If you want the players to engage with politics, social positioning, war, and interpersonal relations, you should have robust rules for that and... in D&D, we don't. We have hand-waving. There should be ways for them to plan tactics and have special abilities around persuasion and intimidation, for example. In general there should be feats and class abilities that relate to these areas of play. There should be rules for use of resources on larger scale than small squad battles. And so on.
Our rules systems help assure that players have reasonable and interesting things to do within the context of whatever the action is, which effectively helps make sure everyone gets a bit of spotlight time. No rules? Unless the GM is very attentive, the bulk of play is apt to go to the most personally persuasive player, which is kind of bogus. The GM should have tools that help them organize play in a way where spreading the action comes out of the process of play.
I basically agree with this 1000%, but see below.
I don't really agree with this. Rules and robust structures are more useful for some things than others. Something like combat, IMO, needs more of that than politics or interpersonal relations. Larding those areas of play up with more rules and robust structures is, to me, detrimental to the game. OTOH, I think we could use some more rules and structure around exploration--I know these are all subjective preferences.
Yeah, there are plenty of games that can provide rip-roaring, intense, satisfying combat without robust or detailed structures for combat.
The frustration for some is that D&D
does provide that for combat, but not for much else. "Provide" is the wrong term, really, because it's clearly the game's mechanical focus.
Something just occurred to me: some games focus on combat mechanics because that's something we can't simulate at the gaming table very well. We can, however, simulate social interaction, and we've all probably spent at least some time out int he woods or what have you, so we can kind of extrapolate exploration. But most people have not been in even a safe and protected combat with swords and such. So we have all these rules for it, in games like D&D.
However, it's a good point about how some people are not outgoing or have acting skills, and how in 5E those players have a disadvantage compared to the more dramatic, role-playing, actor-y players. That's not the case with game combat: a less active or athletic player has no real disadvanatge compared to an athletic player with vast martial arts and weapons experience.
Anyway, it's interesting.