Is Combat Supposed to be Fun?

One of the features of Wizards' D&D is "fun, tactical combat." This has been the way since D&D 3.0 and every version since. Every one of these "D&D clones" we have these days advertises the same thing: fun, tactical combat.

And in every one of these games, including the "boiled down" 5E clones, combat still takes the same amount of time to complete. Combat in any "fun tactical combat" version of the game will take forever. Too much is gamified. Too many things that should not matter in the chaos of battle suddenly matter. Things that give you a false sense of "combat mastery" have no real parallel in real life. Tactics in the game would be stupid and silly if used in a real fight.

None of these "gamified combat rules" is anything close to reality.

Show me bardic inspiration or a bonus action in real life. They are fake, made-up, almost amateur-hour game designer "fantasy words" meant to make you feel smart that you know what they mean and the paragraphs of rules around them. When they are nothing close to reality, and they only exist in a strange "physics model" programmed into a pen-and-paper game.

We are riding "but this is a fantasy" horse way, way too far off the cliff, and venturing into pure absurdity.

In contrast, OSE, Shadowdark, and ADAD? Combat is not supposed to be gamified and fun. Thus, combat is blazingly fast. We have time in the session for roleplay and exploration, and figuring out how to survive, what we can carry, and the hirelings we want to bring along.

Without all these gamist combat rules —many of which are pure garbage —we can play the game and focus on the story.

People say, "When I play Shadowdark, I have more time for story, roleplaying, my character, and looking at the environment."

Of course, you are not wasting hours of every game session on fake gamified combat.

Sim games, like GURPS, are a different thing entirely, since the yardstick is reality, and we can benchmark the rules by how close they come to it. Yes, they have just as many rules as a gamified system, but their purpose is different, and they can be judged against real-world events.

Gamified systems that create a 500-page rulebook like the Tower of Babel?

I have my questions about them, and I am not afraid to call them out for being overdesigned and unnecessarily heavy.