vastly more useful than the majority of comments I get when someone disagrees with my ideas.
I am honored; thank you; though in all too many cases, I'm merely clearing a low bar.
all possible RPGs uniquely treated the concept of combat (or else presumably would fail in their narrative goals)
Oh. That's an ambitious scope of hypothesis. In linguistics, AFAIK, an assertion about "every known language humans have ever spoken (or signed or whistled or written)" is a possible width of scope, and "every possible human language", is a significantly larger scope.
Does parallel structure include emotional impact? That's kinda where I was going, with the bit about getting the shakes. I stand by my observation that a six-on-six SCA combat can flow somewhat like basketball, and I agree with your statement, "they aren't war". I imagine that a fight between people with swords and shields who were actually ready to kill and/or die, would move much the same as the SCA fight, because what *works* is the same - that is, whenever a parry is the optimal move in the former, it's also the optimal move in the latter, so either way, you parry.
There are TRPGs which declare intent to model fiction, rather than reality; those games succeed when they produce the sort of fight scene we see in Errol Flynn movies, not the sort of fight scene we see on security cameras. You know GURPs, so you know the idea of "cinematic" rules.
I've played "Fiasco" once at a convention. Are you familiar with it? There was no combat in the session I played, no attack rolls. Plenty of conflict, resolved other ways. I think the scenario of Pandemic might work well as a Fiasco session's story seed. I can imagine it ending with the "everyone dies" outcome; perhaps including the last dialogue, ever spoken between two humans, towards the end of the session; and I would tip my hat, to players willing to "go there." I am less confident that Fiasco would be a useful rules structure for Hoosiers: The Dribbling, insofar as that requires scenes which are mainly about who passes to whom, who intentionally fouls while setting picks, those sorts of choices; in cinematic terms, scenes in which camerawork and body language tell the story, far more than spoken dialogue; the sports equivalent of battlefield (or bar brawl) scenes.
I agree on JRRT's portrayal of shell shock, and on the high quality of his portrayal in cases such as Frodo and Eowyn. (Aragorn... well, not his first rodeo.) I don't assert the same awareness for Gygax, nor for most later TRPG authors. I have occasionally role-played aftermath; for example, the party camps overnight, the DM asks who's on watch, and I add that during the pre-dawn watch, other PCs might be woken up by my PC screaming his way out of a nightmare, then casting Heroism *just to get back to sleep*. (I've woken up suddenly, heart racing, from post-car-crash nightmares, and if post-combat is even worse...) AFAIK, that's not common among TRPGers.
One of my favorite moments, in terms of pride in what my character did: we had escaped from a captor's horrific experiment/torture lab, and in the process freed the other "subjects", and taken them to a city. My PC, a paladin with Folk Hero background, stayed at the home of the first subject we'd freed (a teenage boy), rather than at the inn. Sure enough, the boy got a nightmare... his mother held him close, but he still thrashed about in his sleep... so my PC stood at the door, back towards them, to indicate "nothing's getting through this door, to harm you, unless over my dead body". She relaxed; he, asleep, could feel her relaxing; and then they could both sleep soundly. I treasure that passage, more than any of my critical-hit smites on wight knights, though those were fun too.
