For example, Healing Surges would be very useful in 3E. They would put an end to the 5 Minute Adventuring Day (as people are calling it.)
(1) The commonly accepted term is "15 minute adventuring day".
(2) 4th Edition healing surges
encourage the 15 minute adventuring day. They in no way alleviate it.
A little off topic, no they wouldn't
The 5 minute adventuring day is alive and well in 4E and you can't prevent them with mechanics
Oh, it's quite possible to mechanically eliminate them. The 15 minute adventuring day rests on two principles: First, the mechanical incentive to blow your biggest and baddest abilities and then rest to regain them (the nova-rest-nova cycle). Second, mechanical necessity when you rapidly run out of healing resources and you HAVE to rest or end up dead in the next encounter (that's why healing surges, by creating an effective hard cap on daily healing, encourage the 15 minute adventuring day).
These problems can all be mechanically eliminated, however.
(1) Make Daily powers usable once per 4 encounters. (The 4 encounters can be one the same day or they might be spread out over 4 months. But you don't get the powers back until your 4th encounter.)
(2) Give each character a # of healing surges per encounter and make them a purely encounter-level resource to manage. You get all your healing surges back at the end of each encounter and your regain all your hit points after a short rest.
(3) Just to make sure you've left no mechanical incentive for the nova-rest-nova cycle that lies at the heart of the 15 minute adventuring day, get rid of the rule that gives you an action point after an extended rest.
Done.
On the more general premise of the thread: I've taken rules from systems as diverse as GURPS, Heavy Gear, Rolemaster, and Amber and then grafted them onto D&D. If there is actually somebody out there saying that you can't take a rule from X and figure out some way to graft it onto Y, then they're kidding themselves.
Of course, I haven't actually seen anyone saying that.
I have seen people saying, quite accurately, that 4th Edition is a fundamentally different game than 3rd Edition. It lopped off the top and bottom of the power scale, virtually eliminated Gygaxian naturalism, embraced dissociated mechanics, and changed the core gameplay of every single class in the game. (And so forth.)
Does that mean I can't take a 3rd Edition module, re-stat the whole thing in 4th Edition, and then run it? Of course not. Heck, I've used both
Parlainth (Earthdawn supplement) and
Ruins of Rathess (Exalted supplement) in the exact same 3rd Edition campaign. I once played in a
Tomb of Horrors one-shot using FUDGE.
That doesn't mean that pre-4E D&D, 4th Edition, Earthdawn, Exalted, and FUDGE are all the same game.
