Because I want the system to handle that sort of thing.
Awesome. The system
should handle those things because
you want the system to handle those things. Gotcha. But that doesn't mean the system
has to. That's my point. Some people want the system to handle those things, others don't. But there's no cosmic rule that the system
must. It is possible to handle those things without the system. It's how people have played for decades. It's how the people who created the first published role-playing games played.
I want the fiction and the fictional context to handle those things. Because it's less work for me. I don't have to memorize as much or look up as much when we handle that ourselves rather than "offloading" the work to the mechanics. It's not really offloading as we have to read, re-read, re-re-read...look it up...look it up again...memorize it...forget it...relearn it after a few months away from active play. On and on.
The system tells me what the fiction means.
Weird. I always thought the referee/players gave the fiction meaning.
In the Cyberpapacy, Cybercatholicism is the One True Faith and anyone trying to invoke a miracle of another faith is causing a contradiction. In Aysle, items used to perform mighty deeds will naturally take on an enchantment. The Living Land abhors death, so it is easier to survive severe injuries, and you heal faster from them, but once you're dead the land will rapidly dispose of your corpse. These are all mechanical effects that describe how those realities differ from one another.
Those are all
setting information. Not mechanics. I can use the sentences above and do the same thing without whatever mechanics those books present to do the same thing. Again, it doesn't have to be done through mechanics.
And moving to other games, they impose different feels on their settings. Playing Star Wars with d20 Saga and its grids and levels and hit points feels completely different from the heroic nature and two-dimensional task resolution system of Genesys. In The Troubleshooters, PCs are rewarded with metacurrency for being captured (as appropriate to the genre), and can't be killed unless they specifically decide to raise the stakes by placing themselves in Mortal Peril (or if they do something to abuse their plot armor, like jumping off a tall building because they can't be killed anyway). Sometimes I like that free-wheeling gameplay, and other times I enjoy the more tactical nature of Pathfinder 2.
Exactly. Sometimes it's fun to dig deep into the tactics and mechanics, other times it's fun to free-form it. Nothing wrong with either. Your preferences tend to run more into mechanics than mine. I prefer everything to be handled by the people at the table rather than a tome. Saves time and brainpower. Also much quicker.
Just like some movies are Saving Private Ryan, and other movies are Army of Darkness. Both are excellent movies, but they do very different things. Come to think of it, there are a pair of movies that do show what happens when you use the same setting in different systems: Alien and Aliens. They have very different feels despite having the same lead character and a similar threat, but one is a horror movie and the other is a high-octane action movie.
Which is weird because the Alien RPG covers Alien and Aliens with the same game system, just with some tweaks.
But yeah, different stories and different feel. Mechanics can do that. But so can the people at the table.
