It's definitely important to decide
- what you want to take up time in game play, and
- how you want to distribute mechanical resolution and narrative resolution.
I talk a lot about conflict resolution, not combat resolution, when I talk about game system design. Resolving conflict tends to be a part of the game where people want random elements, such as dice-rolling, because that way there's an impersonal method of working out which of the five or six people around the table gets to decide how things are resolved. In many games, however, combat gets very detailed conflict resolution mechanics, while social conflict gets simplified conflict resolution mechanics, if any.
For example, making someone like you is often a single dice roll in most systems - whether that's a check against Looks in Dragon Warriors, or Diplomacy in 3rd edition D&D, or Charm in 5th edition HERO System. Beating someone unconscious with a club usually requires many more dice rolls - initiative, attack, armour bypass or damage, and so on.
That said, it's not necessarily as simple (or complex) as making social interactions have the same degree of mechanical complexity as combat. Another facet of this design challenge is that, in many games, social interactions are resolved narratively, and not mechanically. That is, the people around the table interact with each other, and decide (individually or collectively) how the story plays out.
This occasionally happens with combat as well, in my experience - particularly if a play session is running late, and everyone agrees that the PCs are going to win, so why spend 2 hours rolling all those dice to confirm that outcome? What I think people tend to unconsciously and uncritically accept is when a game system has many mechanics for combat, but not for social conflict. There's no good reason why combat with NPCs to resolve a conflict should be privileged with so much more detail than, say, negotiating or persuading those NPCs to change their position and resolve the same conflict.
One of the things I like about Dave Morris' concept of
stature is that it lends itself more to narrative resolution mechanics for all situations, including combat. When your noble knight has stature 5, she's likely to succeed in all her endeavours against her lower stature rivals - whether that's defeating all comers in the lists at the jousting, ignoring the poison in the enchanted apple that's supposed to turn her heart away from her loyalty to the king, or surviving the leap into the moat from the tower to escape the stature 8 sorcerer who poisoned the apple. It's a different way of thinking about conflict resolution, and one that is more explicitly narrative in mode.
Cheers,
Gary Johnson
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