Tell me true, if it were an OSR game would you make the presumption that the situation couldn't be arbitrated based on those conditions listed even if there were no express formulas for calculating them? Or would you presume the GM is more than capable of deciding those those things on their own?
Hey now -- you began by telling me that my estimation of people's math skills was too high. Now you are telling me that my estimation of people's improvisation is too low. To answer your question, I presume people can do math, and I presume GMs want rules so they don't have to decide everything on their own.
I believe that the average player can do the math in Ascendant because *I have playtested it* for 2 years. It plays fast and easy and no one has problems.
I believe that many GMs do NOT like to have to improvise answers for complex situations. They don't want to "make it up". They want to get it right. I believe this because I run a thriving community of ACKS judges, and the most frequent questions I get as a game designer is to answer how to resolve complex situations in order to best simulate reality.
The history of every RPG system (and every wargame) is to trend towards more rules, because as the game is played more, people want to know how those situations get resolved. So to answer your question, when I design OSR games, I give the rules for the GM so he *doesn't have to* improvise the answers. That's why I designed ACKS, and not e.g. Dungeon World or OSE. And Ascendant and not ICONS.
Access to water? GMs call if there's enough around. Default in a city with a fire department is "Yes" for me though since the whole point of the fire hydrants is to make sure the fire department has a enough water to fight fires with. If there's a shortage of water though, the GM can just throw a penalty on the check for there not being enough water to just outright drench the entire place.
If you're happy with everything being a GM's call, then my games are "over-designed" for your purposes. It's the equivalent of offering Dwarf Fortress to someone who just wants to play Bard's Tale.
The people who buy my games love that they can pick up a book by me and find the answer to questions that come up in their games and know the answer will be *right* from the point of simulation and verisimilitude. In ACKS, you can pick up the books and find out "how long would it take a siege engineer to build a catapult?" "how many 1st level henchmen can I hire in a city of 4,000?" "how much does it cost to buy a baby wyvern and how long will it take to grow to maturity?" All those answers are in the books. Sure, a GM *could* make them up on the fly, but I've done the work for you.
For good or ill, I am an exceptionally meticulous designer and world-builder. When I built Capital of the Borderlands (for ACKS), I went through the entire city of Pompeii to map every type of building down to the whorehouses. Then I made an Excel spreadsheet of the number and size of each type of building, and then used that to guide the building of the city of Cyfaraun. It took probably 40 hours of research just to do that. You may never care that the number of whorehouses in Cyfaraun is the correct amount for the population of an ancient ersatz Roman city, but I care, and people who buy my games care a lot. It's "real".
So, turning back to this. I would never, ever, run a scenario involving fire-fighting as a major event where I hadn't thought all this through. And I like games that afford me *rules* for that. I don't like games that expect the GM to just make it up. Your mileage varies, and that's fine. My games aren't going to appeal to you.
The building matters and has stats, they're just not especially relevant to putting out a fire; just to how quickly its going to burn down.
That's fine... if you don't care about reality. But in reality, that's incorrect. The flammability of a building absolutely determines how hard it is to put out a fire. Buildings are categorized by fire departments based on material used and contents contained within, which is used as a variable in the official firefighting guides. I know this because I researched it and modeled it. The mechanics of Ascendant are such that if you model an actual fire engine using an actual fire hydrant's flow rate, against various buildings of known size, material, etc., the fires get put out in the time the fire-fighting manuals say they would.
I'm guessing you don't care, and that's fine. I do care. And this level of coherence is awesome if you care about it.
Its only two stats are basically size and toughness. A building with paper walls (toughness 0) is going to burn pretty quick... a building built of reinforced unobtanium (toughness 30+) isn't on fire in the first place, at worst its coated in accelerants that will burn off eventually leaving it unharmed.
The fire's rank? Again GM's call based on what's burning... just like they'd assign a difficulty to any task a PC attempts its a judgement call; there's various guidelines out there.
Pause for a sec. Imagine if people ran D&D5E the way you're talking about running a fire-fighting scenario. "How hard is it to hit the dragon?" "That's just a judgment call for the GM." "What's the intensity of a fireball?" "That's just a judgment call for the GM." And so on. But that doesn't happen! Why? It certainly could.
I have a heuristic: You can tell what a game is about based on how many pages of rules it devotes to the topic. A typical RPG is about combat, and you can tell, because it has a huge combat chapter. A typical RPG has almost no real rules for anything else, because all it's about is combat. In my opinion "that's a judgment call for the GM" means "we don't think this is important". Anything a game thinks is important, it provides rules for. Cyberpunk, humanity loss, head shots, shock saves. Call of Cthulhu, sanity checks. Etc.
One of the things Ascendant is "about" is saving the day. So it takes saving the day, like fighting fires, or stopping earthquakes, as seriously as D&D 5E takes combat. It has 50 pages of rules for dealing with emergencies ranging from fighting fires to stopping floods to diverting asteroids to defusing bombs to settling hostage crises. We've done entire sessions of Ascendant that are just superheroes doing emergency response - massive earthquake strikes Haiti, with fires, collapsed buildings, etc. And it plays with as much detail and mechanical support as D&D5E can give to a combat, for instance.
So to my ears, your answers are just different ways of saying "I don't think saving the day is worth having rules for". And that's fine. But one of my design goals was to have rules for saving the day. Rules as robust as combat rules.
All of that though ultimately comes down the very basic PC rolls 1d20+water control vs. a DC based on the fire's intensity/rank and the GM doesn't need in depth formulas for that because it ultimately comes down to the GM setting the stage as whether the want the Water Controller's efforts to be easy or hard, fluff or impossible.
Ah-hah! Now we come to the crux of it. This is where I part ways with you philsophically. I don't run games based on "whether I want the [player's] efforts to be easy or hard, fluff or impossible." Never, ever. I don't take that into consideration at all. The world is what the world is. It doesn't change for the players. What happens is what would happen given how the world is. (I hate to bring up the awful Forge/GNS theory, but it provides a useful heuristic here. You sound like you are a "gamist". I'm a simulationist.)
Everything else is just flavor text used to justify the final DC the player is rolling against just like every other RPG ever.
See above. I couldn't disagree with you more philosophically. There's all the difference in the world between a DC that is realistically grounded in the physics of the world, and just making shit up -- if, like me, you care about simulation. If you don't care, and it's all fluff to you, then Ascendant's not the game for you.
Please note I'm not trying to claim your philosophy is wrong. It's just not mine, so you and I aren't going to see eye to eye. Thanks for the discussion.