While this may be Off Topic for the question posed in this thread, it seems to be something folks were interested in so I have tried to re-create the core of that other thread here.
Please do not derail the original thread idea - please post YOUR definition of "Role-playing" for Johnn's data gathering or writing research.
My comments about role-playing from the other thread collected together and lightly edited for context.
Please direct message me if you have questions or would like additional discussion or clarification on this.
Meanwhile, in another thread:
Johnn mentions that "theater of the mind" combat has "less fidelity" due to lack of distance and spatial awareness and such.
This is a topic near and dear to me because its a related to a key design decision I made for my personal tabletop rules system.
In simplistic terms, my opinion is that too many RPGs are far too heavily bound to a tabletop war game, which makes sense given the origins.
Breaking away from the tabletop war game by abstracting leads to the "lack of fidelity" that Johnn notes.
So here's some of my thinking and experience around this, and ways to possibly solve them, based on my personal game design.
The Problem with Wargames in RPGs:
When the combat starts, all too often, the role-playing stops.
This is the irritant that leads to people trying "other ways"
In many game implementations, the war game is "OOC" - the players have a "deity's eye view" of the situation - and that view colors their tactics and actions.
It breaks immersion in the combat in subtle yet powerful ways.
Second, the war game is heavily tied to and driven by specific mechanics which encourage "maximizing damage" and much meta or OOC consideration and trickery, which also serves to draw off role-playing and replacing it with "I roll to do damage"
If that is your fun - then by all means follow it.
In recent times I got interested in exploring the alternate space of role-playing combats without the war game core.
One part of that exploration comes from finding mechanics that support that view better - which I found means more abstraction.
Rather than a tactical combat "state" with lots of conditions, modifiers and such - each encouraging meta behaviors to optimize when to use them... what if you strip all of that back to things that the *character* - not the player - can influence "in character"
At the core, that comes down to some sort of skill they've learned and practiced, some choice of weapon, some choice of armor, and moves they make in the fight.
The first 3 are still fundamentally mechanics based, but the last leads to one possible way to improve the theater of the mind - changing the moves and more importantly HOW you make moves in the fight.
In a war game, how do you plan your moves? Looking down at the map, you calculate based on the state of the battlefield and your options, decide, then move.
This has no relation to how the character in the combat would move.
A fundamental blockage to role playing in combats is partly as simple as just the difference between third-person view to first-person view.
Imagine your combat first as a top down map system like Warcraft style battles - compared to the same battle in a first person shooter mode where you are looking through the eyes of the character IN the situation.
After all that wall of text, that's the first recommendation to improving the fidelity of "theater of the mind" combat is to imagine and describe it through the eyes of the character on the battlefield, rather than the eyes of the player over the battlefield.
I am sure many GMs do this instinctively, but new GMs may not have run into this idea yet and Johnns comment in the video reminded me of this.
If you are having a hard time picturing how to do this, the example I've used many times in my personal RPG design is to picture space combat in two ways:
If you see the ships - you're looking third-person or "top down" - Star Trek encounters between Enterprise and Romulans or Klingons are generally pictured this way - you see the ships in relation to each other and the battlefield.
But... Star Trek also shows the first-person view as the scene cuts to the bridge of the Enterprise where you see the battle situation from the crew's perspective within the ship.
Many tabletop games included detailed chapters on how to run combats "third person" - and less than a paragraph (if any at all) about how to do the same combats in first person. So which one will players choose? The one they read in the rules they paid for - and with so much there to assimilate... it easily can create the blind spot around translating that to first person view.
As time permits, a fun experiment with your current favorite game system would be to go through the war game rules provided and for each part, ask yourself if its third-person or first person - and if its not first person - ask yourself how you would do that first person from the character's point of view.
You may find, like I did, that the combat system can be stripped back to simply armor choice, weapon choice, and combat skill roles described entirely in first person - doing a single skill roll or an opposed skill roll also makes for super fast combats and with it all first person it can be very dynamic.
Space combat becomes reporting everything through sensors checks and communication/miscommunication and results of effects of attacks rather than "ship moves here and faces there"
