Thanks Kanisatha, that sparked a thought in me.
In P&P Combat is where you lean back, wait for your turn (and maybe chat with your friends - depending on your personal play style) while glorifying all hit and dmg rolls and especially the crits while imagining just how awesome those blows all land and maybe describing to each other how and where exactly you want to cut the Enemy up, or just how nonchalant you look while decapitating hordes of lesser beings with each swing of your sword.
this can not be recreated in a single player game. some of the tactical stuff yes, but all the cheering for a crit or random explanation of where you want to hit the enemy are almost impossible to put into any game that is less than full SAO style VR.
Or in other words: Combat with automatic rolls that are not announced by a genuinely happy (or dejected) player is inherently less interesting than P&P combat.
usually the only goal of such combat is to survive and make sure the enemy is no longer willing to mess with the characters (make enemies with weak agency to fight to the death flee!) and just rolling that out is... boring. I'ts why i like automation in my single player combat, after i created my AI in my likeness (only better) i can sit back and enjoy watching the fight and continue on with the things where my agency really lies: exploring a bit, looting every nook and cranny (or not, if i were ever given incentive for not doing that like the D:OS cities.) and solving my own problems (the quest)
If the goal of the combat directly aligns with my own goal (normally named enemies) i am much more willing to play that whole combat subgame, but that is it. I am not that much of a combat kinda guy and I'd prefer it if combat was not the first, last and only otion in too many cases or the main way to gain experience.
Well put. And I think this is precisely where the dividing line is between TB and RTwP. The reason tabletop games are ALL TB (not just D&D and Pathfinder but also Monopoly and Scrabble etc.) is because when you have a group of people around a table playing a game, it HAS to be TB. There is no other possible mechanic. And if you then take that game to the computer medium and retain having a group of people playing it (co-op/multiplayer), it would continue to make sense to have the game be TB. But the moment that game on the computer medium becomes a single-player game, TB no longer makes any sense and in fact becomes EXTREMELY boring, tedious, annoying and frustrating.
So I think this debate is less about TB v. RTwP and more about co-op v. single-player. And because of the D:OS games, the co-op preferring gamers now take it for granted that RPGs should be all about co-op play and if someone (stupidly) wants to play the game single-player they can, but the game should be built and optimized for co-op play. This is where my reference to selfishness comes in. The people who are interested only in co-op play are being selfishly dismissive of the single-player side of the game.
