i will allow that if you had an unimaginative GM i can see how 4th might *maybe* make non-combat a little more irritating, but you're already screwed if you have an unimaginative GM anyway
I strongly disagree with that logic. That's like saying absolute monarchy is good, because if you have a cruel king, you're screwed anyway.
Don't pick apart this analogy too hard. It's imperfect. The point is - RPG are a game. Games have rules, and certain rules incentivise a certain kind of play. Saying that an imaginative GM fixes that is admitting that the rules by themselves do not do the job.
Or to put it another way - why have any rules, including combat rules? An imaginative GM can run a combat scenario without a single rule, surely.
What's that? Players take enjoyment from combat encounters *because* they're a meaningful interaction with the game's rules that the players and their characters' statistics have a measurable impact on, not just a made-up scenario that's meant to be entertaining?
Yes, I agree. Some players look at every game interaction in this way. D&D may be extraordinarily focused on combat, but it's been a game about exploration and discovery literally since its inception. Why apply a different logic to combat rules and non-combat rules? Why not say "eh, if the combat rules are bad, you just have an unimaginative GM"?
I don't even think 4E is *that* bad. But the argument that it's only combat that matters in D&D mechanics is a fallacious one in my book.
I'll admit to being biased. When tabletop RPG became popular in Poland around mid-1980s, a trend slowly emerged over the years of taking GM's impact on the game as all-powerful. Younger generations of players (including myself) snarkily call this "the Polish school of playing RPG", which includes GMs throwing the intended play (as set by the rules, but also by how the game is written) out of the window in the name of their "vision" whenever they deem it better for the "story". This style of play gives players very little impact on anything that happens at the table. I consider rules to be a tool for a player, not the GM, and the approach "why have rules, when the GM is good" to ultimately lead to, at best, an illusion of agency for players. So I fundamentally disagree that saying "rules are poor, but who cares, the GM will patch things up" is *ever* a good defense.
I like 5E *much* better than, say, 3E in part because the game doesn't feel to me as if it was written to have excuse plots from one dungeon to another, or from one combat encounter to another. It's not just the rules, it's also how the game is written, how proposed adventures are structured, and so on. And I feel I'm plenty imaginative as a GM, and I've ran tabletop RPG for more than 20 years. Again - I don't think it's about GM skill whether a game incentivises a certain kind of play or not. If a certain interaction *is* part of the game and there *are* rules for that part, it should work well. The level of skill of a GM is irrelevant, especially since most new people getting into RPG *will* be starting with D&D, so the game should be ESPECIALLY well-equipped to handle novice GMs.
As to combat... as I said, I don't hate 4E, but the D&D players I've known who do not enjoy the edition are often of the opinion that the interaction with rules during combat in 4E is not as interesting as it might be, especially with regard to player character progression. One person put it this way:
In D&D 4E, every roll in the game, no matter where you are in the campaign, the level of your character and what is happening, is a "you have 55% chance to succeed" roll. It doesn't matter what you do, because the progression of player characters and opposition is linked so tightly together, levelling up your characters becomes meaningless
I think the person was exaggerating for effect, but I do think it's what criticism of 4E often boils down to. I haven't ran any games in this edition, so I don't know how accurate it is. But it seems to be a common complaint. Whether it's accurate I don't know, but saying the game is just about combat anyway is not a convincing defense of the rules anyway, in my opinion.