single-roll combat resolution eh? might be worth a try. im thinking 3 rounds of rolls and narrate the rest. trick is to leave your players feeling like they contributed to the final result. I guess if the overall outcome of the battle is still in doubt then make a 'final salvo' roll to decide which side/combatant wins.
Indeed - I suspect a single roll might be cutting it down too much for most players. Cutting it down to three rounds would give the players an opportunity to consider their tactics and choose the point where they either flee or press on...
The designer I mentioned speaks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPf13IWjlbU&t=955s
At the same time, most of the same players are OK with a single social skill roll that will decide the fate of thousands. The pen is not mightier than the sword, apparently :p
I wonder if the reason behind this is the lack of life-threatening consequences for social interactions (as opposed to combat). If a defeat in social interactions resulted in "you character is done for, only ritual suicide remains as an option, time to roll up a new character", I wonder if players would ask for a more detailed resolution (because dying from a single bad roll is not fun).
Consequently, if the outcome of combat is *not* life-threatening, going for a shortened resolution makes sense. It's like risk management - if the combination of threat probability and threat impact is low, you do not engage costly mitigation actions. If it is high, you do. I wonder if it is not the same for combat vs non-combat contests : if the contest has low stakes (impact), low probability of failure, or both, resolve it quickly. If the contest has significant stakes and probability of failure, detail the resolution. If the contest has goth high stakes and high probability of failure, it is a scenario or campaign plot, and the "resolution" is what the whole scenario or campaign is about :p
The problem with most RPGs (RM is far from alone in that respect) is that resolution is an all-or-nothing affair - there is no granularity. You have no official way of resolving a combat situation quickly if you thing spending more than five minutes on it is not worth the extra effort. You also cannot go into *more* details than the proposed resolution system if it's slow-motion bullet time. Conversely, you don't have a scaling resolution mechanism for non-combat situations either - it's typically either a single yes/no roll (most games) or a convoluted resolution system that is similar to the combat system (the GoT RPG social conflict system), but it's not scalable. The closer I know to a scalable system is the Skill Challenge system that was proposed in D&D4, but it is glossed over and lacks the gradual consequences that the combat system has - it's main saving grace is that it spurs the players to come up with inventive use of their skill set when faced with a challenge... if the GM allows deviation from the "prescribed" skill sets for the challenge.
In the end, the GM has to do almost all of the work for non-combat challenges resolution, while combat resolution provides a wealth of details.
As a side note, that's why I almost never do random encounters - since they are basically a waste of time for my style of gaming, I push them into the background - the ultimate scaling down is to omit them altogether. It's not that they don't happen, it's just that I don't talk about them because their severity (impact and probability of failure) is not significant enough to warrant spending time on them. I spend time on challenges, because they have significance - even if said challenge is "a patrol is scouting the area you're crossing to reach the prisoners' location. They seem to believe that someone is nearby. What are you doing ?" - for some, a patrol is a random encounter. For me, it is not, I never "rolled to see if there is a patrol". Releasing the prisoners is a challenge, and I set up events to increase the tension. There is nothing "random" in that, even if there might be the *illusion* of randomness.