As players we spend hours refining our character sheets. We re-balance our stats, select the perfect feat, the perfect variant, optimize our armor class, multiclass, and agonize over whether a longbow or a shortbow better fit the build. Then the session starts, and within twenty minutes (assuming it's a good one) we talk our way past a guard, lie to a priest, and start a bar fight — none of which end up involving a single number on that sheet.
I've been running tabletop RPGs for a long time, and this pattern always repeats. Players prepare as if the game is a math problem. But a good game, as it actually plays, is almost entirely a series of social and moral decisions that the rules can barely describe, let alone resolve.
The rulebook tells you what happens when you swing a sword. It has nothing to say about whether you should.
This isn't a flaw in the design. The best game systems seem to understand it intuitively. They give you just enough mechanical structure to create consequences — your choices have weight because failure is possible and resources are finite — and then they get out of the way. The structure exists to make the unstructured moments matter. Hit points aren't the point. The moment you decide to stand your ground when running would be smarter — that's the point.
I think about this every time someone describes a system as if the system itself is the thing. A business process. An org chart. A methodology. A curriculum. These are all scaffolding. They're necessary, sometimes elegant, occasionally beautiful in their own right. But the work happens in the gaps between the documented steps, in the judgment calls the framework can't anticipate, in the moments where someone has to decide what to do when the rules don't have an answer.
The player who spends hours on their character sheet wasn't wasting their time, exactly. That preparation gave them confidence. It let them feel ready. But the session they actually had — the guard, the priest, the bar fight — emerged from something the sheet couldn't capture: their willingness to improvise when the situation demanded it.
The deck is not the game. The game begins where the rules stop.