A lot of the restrictions he is seeing with regards "making myths not following them" and "it is like D20 just choose what is there" seem more restrictive at character creation than in play, I think. Once you are caught up in events you are mostly limited by those events, rather than by your character. Yes, the world does have limits, as it needs to have to keep things from spiraling out of control. But as much as anything it should be the tension within the character sheet—he goals, his flaws, his relationships—which give those limits.
I was struggling for an analogy in my earlier post, without finding a good one. I think I finally did. Progress is easiest on the well beaten path (In D20, this is the only option for character progression). You can still move along fairly well on less used paths, but there will be more difficult spots. You can even abandon paths altogether and make your own paths through the woods, but this will be extraordinarily difficult. The question is, what is important to you? Getting exactly where you want to go, or getting somewhere quickly?
As a player, when you are used to other systems where the system limited the character much more, it is easy to forget to build tension into the character. A hero built like an arrow, ready to fly neatly off in one direction, is less interesting than one that has to resolve internal tension. So even heroes who intend to trod along one of those well worn paths should have one or two reasons why they may question that route sometimes.
One way that the narrator can let key words matter less, and character background and special abilities matter more is to simply declare that all abilities start at 17 (or to not penalize too much anyone who wants to use the list method, ten background abilities start at 17, the rest start at 14). That way your important abilities like "knowledge of dragon occultism" or "EWF geography" can be on the same footing as trivial things like how you make a living and deal with the otherworld :) (this is one of a few ways that have been discussed on the rules list to encourage character individuality)
Finally, for what it is worth, my experience as a player even in Runequest was that the mythic background of Glorantha made it easy to make your own myths. The high stakes and huge mythology gives leverage to players too. I'm afraid I feel another analogy coming on ;-) If you are standing in the middle of a plain, whatever you do will stand out by contrast, but it is hard to make anything all that big. If you are in dramatic mountains maybe whatever you build will be dwarfed by the mountains, but you have lots of places to hang things off of, you can move huge amounts of rock just by cutting and trusting to gravity, and generally it is much easier to make something really impessive on its own terms, even if it is still dwarfed by the mountains. Most games are like the plains, it is easy to stand out against the blandness, but you don't have much to work with. Glorantha is like the mountains, you may never match the mountains, but what you can build is pretty darned amazing in its own right, and far cooler than you'd ever manage on the plains.
I hope some of this is of some sort of help.
--Bryan
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