KM, just in case it wasn't clear my earlier post about metagame mechanics was meant to be in sympathy with your criticism of D&D's traditional approach. Purist-for-system simulationism - which gives us skill checks, mundane limits on mortal abilities, etc - in combination with it's magic for wizards, which means the simulation permits them to bypass skill checks, mundane limits etc - produces the D&D experience of disparit between wizards and warriors.
There are simulationist systems out there that reduce this disparity - Rolemaster, for example, while still suffering from a wizards-overshadowing-warriors problem, doesn't suffer as badly from it as does D&D because of the greater constraints that RM wizards labour under (in terms of skill development, spell selection and skill rolls for using spells). But the underlying tension is nevertheless there.
But the other point I was trying to make is that there is a lot of player support for this unstable, disparity-inducing approach. The attempt by 4e to move away in certain respects has been one of the key points of criticism of 4e. How often have your heard "4e fighters have spells now"? - which makes sense only if the underlying logic is one of denying the metagame character of a power like Come and Get It, and of assuming that the astounding prowess, foresight and/or luck that this power signals is occurring in the gameworld must have been produced, as if by magic, by the figher in question.
I think that, in practice, this depends upon what the mechanics in question are.
The HeroQuest 2nd ed rulebook gives an example of the player of a cowboy with Fast Runner 10w suggesting that his PC will outrun the horse, whose Gallop is only 18. The suggested way of handling this: in any sort of mainstream western game, the attempt is disallowed, as it fails the genre-reality constraint on scene-framing; but in a supers western, it would be permissible. I agree that for this sort of constraint on metagame mechanics to work, the ability of the participants to provide world context matters.
But Come and Get It - being a much more tightly defined and circumscribed power - very rarely gives rise to this sort of problem. At least in my experience, it is very rare for there to be any difficulty in explaining why or how the pull took place - be it footwork, taunting, feigning a weakness to trigger a rush, or whatever. Apart from anything else, there is a reasonable chance that the fighter with Come and Get It will have other features of his/her build that emphasise and take advantage of forced movement and/or area attacks - so the use of Come and Get It will just be one more event in a whole sequence of displays of battlefield control. (Again in my exeperience, the existence of effects like Come and Get It is part of what makes the fighter play so very differently from a ranger or even a paladin.) The "problem" of improbably taunting archers and sorcerers into a losing close combat just doesn't come up very often. And the ability to trick and/or force archers and sorcerer who have got within fifteen feet of the fighter into a losing close combat isn't improbable at all - it's just a display of the fighter's close combat virtuosity.
Likewise for KM's example of the rogue not needing to make a skill check to climb - only if the wall is the world's slickest wall of ice, and the narration has rendered the rogue naked and without rope or tools, will there be any difficulty in narrating his/her success at the climb. Apart from anything else - if in a standard skill check system it would be possible for the rogue to succeed (and in RM this is always so, via open-ended rolls) then just narrate the automatic success in whatever terms you would narrate the improbable success under the skill check approach.
This would be great. But I don't think it will be all that popular. I remember a couple of years ago, when someone was asking how Diplomacy might be used in a skill challenge to open the gates of Moria, I replied that it was fairly easy - the player of the PC simply narrates a flashback in which his/her PC spoke to a loremaster wise in magic passwords, and persuaded that loremaster to tell him/her the most powerful and universal ones. (Of coures, the GM might be expected to set a high DC for this sort of check. And the flashback would have to be plausible, given everything else that was known about the gameworld and the PC in question.)
My suggestion was met with general (although not uniform) derision.
Now my example is vulnerable to Crazy Jerome's concerns - it depends upon the participants sharing a sense as to what is and is not permissible in scene-framing - whereas I think that the sorts of metagame mechanics you are after (like the rogue example above) can mostly survive Crazy Jerome's concern. But I think they will nevertheless continue to attract the hostility of simulationist gamers. Because what you are asking for is for the rogue to do something in the gameworld that does not correspond, in causal/temporal sequence, to the mechanic you are using. And this is what simulationist gamers don't like - they are not moved by Crazy Jerome's concerns, which operate at a more abstract and removed level of reflection on workable game design.
By playing the "I have a counter to that" power, or by using a flashback to try and resolve a skill challenge, you are now - in the middle of the current situation - stipulating the consequences of some action that your PC took days or years ago in the gameworld. (This is what makes it a metagame rather than simulationist mechanic.) And this is what attracts the pejorative labels of "pop quiz roleplaying", "retconning", "quantum wounding" (or, in this case, "quantum equipment lists" or "quantum backstory"), etc, etc.
I'm not defending those labels - recently most of the effort I've spent on these boards has been trying to repudiate them - but they seem to have a widespread currency among D&D players. But many of those players also seem to want high magic. And hence we get the enduring problem of the disparity between wizards and warriors.
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