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There are many who see "rules" and immediately think of rules like they see in a board game or legal laws, rules set forth by authority figures, and in rare cases, laws of physics sort of rules of the universe. In all these cases rules are a strict thing intended to be followed exactly, and if an alteration is needed, the rule itself should be altered to accommodate.
There is a thing called "selective enforcement" however, in which there are rules that are expected to have a blind eye turned towards the activity unless a problem occurs, or in other cases is supposed to be followed unless "common sense" would dictate breaking the rules. I.E. such as speeding when you are trying to get a person to the hospital in time to save their life. The law doesn't explicitly say you are allowed, but rather expects police and judges to utilize good judgement and simply not enforce the speed limits in such a case.
Then we get RPGs. RPGs have rules, and while it can be fun to play a game treating the rules like a board game, or as I call 4e, a miniatures combat game with story, there is also a way of playing in which the rules are expected to have selective enforcement or even no enforcement at all.
Most of the time, players tell me that if I don't want to follow the rules of a game like D20, that I should go play freeform. Problem is, I see value in D20's rules for something other than being "rules."
To describe this other value to be found, I'll lead you there via a thought experiment, so perhaps it makes better sense why I like to have D20-ish rules without the enforcement expected of "rules."
To start, imagine playing freeform. Now, as players make choices in-game, players need more information than an author would give in a story or movie.
I.E. we do not know the full list of spells known by Harry Potter, we only know which ones he uses. His rationale for using those particular spells is hidden from us as it is not needed for us to enjoy the story.
But, as players who make decisions, as we are the ones who are choosing what spells to use or what strategies to utilize, we need far more information than is given in a simple story.
More importantly, that information needs more accuracy. A book can tell us a character is "very strong," and each reader will have different ideas about what that means.
But when a players describes themselves as "very strong," we need to know whether they mean The Hulk kind of strong, Body builder strong, or simply above average soldier kind of strong.
The easiest way to achieve this is to put together a table of terms, each defining how strong a character is when described with that term, whether it be a word or a number. In this way, every player can look at the table and use those terms so everyone is on the same page of understanding how strong everyone is.
Such a table can also include information telling how common or rare it is to find individuals of a particular level of strength, which tells us a fair bit of the world milieu.
Do this with a number of traits and you get what looks like a book of rules, but really is just a language to make communication about the world and characters easier, more accurate, and most importantly, concise. As this is a game, we want to talk and understand in a way that the talking is unnoticed (much like talking in our natively language goes unnoticed. We don't think about the language we are using, we think only about what we are trying to communicate and the language handles itself without much thought).
Thus we have stats, and character sheets, and a reference book.
Then we also find that players are getting irritated as the GM seems rather biased, the GM had player C fail the last three times C tried anything. The GM will almost always seem biased, no matter how unbiased they actually are.
The solution here is to outsource the success and failure decision to something other than a person, at least for cases when there is disagreement over what the result should be or when the game would benefit from it.
But simply flipping a coin feels arbitrary and disconnected from the world. Why should the barbarian have the same chance of pummeling the orc as the fumbling healer?
It really is beneficial, making the choice feel connected to the world when your not-human decision maker accounts for character capability and task difficulty. And guess what, we already have stats, so just use those as your measure of character ability by making the terms apply to the decision making system.
Then simply include someway for task difficulty to also apply and viola, you have a full fledged RPG, with zero expectation of rules being something that must be absolutely followed like they would be in Chess or some other board game.
In fact, from this point of view, things should only apply or be used when it enhances the game. For example, taking penalties for fighting on a boat should only apply when such a fight is uncommon, when those penalties are a part of what makes that fight stand out from the others. In a campaign where nearly every fight is on a boat, those penalties should simply be ignored as they are not adding anything at that point.
It also makes sense at this to simply use whatever rules represent the narrative milieu best, regardless of what those rules were created for, or even to make new rules on the spot for handling something even if those rules never get used again (otherwise known as a GM ruling).
Hopefully this helps some folks understand a radically different way of using the same mechanics. Perhaps when playing this way, we should call the rules something else, perhaps descriptive guidelines?
Using mechanics in this way is not playing rules, but using them as a language to communicate about the world and the characters.