And here is where I think we fundamentally disagree. I do want to point out, that I don't think these situations require a unique point of game design in every instance, I think an interesting game emerges from their iteration, not from having a set of unique mechanics applied to all of them individually.
I don't think, for the record, that encounters and obstacles should be designed intentionally as intricate puzzles in the sense you're saying, I think that will happily all live in a resolution system that exist ahead of time. A castle isn't a problem to solve unless a player decides it is one; arguably "things in the setting" are more like toys and the actions available to players are the child's hand they can use to manipulate them.
I think a ton of that work is offloaded on having iterative and variable goals. The game design work underlying an interesting tactical board game and an RPG are similar, but I think the need for each decision in the board game is necessarily higher as you don't have any motivation outside of that specified by the game to fall back on. Players uniquely get to care about anything they want inside an RPG, which provides meaning and context to their actions more broadly than say, the victory conditions in Spirit Island, which are set ahead of time, and only loosely mapped to fiction.
That and you have generally want to wrap up your board game in a few hours, which means the decision making must necessarily be much tighter and engaging, vs. the months-years of playtime you might have in an RPG.
You know I don't actually disagree about this point, I just don't think the link is where everyone is putting it with a skill challenge. The situation and goals are the interesting fictional elements that make RPGs engaging, not deciding my course of action. That's entirely gameplay, and that's entirely mediated by character immersion. My character wants something, there is a situation I need to resolve to get the something, now I play a game to get there. The first two elements are the fictional connection, not the bit where I decide what I'm doing.
I screamed loud and hard in the 5e playtests that we needed objective skill DCs, and I of course did not get them. My preferred resolution system would specify the actions that are possible with each skill, the time they take, relevant modifiers, and the difficulty of static checks, opposed checks, and so on. I would be fine with a system that didn't necessarily use randomness in skill evaluation. Perhaps instead your level of skill just opens various declarations, and you use those to overcome whatever challenges are set your way. I haven't yet found a diceless system that isn't incredibly loose with its available set of actions, but who knows, design might get there.
Or perhaps our fighter is specialized in jumping, and has specifically sought this wall as an entry point to the keep, because being able to leverage jumping is more effective for this fighter than other actions, and by making a leap he's avoided a series of other possible failure points.
What you're doing right there is the thing I'm talking about. You've flattened the scenario thus that any approach has roughly the same value, and all that changes is the description. I mean, not to play into the meme, but I'm saying I want to be able to "win at D&D" in the very specific and limited context of any given challenge. I want to be presented with a situation and then through my choices come out of that situation in a state I think is better than some alternative. Or, fail to do so, which can be equally interesting.
I mean, we might be at the agree to disagree point here. I really do believe it's possible to provide players a comprehensive set of available actions that have discrete fictional mapping, thus that they can use that palette to approach a wide variety of fictional situations.
And yeah, I always found SCs kind of baffling in the context of 4e, as they very much lean toward the underlying spirit of your "rulings" style play, just more mechanistically than has been historically the case. Why shouldn't the out of combat game be as specified as the in-combat one? It's always been weird to me that the edition arguably most lauded for pushing player agency in combat was so happy to have a low-agency game outside of it.
Yeah, I'm criticizing very specifically SCs as a not particularly engaging tactical game, and claiming that such a tactical game can and should exist inside skill systems (and out-of-combat RPG resolution more broadly). SCs are obviously a 4e invention and very related to that system, but I generally have found that much virtue that gets ascribed to them is not intrinsic to their structure.
