What are the rules for?

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, this is getting at what separates many of the rules with mechanics from not-quite-rules about how the world works, the kind of knowledge characters in the game world could discuss.

I'm not even sure it quite reaches the latter in some cases, because sometimes there's nitty-gritty that will matter to some people in the world who interact with it but won't exist in general "lore". As an example, people may generally know that a magical metal is harder and tougher than whatever the commonly used, but that may not translate into them understanding its better at cleaving shields (but warriors may well know that) or difficult to get a really sharp edge on (but smiths may know that). These are the sort of things that the combat and crafting rules will tell you, though. The people in the two specialties may not have the specific numbers or whatever those rules do, but their understanding of their professions will often translate into that, and there's probably no clear way to express it in the lore (if it exists there at all--its the sort of detail the "lore" as presented for a setting rarely gets into) but its been conveyed in a meaningful way by word of mouth among those it'd be relevant to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We actually don’t rely on rules for a lot of that. The canonical example would be a map.

I'd argue the map has rules baked into it too: distance is usually there in some way, and that's relevant because players know how long it takes for people to cover those distances. The latter in particular are part of rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

nods For instance, a narrative example (rather than an action-by-action play) of a dragon soaring through the sky and occasionally unleashing a gout of flame is unlikely to allow one to deduce how quickly it flies, how often it can breathe fire, or the area of effect or the precise lethality of its flame breath. Arrows and spears may bounce off its scales, but is it merely unlikely or literally impossible for a mundane projectile to have a meaningful impact on it? And so forth.

If one is running a system that abhors the very notion of combat as a subsystem and prefers to reduce the entire scene to a single die roll or two based on preferred drama, estimated task difficulty, and some narrative metacurrency -- such details may not be important.

Even with this case, if its going to be resolved in anything but a completely arbitrary way, the question of "How likely is the dragon to be defeated?" comes up and has to be expressed some way, as is the question of whether that's predictive of a similar situation in future (i.e. does it happen only because someone has a special black arrow?).

Really, if its going to be resolved in anything but an utterly ad-hoc way, there still needs to be some kind of rules framework around it, even if its inimalist or is more about the dragon's narrative function than any physical properties.

 

[MGibster]

I hadn’t shared the excerpt about randomized combat results when you shared your story, but this is a good example of how randomization is definitely important — the most likely outcome does not always happen — but intricate rules are not the only way to introduce random outcomes.

For most of us, playing a game is simply a form of entertainment, playtime can also prepare us for the real world. Lion cubs play fighting prepares them to hunt or fight other lions. Hide & seek can teach children the necessary skills to survive when the Hill People show up. Kriegsspiel was developed to train Prussian officers in how to command military forces. I imagine an arbiter might just decide, "Nah, those jerks didn't win. Let's see how Herr Klink adapts to an unexpected loss."