I wrote the OP in this thread. It was not any sort of criticism of free kriegsspiel; it was an analysis.
And someone else turned this into a thread about FKR. Which is fine by me.
I think I would find it helpful if someone who thinks they "get" FKR better than me would identify some of the rules-heavy systems that are the objects of its critique. As I've said, 3E D&D seems to me to be the core of it; but are there other systems that are also being had in mind?
Not far upthread
@Numidius suggested that D&D-style spells are compatible with FKR. Can RQ be played in a FKR-adjacent fashion?
Anyway, it seems time to mention Vincent Baker on cubes and clouds: a list of those blogs is
here, and here's the one I know best:
anyway: 3 Resolution Systems.
Obviously FKR is very hostile to cubes-to-cubes resolution (D&D hit points; WotC D&D stop-motion initiative; at least some interpretations of the action economy and PC abilities that affect it more generally; damage-on-a-miss, which tends to undercut Baker's treatment of "I hit" as a cubes-to-cloud relationship; etc). They love cloud-to-cloud.
It's the attitude towards cubes-to-cloud that I'm unclear about, because it is sometimes called for but there is a least an intermittent hostility to systematisation, though not a uniform hostility. (The AW-flavoured FKR clearly has a systematic mechanical framework, of rolling dice whose size reflects fictional likelihoods of prevailing in a given sort of contest.)