However, the designers were clear that D&D isn't a game about talking to faeries; it is a game about combat. And it shows.
I credit 3e with having the first system in place (complex skill checks) to deal with non-combat encounter conflicts in a satisfying mechanical way. 3e provided DMs with excellent tools to make a game that is precisely about talking to faeries, and to make that "action" meaningful in game terms.
I really just see this in a very different way. Cumbersome and needless rules for something as intuitive and fundamental to the human experience as social interaction should usually just get the heck out of my way. And then when you get into something as unintuitive as combat, rules should be available to make it fair for all participants.
I don't actually need rules to adjudicate a conversation with faeries "fairly" or in an interesting way. Negotiation will work there. It is sorta nice to have in-game Diplomacy skills or whatever to control for or replace entirely the varying real life skills of people that would unbalance the situation in a game that focused extensively on those things, but it's not really necessary. YMMV, and obviously does. Conversation is also inherently interesting as long as the ideas being exchanged are good, engaging, and/or humorous.
But to run combat in a fair way that is also interesting to use... I need a system.
A game about talking to people is not worth money to me. I can handle that on my own. But to simulate combat... a game about combat with engaging and interesting mechanics is critical.
However, the skill challenge system in 4e, as it first appeared, needed a lot of work. It was simply bland and meaningless, with the die rolls having no real effect apart from toting up a score. As the means to move the story along to the next exciting combat sequence, it was a reasonable tool. As a means to exciting resolution in and of itself, not so much.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that skill challenges in 4e, as initially presented, were a pale shadow of more robust mechanics from 3e.
I disagree with that last to some extent, but that's not really relevant here.
What's relevant is that they had an intent to make non-combat situations engaging and relevant
to the whole group in the same way that combat has always been.
They may have failed wholly, largely, or partly in their execution. But that's not really what's at issue here. They did provide a (debatably weak) framework for non-combat interactions that went beyond the mere "roll d20, add modifiers, check against DC" model, if only by stringing multiple such checks together from multiple people. Rather than conversation starting and everyone but the "face" character disengaging and waiting for the game to restart, everyone can throw some dice in an attempt to influence the outcome.
It may be ham-handed, but I think the intent was simply to get more players engaged at the same time. This is apparently something that many of you have not seen as a problem in your games. So maybe it looks so bad to you because they're trying to fix a non-existent problem. I obviously have a different perspective.
Again, we are presented with traditionally non-combat parts of D&D (traps, for instance) that we are asked to treat as though they were combat. What are we to make of this?
That they wanted to leverage the most interesting and dynamic "engine" of the game for something other than combat. And it works. Traps are more interesting than Perception check followed by Disable Device check... OK, people besides the rogue can start playing again.
In the case of monsters, non-combat utility powers from previous editions are stripped out. What are we to make of this?
That those don't see play for many gamers anyway. I sure as heck rarely saw them used. For those that do use them, they can just as easily be a straight-jacket as a help. "But a <insert monster here> can't
do that" is a complaint that
makes sense when the books delineate every single thing they can do, and is a complaint responsible for derailing at least two campaigns I've been in. When the books only delineate what they probabilistically do in combat.... the DM is free to do what the game needs outside of combat without "breaking rules".
On the map-making thing.... I've seen people obsess over this or gloss over it completely independent of system. My (admittedly limited) experience has been reliably diametrically opposed to what you're talking about.
My 1e/2e experience was practically wall-to-wall combat with nothing but the occasional damsel-in-distress to break it up. My 3e experience was... awful, but that was due to the people playing and not the game system. One of the DMs, at least, was trying to do something more than combat and basically got shouted down by most of the players. They had been a group for a while, and they all just wanted to kill things and take their stuff.... which is apparently what they had done in 2e. One of them even complained that 3e was "all sissified and about talking and <expletive redacted>."
I haven't been in contact with any of them for years because most of them were vile wastes of carbon that would have been more profitably used by society as doorstops or jet fuel, so I can't determine how they feel about 4e.
My point is not to bash and one of these systems, but to point out that a focus on combat, roleplaying, etc is more determined by the people at the table than the rules.
