I was also disagreeing with the suggestion that the core concerns of RPG rules are presenting the setting and mediating players having their PCs interact with the setting.
I would be very interested to know what you think RPGs are doing if not those two specific things. Those are precisely the things I am quite convinced that RPGs
are doing. What an interesting difference of opinion.
Well, I am from the Vincent Baker school: the essential function of the rules in a RPG is to assist the participants in agreeing on what to imagine together.
Where there is a fairly traditional player/GM split, then sometimes that will be related to the GM presenting the setting (eg the GM is not allowed to say <xyz> about the setting unless a certain rule permission or requirement is triggered); and sometimes the rules will mediate the players having their PCs interact with the setting.
But there can be all sorts of other concerns with, or aspects of, the fiction that the rules are dealing with. Sometimes PCs interact with one another. Sometimes the rules establishes some "meta"-context of the fiction (eg the Doom Pool in MHRP). Sometimes the rules govern situation in some fashion - eg the rules for Circles in Burning Wheel.
There's also the issue of
what is setting? I think it can be quite misleading - in the sense of giving a mistaken impression of the way play unfolds and of the sorts of things that matter in the shared fiction - to characterise everything outside the PCs as
setting. For instance, in may RPGs there is a greater focus on
situation than on setting - some context of strife or tension or opportunity or opposition that the PCs are caught up in. Rules that deal with that aren't generally about
presenting the setting, or about
PC interactions with the setting. The setting is typically just a backdrop to what the fiction - and hence the rules - is actually concerned with.
