Arbitrary Limited number of uses per day.
Ok, I agree on that one. If I had to write a barbarian, I'd give them two "emotional states", Rage and Calm. Depending on what state they are in, they'd have different bonuses / abilities.
I'm just as likely to use a Satyr, or a Minotaur, or a Succubus, for a non-combat encounter (which has a decent chance of turning into combat.)
I don't need a full character sheet, but the succubus needs to have well, "Charm" and such.
I see what you mean. Intelligent creatures (I'd add dragons to your list) are often viable NPCs, not just combat adversaries. 4th edition had the attitude of "give them combat stats, the rest will sort itself out", which created the problem that some monsters have powers relevant to social encounters (charms, shapechange, teleport...), which don't show up in their stats. It also created the impression that many of these creatures were only good for killing, not for storytelling (and the bland and boring modules were no help).
On of my major gripes with D&D (any edition) is the prevalence of stupid monsters that don't serve better plot purposes as "it showed up and now you need to kill it". The Terrasque is the epitome of this. Give us more intelligent monsters with their own culture and motivation! And for low levels, more stats of "normal" enemies like town guards.
It's hard to do a capture mission when you can't keep someone unconscious for more than 6 seconds.
In 4th edition, you can knock someone unconscious instead of killing them when you bring them below 0 hp, just by declaring it. It's right there in the book, but few people are aware of that rule.
I get so bored when everything is just slowly whittling away hitpoints. I need more than that.
Sorry, but if 4th edition combat felt like "boring whittling away hit points", you or your group didn't play it as intended.
Other than D&D and WoW, most fantasy I've read, a mob is a serious threat even to trained experts.
We're not talking about "trained experts", we're talking about 20th-level characters. Like Sauron in the first minutes of the first LOTR movie. One swing of the sword, send half an army flying.
I suppose the difference is that I don't feel like my game needs to go all the way up to kicking down the gates of hell to kill the devil. That seems more high powered than I need. I'm good with sticking to killing giants and slaying the occasional dragon; but I want a full-fledged game that covers the genre I want to play.
I'd be cool with, you know: 20 levels of fantasy (book 1), 20 levels of superheroes(book 2), 20 levels of godslayers (book 3). You can chain them together, or run them as separate games.
... or call them Heroic, Paragon and Epic tier and give them 10 levels each.