@Celebrim Two quick things. First, I wasn't talking about the difficulty of the actions at all, I was indexing the difficulty that different
systems have with those two propositions.
Ok, so I'm not sure I understand you after all.
But, to take a stab at it, if you are talking about the different degrees of support a system might have for combat relative to how much support a system has for social interaction, that's to me an issue of rules. The process of play might be how the participants attempt to within the rules account for a proposition that isn't explicitly handled. And that process of play usually would involve producing a (usually unwritten) house rule which the table will tend to not recognize as a house rule, but instead will see it as a simple application of the rules. At that point, my interest in the process of play diminishes because we can start talking about how they handle the situation from a rules perspective. What's more interesting to me for the purpose of this discussion is that the process of house rule generation occurred, and happened in some fashion. For example, when house rules are needed, is the GM explicitly empowered to create the house rules and does the GM generally not consult with the players? Or when a house rule is needed, does play stop and the whole table discuss the best way to handle this? Those are two different processes of play, and while you can see that as part of the rules themselves, those processes are more obviously metarules about how play is conducted.
Related to that, I think different tables are not necessarily going to understand that different systems have "difficulty" with a proposition. For example, you might be thinking that 1e AD&D has difficulty with the proposition "
I try to talk my way past the guard by flashing some calf and giving him the bedroom eyes." compared to the proposition "I try to hit the orc with my sword", but in practice I'm not sure that it does. What is true is not that it has difficulty with the proposition, but that different tables will definitely end up with very different processes of play and very different house rules owing to the fact that 1e AD&D doesn't really tell you how to mechanically resolve the proposition. But to be honest, that's also true in 1e AD&D of "I try to hit the orc with my sword", owing to the lack of organization and clarity in the rules. Arguably though, the very fact that 1e AD&D lacked clarity and organization in the rules would tend to cause the DMs of that system to not see the two propositions as particularly different in terms of how difficult they were. It would be normal process of play to be spawning out house rules out of the 1e AD&D system all the time, often without realizing you were doing so.
The corollary being that different rules systems produce different kinds of propositions, just like different genre conventions produce different propositions...
They can, but only in that many modern rules systems like say Dungeon World do actually have rules making explicit how propositions are made, filtered, validated, and applied. For the vast majority of games I've played though, explicit proposition metarules didn't exist, and as such I think they tended to produce very much the same sorts of propositions.
There are some exceptions though, and that concerns the issue of whether the silence of the rules discourages players from imagining that they have the option to do something. For example, we can safely assert that 3e D&D made the proposition, "I try to grapple the orc." more explicitly a valid proposition than 1e AD&D did. But that doesn't really address whether resolving that proposition was more difficult in either system, or whether the participants were discouraged by the difficulty of the rules to just avoid them all together.
...and different player expectations produce different propositions. I wanted to stick to the first item because there's going to be less to disagree about, the rules being more stable from table to table than expectations or actualized play.
Yes, but it's the expectations that I'm really interested in. It's how those expectations change the game so radically that it's a different game, even when the two tables share the same rules, that I'm most interested in.
I want to ignore the differences there, at least to start, and focus on the similarities.
I'm not sure where you are going except to say that I think you are stuck on the idea that the metagame proceeds logically from the rules, and it's that idea that I very much want to disabuse. This is a whole other layer completely separate from the rules. A game can try to change how a table thinks about playing the game, and if it does that and changes how they think about playing, then it will change how the game is played compared how the players will play a different system. But that process of changing how the table thinks about playing or how they approach the game is more important than, and distinct from, the rules themselves.
Believing otherwise tends to create huge logical fallacies or failures of imagination where some forum poster will assert as a universal, "This game system played like X", where X is actually a process of play that is not nearly as universal to people playing that game system as the poster thinks.
