Lonely Tylenol
First Post
This is something I strongly am against. Players only get to decide what they want to do, and with that have more narrative control over anything the DM has, as the DM only sets up chances.
I notice that you cut out my comments about granularity, which were largely the point of that post, so I'll repeat myself.
If the DM does not say, "the enemy glances at the paladin, giving you an opening," you don't get a chance to use an interesting ability that relies on such an opening. The DM never has any reason to do that, considering that it would be essentially a free giveaway. He never sets up chances, because there are no rules for setting up chances at that level of granularity. The monster is in this square or that. It is attacking or not. It has conditions X, Y, and Z applied by various spells and effects. But did it over-reach when it tried to hit you with its club, granting you an opportunity to knock it down? There are no rules for that.
4e specifically lets you say, yes, the monster over-reached. By blowing this particular encounter power, I get to say it did, and I get to hit it like so. 4e specifies details that 3e abstracts, and those details are things that make combat sound more fun when you're describing what it is that's going on.
Sure, you could ad-lib this stuff, but then you would have to deliberately avoid descriptions that give you mechanical advantages. In 3e, you could turn "I hit for 3 damage," into "I smash his face with my mace," but you couldn't then ask the DM whether smashing his face causes him to have any kind of penalties, as one might expect it would. Book of Iron Might included a whole stunt system to account for these things, because of the perceived need for them. In 4e, you could simply get a face-smashing power that smashes faces and applies some kind of negative status effect on top of it in accordance with what you might expect after smashing someone's face.
4e hands you a bunch of cool actions, and says "here, use these. It'll be awesome." You don't have to wait for your DM to remember to give you the chance to do something other than "I hit for 3 damage." You get to throw in an awesome thing whenever you like. And the DM is given his own awesome things in the Monster Manual. The entire game is geared toward fun descriptions of cinematic combat manoeuvres. I fail to see how that is a bad thing to encourage.