the last time I ran for complete newbies I ran Troika for them and it was a blast

I believe so, but I honestly don't know, it never made much sense to me either. I thought I'd described a pretty generic scenario!

...one way or the other and no real reason for the substance to *not* be conductive, simply takes the cue from the player and decides right then and there that the substance actually is conductive. That's the scenario (as I understood it) that was called definitionally a story game!

The scenario I'd posed wasn't even that overt, where the GM explicitly asks a player to make the call; iirc, the scenario was a player proposes a plan of action, which based on the GM's description of the scene assumes a given substance is likely conductive, and the GM, having no previous opinion...

an exhausting element of the long hangover from the ZS era is that a huge contingent of ttrpg designers see taxonomical exactitude as a core part of the work, rather than merely occasionally useful avenue of analysis, and the result is we've ended up lionizing a bunch of ludic phrenologists