clearstream
(He, Him)
It sounds like we're united in desiring to emerge fiction from game, but with differing tolerances for how that works. In the past I have used 'everyone-declares, then everyone-acts' and it felt bad (to our group) to find player declarations stymied by game state on their turn. We kept having to allow corrections. Similarly, and responsive to @pemerton's point, I can see the justice of losing tempo with initiative, but have other motives - such as avoiding the possibly punitive feeling, 'go second and lose tempo' result.Combat in D&D hinges on some concrete parameters that players are going to base their next decisions on, and that fiction doesn't get generated till the end of the round in the best case.
In the worst case it's generated by turn, which I guess can preserve the presence of fiction and fictional decision points, but at this point we've just changed the fiction to be 'turn based fiction', which isn't really any better than fictionless IMO.
I would dislike emerging our fiction on a per-turn basis if that shattered suspension of disbelief for me. My play would risk becoming 'fictionless' because sans suspension of disbelief my fiction is disrupted. Does that then capture the essence of your concern?
A third group might choose not to over-think it. I guess you know about oddities such as that you cannot see colour at the edge of your vision. Your brain glosses over that with an impression of colour. It plays similar tricks with the timing of events. We can emerge our fiction on a per-turn basis and allow ourselves to gloss over oddities when they surface. Or to put it another way, a vast number of omissions, elisions, and quixotic events arise in RPG play. The question is not whether the rules make sense, but do they make sufficient sense for us to go along with them? I think you rightly imply with "when", that this isn't a binary - the rules might make sufficient sense most of the time. Meaning that the cost of patching over the cases where they don't isn't worth paying unless those cases are common and (to you) egregious.The first group will overrule things in the name of the fiction when the abstractions of the rules do not make sense.
The second group will ignore the fiction because the rules and the rules (and they like the minigame of combat for it's own sake, and possibly even the fact that is provides a break from thinking about the fiction)
For reasons, that fighter couldn't get to the door before the orcs. There isn't anything objectively fictionless about that. Yet it might not be the fiction we desire, and could jolt us out of disbelief. I can appreciate concerns like @FrogReaver's, which seem to essentially be saying that the rules do not make sufficient sense for him to go along with them. Assuming I have captured that correctly?