I see what you are saying, but personally I don't think that having some intricate logical puzzle of tactical skill to solve is going to ADD to an RPG. In fact I think it actually detracts!
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.
Meh, I don't really agree. D&D combat, even the 4e variety which was quite detailed and fairly tactical, isn't a GREAT wargame. I mean, I have done a lot of wargaming, I would not even bother for 2 seconds with a 5e-derived, or AD&D-derived, or 3.x-derived, tactical wargame. I might start with what is in 3.x or 4e, perhaps, but it would require a lot of refinement to be a passable combat game.
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.
I don't agree, because the gameplay and the fiction are inextricably linked in RPGs.
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.
So, your answer is, I don't think the game play of an SC is good on its own, so I will just remove all pretense that there is any game play at all? Because the alternative is 5e free-form skill checks, which has so little structure it cannot even be called a game by itself!
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.
I just don't think that SCs are flawed in this way. Supposing your example fighter... If he climbs the wall (Athletics) he's pressed for time. If he leaps the wall (this will require expending some sort of power probably) then he's out a resource. If he smashes through the wall he's probably taking some damage and making a lot of noise. Each of those will have fictional ramifications that will impact the likely options available going forward, both within the current challenge and later.
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.
And I just don't think you CAN make this hypothetical system you are talking about. It will, perforce, be largely detached from fiction (there will be few, if any, 'rightward arrows' as we say). I strongly doubt it will be very coherent WITH the fiction in most cases. I too find it ironic that you criticize 4e for being TOO ATTACHED to fiction, when practically every criticism ever of the system has revolved around precisely the opposite criticism.
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.
I understood
@Pedantic to be criticising 4e SCs for that, rather than 4e as an overall system. I think there was a comment that you could remove SC's and 4e would be fine. I could be mistaken.
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.