Let’s suppose that you are DM of tabletop RPG campaign with homebrew rules. You want to have Epic Battles in your campaign, where players should perform incredibly complex tactical and technical moves to win and dozens of characters will tragically die. But your players discovered that fundamental rules of your homebrew alchemy allow them to mix bread, garlic and first level healing potion and get Enormous Explosions that kill all the enemies including Final Boss, so all of your plans for Epic Battles go to hell.
It’s not like players are your enemies that want to hurt you, they just Play by The Rules and apply enormous amount of optimization to them. If your have Rules that are not adversarily robust and apply enormous amount of optimization to them, you get not what you want, even if you don’t have actual adversary.
As the wise man say:
What matters isn’t so much the “adversary” part as the optimization part. There are systematic, nonrandom forces strongly selecting for particular outcomes, causing pieces of the system to go down weird execution paths and occupy unexpected states. If your system literally has no misbehavior modes at all, it doesn’t matter if you have IQ 140 and the enemy has IQ 160—it’s not an arm-wrestling contest. It’s just very much harder to build a system that doesn’t enter weird states when the weird states are being selected-for in a correlated way, rather than happening only by accident. The weirdness-selecting forces can search through parts of the larger state space that you yourself failed to imagine.
Let’s suppose that you are DM of tabletop RPG campaign with homebrew rules. You want to have Epic Battles in your campaign, where players should perform incredibly complex tactical and technical moves to win and dozens of characters will tragically die. But your players discovered that fundamental rules of your homebrew alchemy allow them to mix bread, garlic and first level healing potion and get Enormous Explosions that kill all the enemies including Final Boss, so all of your plans for Epic Battles go to hell.
It’s not like players are your enemies that want to hurt you, they just Play by The Rules and apply enormous amount of optimization to them. If your have Rules that are not adversarily robust and apply enormous amount of optimization to them, you get not what you want, even if you don’t have actual adversary.
As the wise man say: