What supplement are you referring to?
Supplement 1: Greyhawk
When Mr. Laws writes a detective game, it tends to be a detective game. Not a modern-world-simulator in which its suggested you might play a detective story. When he writes an action movie game, its an action movie game, not a universal-combat-simulator in which you might play an action story. When he writes a kids game its designed to appeal to kids and anything that might confuse a child or not be age appropriate in terms of complexity is axed. (...)
Of course, if what you really want is a medieval-world-total-simulator-with-magic, you're probably not going to like his stuff.
Whether by accident or design, however, previous editions were capable of catering to and delivering many different styles of play.
For example:
Strangely, this did little to deter people from taking great delight in critter-killing.
The game you're describing sounds slightly hypothetical to me, it just doesn't match the actual play experience of anyone I know.
Mallus is absolutely right in saying that plenty of people play D&D as little more than a fun little combat simulator. (He's wrong in assuming that somehow contradicts what I said. And he's hysterically funny when he claims that the style of D&D played by Gygax and Arneson is some kind of hypothetical non-entity. But I digress.)
But there were plenty of people who found that D&D also suited itself well to "Fantasy
ing Vietnam", "medieval-world-simulator-with-magic", hex-crawling, dungeon-crawling, realm ruling, army-leading, and so forth. (These all notably being play styles supported directly and explicitly by OD&D.)
This type of broad support also extended beyond campaign style. The radically different class designs also supported a broad style of individual play styles at a mechanical level. Prefer daily resource management? There's a class for that. Prefer little or no resource management? There's a class for that. Prefer a mix? There's a class for that.
By contrast, 4th Edition's classes are all built on the same chassis: They all have at-will, encounter, and daily powers. This is why the complaint that "all the classes are the same" keeps coming up. There are distinct differences between 4E classes, but they're differences drawn entirely within a single box (whereas 3rd Edition had lots of different boxes and could draw distinctions).
I don't want to turn this into an edition war, but I do think it's pertinent to discuss an area where I find 4th Edition lacking: As a friend of mine says, they chose a sweet spot and designed the game with a very tight focus on that sweet spot. If that was your sweet spot, then the Laws-like laser focus they employed in their design is fantastic. Not only is the entire game catering to you, but the tighter focus also made it possible to make the classes more balanced (since they only had to worry about balancing one style of play and one type of mechanics).
But if it wasn't your sweet spot, then the game you were playing completely disappeared.
If you had to pick a single style of play to focus on, then certainly combat is probably the way to go given the history of the game. But I would make two points here:
(1) 30+ years of D&D suggest that such focus is unnecessary for the success of the game. I like tightly-focused games, but I'm not convinced that the closest thing RPGs have to a mainstream product should be tightly-focused. It should inclusive, not exclusive.
(2) Combat has certainly always been an important part of the game, so if you were going to choose a focal point then it probably makes the most sense to focus on combat (particularly since, as a company, you still want to keep selling those highly profitable miniatures).
OTOH, if you consider D&D's primary competition to
World of Warcraft and other video games, then focusing on combat makes no sense whatsoever. That's the one style of play in which D&D simply can't compete with video games: They can give you the exact same gameplay wrapped in awesome graphics and delivered without the need for getting together a group of your friends (although it can support that, too).
So I go back to what I said: I think D&D's historical strength has been built on both brand strength (which is unchanged) and its broad appeal. So I think if Rouse is serious about returning some of that broad appeal to the game's design, then that's good for the game.
