“Ironsworn is not about simulating a world, it’s about simulating a story. This is important. (…) It is about story simulation: simulating the high and lows of a story as you could read in a book. If a character falls from a cliff and takes damage, it’s not because the cliff was very high, it’s because the story required a setback, a dramatic tension to be built so that the spectator would halt their breath and wonder if this is where it ends. And that’s why you’ll always have the option to Face Danger and catch a branch midfall and miraculously save the day. (…) And we can even find examples of this in literature: consider the book series The Black Company where pages upon pages are dedicated to a card game while there’s an entire battle against a fortress that’s given but one line.” (via)