Thus to me making it a completely different creature
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Verbrugge the Frost Giant, sitting on his throne in his glacial hall, has AC -1, 93 h.p., 2 attacks a round at +5 to hit/2d10+8 damage, fights like a 15th-level fighter (or BAB +15, depending on system), cold immunity, and vulnerable to fire.
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What you're saying is that most of this changes depending on who or what he's entertaining in his court at any given moment; which to me is preposterous.
What can I say? That's not how 4e works - the creature is first and foremost defined descriptively (eg Verbrugge the Frost Giant King, tougher than all the other frost giants), and the mechanics are a set of game-mechanical tools for presenting Verbrugge in the context of a particular encounter.
Describing a game of that sort as preposterous seems to me like saying that it's prepostorous in Go that black plays first, because in chess white plays first. Or saying that it's preposterous in AD&D that rounds are 1 minute long because in Rolemaster and B/X they're 10 seconds long, in 3e, 4e and 5e they're 6 seconds long, and in HARP they're 2 seconds long.
There's no rule laid up in heaven that says that which colour should move first. There's no rule laid up in heaven that tells us how long a round should be in a fantasy combat resolution system. And there's no rule laid up in heaven that says whether an RPG should use its stats to model inherent properties of the fictional objects, or relational properties of the fictional objects - ie relative to opponents in a given scene. Most RPGs, especially more traditional ones, go the first way; but there are also RPGs that go the second way. (Besides 4e the ones I'm famiiar with include HeroWars/Quest and Maelstrom Storytelling. There are also hints of it in Fate and Marvel Heroic.)
If he remembered to put it on this morning his crown also gives him an always-on charm effect vs. other Frost Giants; but he's not very bright and thus forgets to wear it about 1 day out of 3.
This isn't about resolution at all - it's about description. This is orthgonal to the issue of hit points, level, attack bonus, damage and defences, all of which are about resolution and hence are relative (but not
independently relative - they change as a whole in quite systematic ways) relative to the opposition.
But if you're asking "Is it legitimate to model the Black Knight without his armour as a lower-level monster, and then send him up against lower-level PCs than might otherwise face him?" my answer is Yes, absolutely.
I did a version of this with Kas: just woken from a long sleep, and hence considerably weakened, I modelled him as a 13th level elite. Whereas at full strength Kas is an epic-tier threat (ie dangerous to PCs of levels into the 20s).
The mechanics are essentially a stripped-down expression *of* the game world's natural laws
Even in gamies like RM, RQ and Traveller I don't think this is correct. In those systems the mechanics model processes, but not laws.
For instance, assuming that your dice are fair then the mechanics for the games I've mentioned make a whole lot of outcomes fundamentally stochastic. Whereas in the real world they are probably determinate, or if they are metahphysically random the elements of randomness are probably not present where they are in the mechanics.
To give an example from the history of physics: statistical mechanics used to understand the behaviour of gases is an excellent model of processes involving gasses, but it is not any sort of expression - stripped down or otherwise - of the physical laws that govern gases.
The way I generally see the die roll described is as some sort of substitute for all the small elements of an action - positioning, timing, etc - that we don't model in our action declaration, movement rules etc. That's fine as far as it goes, but in the "real" world of the game all those things are determinate, and it is the interaction of those determinate factors of the situation that yields the outcome. "Roll a d20" is not an expression or model of the natural laws that govern those ingame processes. Just as statistical mechanics is not a model of the physical and chemical laws that govern gas molecules; it's a model of the processes that large numbers of gas molecules will undergo under certain (normal) conditions.
at the same time are the interface through which everyone involved - DM and players alike - interact with said world and said laws. Even if nothing else was involved, this alone would be reason enough to unequivocally state that those mechanics have to be both consistent with themselves and locked in on (or before) first contact in order to ensure both a playable game and believable setting.
With resepct, this is just asseting one particular preference dogmatically, if no other way of playing an RPG were possible.
The 4e mechanics are consistent with themselves - there is nothing inconsistent about saying that a frost giant of constant toughness can be modelled both as a 17th level standard NPC and a 25th level minion, depending on what opposition it is facing, any more than saying that the same person can be to the east of Seattle but to the west of Boston. And they fully support a believable setting (for some fantasy-appropriate notion of "believable"): it's perfectly believable that a frost giant is a tough opponent for knights errant and the like (ie at a roughly Aragorn/Conan power level) but is a weak opponent for demigods and the like (ie at a roughly Gandalf/Hercules power level).
You may not like the mechanical way of realising, in play, those consistent descriptions. That's fine: there's lots of RPG mechanics I'm not really keen on either. But I don't see what it adds to discussion to describe them as "preposterous" or "incoherent", if all you're trying to convey is "different from what I prefer".
