What I hate about this no edition war BS is that it assumes that we cannot have logical discourse about different gaming systems or different gaming styles. Your response (highlighted for effect) sums up why I feel open and mature discussion only benefits the community. Because I like your rational. It works for you and your group. That's all that really matters. I may use it if the time should come.
The next question is why does the PC only get to use it once a day?
Well, the "edition wars" tend to not lead to open and mature discussions but mud-slinging, concealed insults and "my playstyle is better then yours".
There is still room for discussion of game mechanics - but anytime you try to add "value judgement" or ascribing motives or character traits to them, you run into trouble. (That's why "video-gamey", "dumbing down" are all bad ways to describe any change.) And this happens way too often.
Saying that 4E powers can be best described as a meta-game mechanic giving the player narrative control over the game world does not contain any value judgement. That you prefer this because you enjoy having or granting this kind of control is the kind of subjective judgement that's fine.Saying that you don't like it because it brings you "out-of-character", thinking about metagame concepts also seems fine. But after that, there is area where people like to generalize and might talk about stuff like "only power-gamers want to take away the DMs power or only control freaks don't like narrative game mechanics" where you run into trouble.
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I miss the story of D&D and I see less of it now. Truth be told there was not much more in 3e. But at least there your character's abilities weren't limited to combat choices. Skills and skill challenges don't count to me.
Hiding your opinion in spoiler blocks won't help. People can still read it. As an extreme example: I can't put insults into spoiler blocks and hope to go unnoticed (or later tell the moderations that I put in spoiler blocks - only people that wanted to be insulted would be able to read it).
And your "spoiler" part is exactly one of the things that incite controversy, because any 4E fan just can see it as a falsehood.
Every character can learn skills, and most of them have non-combat applications. And spellcasters (or anyone with the Ritual Caster feat) can also learn rituals that are not related to combat stuff. And that are just the "character building" choices. If I look at the class advancement tables in 3E, I don't see more non-combat abilities then in 4E. Wizards in 3E might use their class advancement to learn non-combat utility spells, but Wizards in 4E can use role-playing to learn new rituals - also non-combat utility spells.
And outside of plain character build mechanics - Quests can serve to motivate stuff outside of "kill monsters and take their stuff". One of a player characters quest might become finding a woman for life - or just seducing the princess of the local kingdom. Another might be finding your long-lost brother. Another might be ending a quarrel between two Dwarven clans. And another might be disbanding an Elven Court, so that your hogbolin allies can use the confusion to conquer their Feywild home.
For some of these quests you might skill challenges, others might be way more complex, consisting of multiple challenges and combats - and others might be resolved without using any dice roll at all...
Sometimes I think people are looking in the wrong places for finding the "role-playing" parts of the game. But maybe people just have a very different idea on what promotes role-playing and what doesn't that I just can't hope to find any common ground. I don't know.
