PC Death is not the only meaningful consequence folks can care about - one may want rules to manage those other consequences. Surely you've seen this stated before?
Yes, but in the context other sorts of consequences weren't really relevant. I was responding to: "This is my point. The vast majority of GMs today will refuse to kill characters..."
Now, you may or may not care about anything other that death. That's within your rights, but it makes it a you thing, not a we thing.
"We" in this context would mean "myself and the players that I'm playing with at the time".
But if you really don't care about anything other than death, yeah, maybe you can dispense with rules, and go to total freeform storytelling.
This comment seems to undermine the thrust of your prior comments. If you are wanting to raise the objection that there might be meaningful failure states other than death, it seems strange to suggest that we can go to freeform story telling if we only dispense with death. Surely we can only go to freeform storytelling only if we don't care about consequences or agency at all? Which you seem to conceed immediately, so not sure what your point was.
Though, to be frank, cooperative storytelling practices also tend to have rules and guidelines to keep stories flowing well - humans often need some rules for cooperative endeavors.
I don't know why you'd need to think you'd need to preface this disclosure with a qualifier like "to be frank" since I'm one whose position is that we need rules.
A deep discussion of consequences other than death would be forking the thread pretty hard if we get into that. "Death of a PC" is a pretty unambiguous failure state particularly if this is a "hardcore" situation where coming back from death is impossible or unlikely. Something meaningful gets taken away from the player that almost every player is going to care about.
Other sorts of consequences don't generally have the same consequences on play unless they equivocally take away the player's ability to play. Long term incarceration without possibility of escape is effectively death, particularly considering how short of an in-game time frame most campaigns cover. Permanent loss of collected gear often strikes players in some systems as a sort of death, as does permanent mutilation of the PC. Even if the PC is still playable in theory, death might be arguably easier to recover from and so things like that which retire a PC or tend to cause players to retire a PC do matter.
In theory lots of things could matter to a player that represent some sort of undesired failure state, but in practice for most players things that don't take away their character are always a trade they'll take over anything that does. Martyring a PC for the sake of some cause I've never seen, except in one case with a player that I think was looking to exit the group anyway and was "taking one for the team" in a touch and go situation with a spectacular "retributive strike" sort of thing where he nuked his own position to take out the BBEG. But since the vast majority of players just want to keep playing, a lot of more subtle sort of consequences just aren't universally perceived as failure. Players may not like when NPC retainers die and may have a certain amount of fondness for them, but they also tend to refer to them as "Meat Shields". Losing a retainer is seen by many as roughly equivalent to losing some of your disposable/replaceable gear like money, potions, or scrolls. And many players treat any battle they walk away from intact as a victory, even if the goal of the fight wasn't achieved.
My point being that - even if I wasn't responding to a particular post and was talking about illusionism in the service of protecting PC's from consequences, there aren't a lot of consequences as simple, understandable, and universal as "death" and if I start talking about them it only muddies the waters. If I was stating the quoted sentence as some sort of rule or something, I might write:
"But speaking as a player, if my PC can't actually enter into a meaningful failure state no matter what I do, then I have no idea why we are bothering to use rules."
But without a longer explanation I'm not sure that the meaning of that is clearer.
