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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4036385" data-attributes="member: 42582">No. But you said that " It doesn't matter if you understand that the spirit of the rules or the needs of the story are more important than the rules. All that does is delay the inevitable. Sooner or later, everything will either conform to the rules or the 'audience' will rebel because they'll feel cheated." I rejected your generalisation. I don't quite get the relevance, to that, of my view that some cases might fit your description.But now, I see that by "rules" you don't mean what KM clearly does mean, namely the character build and action resolution mechanics.But in that case I'm still puzzled. When you said  "everything will conform to the rules" I took you to mean "every event in the gameworld". But maybe you really meant "every event at the gaming table". If this is so, then so far from being ridiculous you were correct! But it makes no sense at all to talk of the rules that tell us how to play at the gaming table are the physics of the gameworld. For example, consider "Saying yes" rules - what does it mean to say that the gameworld does or doesn't conform to those rules, or that those rules are the physics of the gameworld?This makes no sense to me, as the PCs (presumably) have no beliefs about the rules, but only about the gameworld. And whether or not the players believe that the mechanics that govern the PCs also govern the NPCs depends entirely on what the rules of the game say.To give my own answers that lie somewhere in the neighbourhood of the questions you have posed (both expressly and implicitly):*There is a physics (sociology) of the gaming table that pertains to the play of the game (thus, I put to one side rules about who is to bring the chips, who the drink and so on). If the game doesn't conform to that, players will feel cheated and leave the group. *There is a physics of the imaginary world (the gameworld) which may or may not bear some resemblance to the physics of our own world. *Sometime these two things correlate quite closesly: that is, the game rules are also a model of the gameworld (the Forge calls that simulationist play). *Sometimes they do not (as is the case, for example, with "Saying yes" rules).And to avoid posturing, and make it practical: suppose that every time the issue of pregnancy comes up, the players and GM all "Say yes" to ignoring it. Or, as is probably even more common, the players and GM all "Say yes" to ignoring the PCs urination and defecation while in the dungeon. It does not therefore follow that noone in the gameworld ever gets pregnant, nor that they never go to the toilet.So this would be an example (drawn from my own gaming experience) which I believe shows that there can be consistent rules which are not the physics of the gameworld. And I think it also shows that there is a practical difference between John Snows type A and type B players.</blockquote>

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