Rulesets as artforms - writing a game never intended to be played?

[NichG]

I actually thought of Nobilis first, which is admittedly much more general and probably more playable than the one's you've mentioned. I also get the feeling that weird concepts and unplayable systems have more to do with breaking assumptions than being actually unplayable.

Within tabletop RPGs we have some assumptions that we tend to make in various ways, including a presumed breadth to the simulation and a focus on media emulation. The latter is actually quite interesting to dig into, as it's the entire reason so many RPGs end up defaulting to physical conflict as a focus. When you break that assumption or start redirecting to more obscure media people have less references for how your rules should actually work.

One of the things that got me thinking about this was an idea for how a system could absolutely not have rules for or built around the existence of combat, but where combat could emerge from those rules.

E.g. imagine something like DangerCrafting, with a bunch of rules for the sorts of industrial accidents and injuries one could get in them, including e.g. injury by falling object. Then when people want to have a fight in that game, they end up modeling it as 'dropping objects horizontally at each other'.

Sort of as a commentary of how often the noncombat parts of combat games get treated like extensions of the assumptions that primarily exist for sake of combat.

Edit: And I've played Nobilis and would again, its actually pretty playable...