It could be better to say something like the imagined inhabitants can discern laws that correspond to the simulationist rules. In order to avoid suggesting that they can know (or even think of looking for) the literal rule or the player-side processes (like the one you drew attention to, of looking up a table).
This seems close to what I posted upthread:
Even where RPG rules do represent things that the world inhabitants can know - eg how a -10 penalty in RM represents a modest degree of pain or impairment - the inhabitants don't know the rules of the RPG that we are all sitting around playing in the real world! They only know the represented things.
Putting to one side its enlightenment anachronism, one can imagine a character in the WoGH doing research to establish how things work in the world of GH. Imagining that does not depend upon using any particular RPG system.
Some RPG systems purport to model or represent - via their PC build, or action resolution, or setting-and-framing rules - some of the more salient processes and principles that the imagined research discovers.
I still take the view that
causal processes are more significant than
laws.
The goal of simulationist mechanics is to represent, and correlate to, ingame causal process ("internal causation is king", "the imagined cosmos in action"). This is the fashion in which they are not metagame, as per
@Thomas Shey's post. Eg in RM, the attack hits, it bruises and it cuts - and the process of resolution at the table reveals this to us, unfolding it before our eyes: the attack is rolled, after allowing for defences it is applied to the table, looking at the column appropriate to the armour which indicates some of the bruising plus the crit (if any). The roll on the crit table fills in details of where and how severely the attack landed.
Ideally, there would be a single roll of d10000 that resolved both the attack table and crit table aspect: splitting them up doesn't reveal anything about the fiction, but is simply a technique for making the game playable using familiar dice and manual lookup tables. At the table we know there is a crit table; in the fiction, people know that a certain spread of injury is likely from
that degree of success in attacking a person wearing that sort of armour. We don't need to posit that the world inhabitants have a concept of an 'A' crit, a 'B' crit, etc; that would be a bit cheesy.
We also don't need to posit that no one every suffers an injury not accounted for on the crit tables. The crit tables can represent a causal process without representing every possible variation that process might manifest in the fiction. Of course they need to represent what is typical and expected; and, as an integral part of the resolution process, they must yield concrete information about what is happening in the fiction. Ie they must do more than
simply confer and constrain authorial permissions; they must dictate.
I'm influenced in the above by
the following remark made by Ron Edwards: "Hero Wars character creation, . . . isn't concerned with the implausibility of having a mastery-level in Greatsword be just as "likely" as having it in Farming; RuneQuest character creation . . . emphatically is." This rules out crit tables that produce results that are implausible relative to what is expected in the imagined world. It doesn't demand literally comprehensive crit tables. (This is somewhat similar, at a structural level, to the Classic Traveller PC gen system: the fact that no one ever changes jobs in that system doesn't mean that career change is, per se, impossible in the Traveller universe. Just that it's not typical, and hence that, by using it, we get a good representation of the process of pursuing a career in the world of Traveller.)
This is why stronger claims about
laws and
predictions and the like seem unnecessary to me.