In this day and age we don't leverage the tools we have on hand. Computers offer an excellent way to track, verify, and manipulate data but we use surprisingly little of that in traditional table-top roleplaying. One area that is interesting is with that with these added capabilities we are also ignoring having rules in our game that would be a nightmare without computer management but trivial with it.
Equipment Condition: yeah your game might have rules for it and they are ignored 90% of the time.
Encumbrance: mostly ignored.
Lighting: mostly ignored or workarounds are made so ridiculously easy that it becomes a non-issue outside of special situations.
Fighting Stance: mostly ignored, some games approach this a bit but most really ignore it.
Footing: yeah this sounds picky but the course of entire nations and all the history that followed for hundreds of years was tied to who had better shoes (or took them off) at a particular battleground.
Food and Drink: this is usually just an encumbrance tax and as such gets ignored about as much as encumbrance does.
Fear and Courage: some games express this really well, but many don't remotely come close. Player agency... blah blah blah. History and fiction is full of people discovering they are much braver or far less brave than they imagined they were, why not roleplaying games?
Weather: unless the scenario is trying to freeze you or possibly fry you it's always relatively pleasant weather....boring.
Alchemy: is it really hard to catalog and track magical substances and how they react to each other? No, but we generally just don't.
History: you don't need a boring document drop to establish a campaigns history but shouldn't it be possible to answer things like "Who's the King's Heir?" and "Who was the King when you were young Grandpa?"? This is just keeping records, records we mostly ignore.
Campaign Calendars: almost nothing on this ever gets done, really easy to track with computer assistance. "Oh it's the 5th of Dragon Nock that means the folks in Menlo Valley will be preparing for the feast of Saint Dobbie"...that's the sort of throw away line that calendar keeping allows a GM to use that will add so much to campaign verisimilitude and setting development that again doesn't require a huge document drop.
Clothing: yes characters in a campaign are often wearing clothing and outside of buying them on the equipment lost this is ignored most of the time. Would you really go to the library in July wearing your flak-jacket, underwear and riding boots? Clothing has been used to define people as long as we have had people in fiction and real life... what people wear has a lot to do with who they are in pseudo-historical societies, and we ignore it way too often.
Different Coins: I hate generic coins , I understand why a rule set may have to be generic but it's an area of world-building and simulation that gets ignored an awful lot. Yes it may be a tad cumbersome to keep track of the value 30 Minosaxian Gildenmarks compared to 22 Pineland Royales... unless you had ready access to a machine that keeps track of data and does speedy calculations.
Do all these ideas have a place in every fantasy roleplaying campaign? NO. But is every fantasy roleplaying game identical? NO.
We have computers in our pockets, hands, or at arms reach most of the day and yet our games seldom take advantage of these devices. Old School or New School the advantages computers and their cousins offer for record keeping and game play are often ignored. We should step up our game and really leverage these tools.
