Rereading your OP I retain the feeling that Baker takes an... I guess it could be called teleological approach. He has purposes in mind and he punts game rules like those that model the world that don't fit those purposes. I am aiming for a definition that will include such rules.
This is simply not correct.
Baker is not asking what RPG rules
can be used for.
He is aware, for instance, that rules
can have some sort of representational relationship to elements in the game world:
Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table.
His assertion is that this is not something that rules
have to do. And, in saying that the sole reason to have rules is to introduce the unwanted and unexpected, he is making an aesthetic judgement. As he says, using rules for other things is a waste of time.
This is also connected to the imperative to purist-for-system RPGs: the reason for using tables isn't just to model, but to model "impartially", which is to say -
to get results that no one would choose, or can be relied upon to choose.
Conversely, his assertion is that if the things your rule tell you to say are things you'd say anyway, then you're better off doing away with the rules and just saying those things!
These claims about what is useful, what sensible and so on are
conclusions of
arguments about what is valuable in RPGing. Rebutting them requires setting out some account of why other things might be valuable. I make a couple of suggestions in the OP.
I'm thinking about bare cause and function. I'm not concerned with the social negotiation, only with what concretely happens when a rule is followed.
You've not said anything concrete about what happens when a rule is followed, either in general or in RPGing. Your various schemas do not ever refer abstractly to actual humans actually performing the task of creating, sustaining and developing a shared fiction
I couldn't find anywhere in the account where it states exactly how that "shaping" takes place.
Innumerable accounts have been given in this thread. My word "shaping" lives in the same functional and explanatory space as Baker's "constrain": I chose "shaping" rather than "constrain" because there is a reading of "constrain" that is negative and so doesn't sufficiently capture the "enabling" or "permissive" character that a rule can have.
Here's an example of how a rule can shape what is said about what happens next:
If the players look to you to see what happens next, make a soft move. This is not a point about the abstract nature of rules in general: rules shape what is said about the fiction in virtue of their
content, the actual permissions they confer and prohibitions that they impose. All the content that constitutes participant roles, and governs what participants do, which is missing from your purely abstract and formal schemas.
I felt that if one could state the process a bit more clearly, one might see how it could fit with a diversity of purposes.
I don't even know what this means. What statement of the process in AW could be more clear than what I've said, or what Baker has said in the rulebook?
If you want to serve a different purpose with your rules, then you will need rules with different content from the AW ones. For instance, if the purpose is "Make the players feel immersed in a setting narrated to them by the GM, but not compelled to action", you would probably suggest different rules from the AW ones. Because one obvious purpose of making a soft move in AW is to compel the players to action! You would probably have rules that tell the GM to narrate colour, to make extremely soft moves that barely hint at conflict, to make certain sorts of hard moves even if an opportunity has
not been offered on a platter, etc.
So far as pre-existing norms extend, participants can often agree that a description D will have the consequences C.
Lapses here necessitate the rule so it's right to observe that this reflects the OP, although I call attention both to the possibility of non-agreement, and the possibility of lack of a norm. I can't see where the OP calls attention to the latter.
I don't know what this means. What is a "pre-existing norm"? I think you mean a belief (but whose?) about what is likely to (or what must?) happen next in the fiction - but I'm not sure of that. What sort of lapses are you referring to? On whose part?
When you say the OP does not call attention to the possibility of a lack of a norm, do you mean the OP doesn't mention that someone (the GM? some or other player? all of the participants?) don't have a predisposition as to what happens next? I think the OP focuses precisely on that: because it talks about the introduction of the unwelcome and the unwanted!
If you mean something else, I do not know what that is.
Baker possibly comes to see that agreement to a rule is never located in the rule
In the context of RPGing, this is the Lumpley principle - that is to say, it bears Vincent Baker's name. So I think it's fair to say that he noticed it, 20-odd years ago.
I take Baker to be saying, essentially, that rules can be forceful (so that the first and last part of your summary amount to the same thing.) The OP implies the additional necessity of pre-existing norms to rely on: I state it outright.
Rules supersede pre-existing norms and extend beyond them.
Regardless of whether there are or are not lapses (whether participants do or don't agree) if they follow the rule then what the rule functionally does is supersede and extend beyond any pre-existing norm. I cannot see where this is stated in the OP, although I do see where some useful consequences of this are stated. This statement has many useful implications for games and if the OP intended it, then I think it should have spelt it out.
During play it can be decided if any D has the consequences C by matching that D to a norm or rule that explicitly states or implies that C.
I call attention to the matching, which again I do not see in the OP but which I saw right away in Schauer and I understand to be a general problem in law: beyond trivial examples, how do we know that a rule fits a case? This necessitates strategies to secure it: in AW that's a design strategy, in D&D that's an organisational strategy. Once we have a rule that matches, the functional mapping itself is as implied in the OP.
I don't know what any of this means. For instance, what is the difference between a "design strategy" and an "organisational strategy" - organisations are often designed! The AW rulebook contains rules for organising the conversation, and the resulting process of creating, sustaining and developing a shared fiction.
I already explained why Schauer's problem is basically irrelevant to a voluntary activity. Suits sees this. So does Baker - hence why he notes that distributions of authority ought not to be the main focus of RPG design.
Which is to say, in defining mechanics as compound rules, I am reserving for myself the resources needed to cover all those other things.
