care. But the world will, and you will find that out. That invisible wall protects you, gives you necessary distance, and maintains your impartiality.
Like the referee in a sports game, you are not here to make one team win over the other. You are here to do a good and fair job where the players can say you handled their interactions between them and the world fairly, and you helped make the world's stories and NPCs come to life.
The players will tell their own stories, and the ultimate story is their rise to power or fall to tragedy.
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