All you "I'll do the work, just tell me what your character's doing" DMs out there - why do you run d20/D&D and not, say, Fudge? What value do you get out of a detailed system if your players don't engage with the options the detail affords them?
That is a very good question.
First, understand that I've run GURPS before. And not only GURPS, but GURPS with the full GULLIVER scale enhancements and many of the associated house rules. So obvious I get alot out of having a detailed system. But what?
The heart of your problem is that you are assuming that the players don't engage with the options that the detail affords them. I'd say that quite the opposite occurs. A roll player never fully engages the options available in the rules. Either he doesn't know the rules, or his theory about how to win prevents him from doing things he things don't enhance that ability to win. But a role player not only fully engages the rules, but in fact is consistantly stretching them because he's trying to do things that the rules often cover only vaguely. He doesn't know that there are limits to the rules, and I do my best to try to hide that fact from them.
Imagine you are a player in my campaign, and I've managed to hide what the rule system is from you. We created a character together, but I've hid the character sheet from you and all you have is some notes about the character. How are you going to play the game? You seem to think that it's impossible to engage with the environment without knowing the rules.
If you believe that, I doubt you've ever really role played. You've played a tactical wargame, and you are probably pretty good at it, but you probably don't do alot of role playing. You are engaged with a rules set and not with cognitive a theory about the universe (real or fantastic).
Deprived of a rules set, you engage the environment in precisely the way that you would mentally engage the real world. You maintain a theory about what the world looks like - and it is my job as a DM to make that theory accurately reflect my theory about the world to a sufficient degree that we understand each other - and based on that theory of the world, you then take an action with hopefully some foresight about what the consequences of success or failure might be based on your own experiences with the real world and your assumptions about the consequences of real world actions. And this is where having a good detailed system comes in. The better that the system models the real world (or at least models peoples theories about the real world), the more likely that the player can use his theories about the real world to predict the behavior of the world in the game.
For myself as a game master, having a detailed set of rules helps generate a high degree of consistancy in the game. Essentially, you might call this the system's 'fairness'. A detailed rules system is designed to give people a fair break without relying on alot of DM fudging. The more detailed the rules, the more likely it is that certain actions will take on a predictable character. With a game like FUDGE - or even a game system like Storyteller - the consequences of actions can be very unpredictable because the system doesn't really promote consistancy and detail in the resolution of actions. It's designed to promote rapid play, and that's a worthy goal in its own right, but I so long as I can play cleanly and quickly with a more detailed system I will because its actually far more stressful for me to try to continually 'fudge' what a fair allocation of success and failure rates should be in a given situation if I lack rules guidance. At that point, I've got too much control over the game and it acquires a much less consensual and coopertive character.
I left 1st edition D&D about 10 years ago with a promise to myself that I'd never play D&D again, because the rules system was so inconsistant and so poorly modeled my expectations about the world that as my gameplay matured the system increasingly became a drag on the game. One particular incident with a rules lawyer that continually demanded that the rules be followed even when the results that they produced where nonsensical was the last straw. I moved on to GURPS because it gave me a system where I could follow the rules consistantly. I moved back to D&D under the D20 because it gave a better mix of fast resolution and detail. Essentially, D20 incorporated alot of the house rules that I'd been accumulating over the years, but cleaned up the system alot and addresed all sorts of problems that I'd had but which I hadn't struck on good a solution for. I can run a 1st edition game that has alot of versimulitude, but its just fantastically easier to do in D20 and the players have alot more options.
For the record though, I'd never want to run a game where the player's didn't even see their character sheet (especially after the first session or so). That's just too much work. Over time, I expect characters to learn enough of the rules that they can make choices about how they want thier characters to develop and understand basically what options that development open up. A spell caster doesn't need to know exactly what thier spells do, but they do need to have a general enough of an idea that they can elect to cast the spells.
I think you have exactly the wrong theory about the game. In my experience, players that don't know the rules and aren't relying on a theory about the rules, but rather on a theory about the game universe are far more creative in the application of thier abilities and far more interactive with the universe than the players that are relying on thier knowledge of the rules. Players that base thier actions on thier knowledge of the rules are predictable, undramatic, and uncreative. They don't turn over tables to provide themselves cover, they don't have alot of couriousity about information that isn't provided as the result of a die roll, they don't talk to goblins that they meet in dungeons, they don't wander the world with a sense of caution and wonder because they know, "Heck, that thing has only 6HD and we can take it." I don't know any roll player that starts there first round action with attempts to parley.
And in my campaign world(s), roll players die horribly. You bring a min/maxer munchkin twink into my campaign and he'll die within two sessions and keep dying every two sessions for as long as he plays. His problem is that he's got one tool - and its a very good tool and he's very good at using it - but he thinks that because he has a hammer the solution to every problem is to hit it. And from my perspecitive as a DM whose primary enjoyment of the game comes from interacting with a group of imaginitive and witty players, a roll player's sterile rules description of what he does is completely boring and adds nothing to the story.
