An RPG character doesn't have free will either, as one of many consequences of being a purely imaginary being.
I mean that a PC differs from a character in a novel or movie by having a will independent from that of the story teller. The story teller of a movie can have all his characters do whatever he likes. But Riddick's counterpart - as the protagonist - in an RPG is a player character controlled by a story collaborator and thus has independent will in a way that the movie version of Riddick does not.
In an RPG in which the player of "Riddick" fights with a cup, victory may not be pre-ordained. But it's not hard to design and run an RPG such that the player, using his/her free will, has a reason to fight with a cup rather than a sword.
I did not say it wasn't.
This was because the elf warrior (and the player playing him) wanted to prove a point about the cutural superiority of elves to thuggish humans. I could easily imagine a Riddick variant of that, in which the warrior wants to prove a point about his abiity to beat of thugs with nothing but a metal cup.
Sure, in which case, the mechanical inferiority of the cup in the setting helps make that point.
This isn't true. Off the top off my head I can think of four RPGs without weapons tables: Marvel Heroic RP, Fate, HeroQuest revised, and Maelstrom Storytelling. In none of them is a tea cup the equal of a bazooka - for instance, a character wieding a tea cup can't make the same action declarations that a character wielding a bazooka because only delivers explosives at range.
There are a couple of ways you evade the point in saying this. I'm not familiar with all of those systems, but in general they depend on a social contract to assign value to weapons only if it is reasonable to agree that they are assets within the setting. Thus, if you were trying to run a non-comic game, but one with a certain seriousness, you'd not have a die or trait assigned to the possession of an object which lacked utility as a weapon and in general the story teller would rule by fiat that that trait generally didn't apply to declarations of intent to do damage. Certainly within those systems you could declare things like 'Beware my Rubber Chicken' gave some advantage in combat equivalent to "I love my trusty shotgun ole Bessy." but the point is in practice players know not to do that and game masters don't respect attempts to violate the setting guidelines. Thus, holding a bazooka in Cortex Plus might generate an extra asset die in a way that holding a rubber chicken would not, or having a sword might create some advantage in a fight that holding a limp wet noodle or a bundle of clover didn't.
However, in such systems you are highly reliant on the game masters to respect and interpret the mechanics in light of the setting supposedly being emulated as the rules themselves aren't actually doing the job of genera emulation.
For example, you declare, "Only the bazooka delivers explosives at range." But this is problematic on several levels. First, if I can declare I punch and kill someone with my old tin cup, then I can certainly declare that I use my old tin cup as a lethal throwing weapon to crush the target's head or smash a building. Without mechanics that say, "Bazookas deliver destructive damage better than thrown tin cups", which the rules in fact do not say, you are leaving it up to fiat for the GM to say, "No." Secondly, Bazooka's are not anti-personal weapons. They in fact deliver explosives in the form of a shaped charge, which is just about basically harmless to anything it doesn't actually directly hit. The blast radius of a 3.5 inch bazooka in most game terms and certainly in abstract systems is negligible enough to be nonexistent. So now, without a weapons list, you are requiring the GM to not only know the properties of bazookas, but for the players to foreknow how the DM will rule on those properties. Will the bazooka behave realistically, or will it behave like a Hollywood special effects explosion with about 80 gallons of gasoline poured down to create a huge fireball around the point of the blast? And in any event, if it behaves realistically and is effectively a single target weapon, what makes such an item particularly more effective than a thrown tin cup except GM fiat? After all, in a system that depends on descriptors and makes the effectiveness of attacks depend according to the rules solely on the descriptors of the person making the attack, thrown tin cups are pretty much the same as shaped charge bazookas until the GM throws his hands up and says, "Look. You are breaking the social contract here. We are supposed to be making a certain sort of story, and you are abusing the game mechanics."
Which again shows that such systems are far more than the rules written on the paper once they go into play, but instead contain a vast number of unknown, unwritten, and at times unknowable house rules such as, "Bazookas have a blast radius and so you can propose effecting multiple targets in the blast.", or "Attacks do damage only if they use a weapon the GM deems can reasonably do lethal damage to the target." - which means that thumbs and tin cups might be out depending on the GM, effectively having been granted a damage modifier of 0.
Ad hoc rules are still rules and they are for being ad hoc no less complicated than formally stated ones. If your answer is, "Well yes, but in those systems you are expected to make up ad hoc rules to handle weapons.", then you've conceded the point that the particular characteristics of a weapon can and often do enhance your goal of creating a good story. Writing them down so that everyone is in agreement about what they are and has reasonable expectations about game physics isn't bad for a game, particularly one in which combat and weapon play will occur regularly in the story.
Incorporating weapons speed, DEX stats, vs armour, etc into combat resolution is a choice in design. Not a requirement.
Sure. I absolutely agree with that. But that comes a long way from Wicks point. Wick argues that incorporating such things into a design is a choice to create a game that isn't a role playing game, but a complicated board game.
