And now for the other bits...
Does your modern-day setting have a mechanic to track credit ratings? Vaccinations? Familiarity with a wide range of cuisines (whether as consumer or as cook)?
Does your fantasy setting have a mechanic to track holes in shoes and clothing? Blunting of blades? Shoeing of horses?
In order: not unless needed, no, if someone wanted to roll for this for a PC then no problem; then no, no but it probably should, and no.
And none of these are as important - by a huge factor - as tracking wealth.
In my BW game there is a Resources mechanic. That game is about (among other things) gritty survival.
In my Cortex+ Heroic game, there is no wealth mechanic. That is a game about vikings trying to find out why there are strange portents from the spirits of the wood and in the Northern Lights. Wealth is largely irrelevant. When one of the PCs robbed the drow of their gold, he earned a persistent d8 Back of Gold asset. There is no need for a special mechanic to track that.
So in the vikings game they don't know how much coin they have? (and it's not a "special mechanic", it's simple recording money in vs. money out) Now don't get me wrong - I dislike economics etc. probably more than the next guy, but even then I want to know how much wealth my PC has at any given time...and I also want to know what's out there for me to spend it on.
Let's just start with one assumption: that social interaction won't change the party.
That is already so far removed from my RPGing experience that it's hard to know what to do with the rest of what you say.
"Irrelevant" social interaction e.g. with a friendly gate guard is great to RP through but is very unlikely to generate any quantifyable mechanical change to the party. It might change their views or their level of knowledge or whatever, but nothing quantifyable.
"Irrelevant" combat with a sea monster in the Pacific has all kinds of opportunity to generate mechanical change to the party: Falstaff drops his magic sword overboard, Gwenivere gets hauled off the ship and drowns (and her body is never found), and Halfred's spellbook gets soaked and some of the spells in it are ruined.
If you want to play a RPG in which more time is spent worrying about random encounters with jermlaine than finding out whether or not the PCs can keep their promise to the dwarves to help them with the giants, well, no one's stopping you. But that sort of focus is not inherent in the idea of RPGing.
That sort of focus was inherent from day 1 - wandering monsters.
The answer to this is simple: if everyone wants to play an encounter with giants, why would we bother spending time on a trip through the Underdark? (Or from DC to Tokyo. Or whatver.) If you like that stuff, then good for you - knock yourself out! But if the players want to go to where the giants are, then a quick narration is fine.
This is my point, though: just because the players want to go where the giants are doesn't mean the game world should just let them, particularly when the intervening risks are already known and even still when they are not.
If the players want to go to the giants they will almost certainly get there at some point. But neither they nor I will know how much time (both fictional and real) it'll take until we play it out.
And you know this because . . .? What level are these PCs? How powerful are their healers? What other magic are they using? How heroic are the martial characters? And how long is it since they took an extended rest?
For whatever party I'm running I would know these things, but it wouldn't get to this point as I'd have played out the dangerous bits in full. But even if I didn't I could factor their abilities in if it came to a shorthand determination of what changes may have occurred during the trip.
Being down a healing surge is trivial - a good night's rest and you're set to rock.
There's so much assumption and projection in these comments, that they're very hard to take seriously as analysis of gaming techniques.
My main assumptions are:
- any game set in what could be a real-world setting with magic added on will at least try to maintain some form of general realism where and how it can;
- where maintaining this realism takes time (e.g. playing out the risky bits of a long journey) that time will be taken;
- that I have control over my character and its resources (e.g. I know how much money it has!)
- that real-world time is not a limiting factor
Like I said to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], this is all just nonsense. I posted, upthread, an actual play account of the session in my main 4e game where the PCs were in the mausoleum of the Raven Queen. At one point, one of them had a vision of the tarrasque breaking out of the earth onto the surface of the world.
In my Dark Sun game, the opening scene took place in an arena, where the crowd were responding to news of the death of the Sorcerer-King of Tyr.
Cool. This is the sort of thing I was asking about.
In a player-driven game the players hook the GM, not vice versa.
The Sorcerer-King of Tyr just died? That's not a hook, it's a trawling net!
Lanefan