Crazy Jerome
First Post
My 3E-fu is a bit weak, but is this really true? I don't think 3E had active metagame player resources like Come and Get It (pre-errata version), or overtly metagamed scaling DCs, or out-of-combat scene resolution (skill challenges), or combat maths (including in-combat healing) deliberately designed to produce a partcular pacing outcome.
One of 4E's "sins" is that it kept a lot of the mechanical underpinnings of 3E/3.5, cleaned them up, and then destroyed the illusion that more was there. 4E pulled the curtain back, and behind it was just some little old man pulling levers. This necessarily says something about those mechanical underpinnings in 3E/3.5, too.
People that already knew that about 3E/3.5 weren't, as a rule, terribly bothered by this. We've never much cared for "make a mess of the mechanics to conceal that they don't do much" school of design. So we shrugged, and got back to using the same flavor on top of the mechanics that we had always used. For others, it went less well, for various reasons, less about the D&D than themselves. And then there are always people who actually do like illusionism as illusionism, and thus naturally objected to it being stripped way. (This paragraph is not a claim to divide all those who like or dislike 4E into three categories, as some people will like or dislike 4E for other reasons.)
The 4E metagame resources you listed are disparaged as proxies and/or examples for this larger issue.