Usually, the rim is going much further in one direction than the other, and you can set it crooked in the dropouts so it won't rub. That's not usually much help with vertical dropouts and close chainstays though.
I was commuting in twilight and kicked a big hunk of metal into my 36h 3x rear Deep V. On the way home that night, a drive-side spoke broke. It wasn't even far enough out of true to have to loosen the brakes
I originally built the wheel, so I just tossed a new spoke in there and it's been fine for a year of hard riding now.
One thing you can do to prevent this is to pluck spokes regularly to ensure even tension. If it starts to go whacky, even the tension out. If even tension leads to way-out-of-true -- it's time to start wheel shopping.