Oh, I totally agree with 3E high-level play being very, very complex -- however, not so much on the tactical side per se. As you said, it mostly came down to crunching numbers with the wide range of feats and prestige classes, but I didn't see it affecting tactical depth; instead, most optimized PCs were really "one-trick ponies" who relied on the same actions round after round.
There was a prolific school of 'optimization' thought that made the game about winning at chargen. But, if you look at the tactical options in the game - before they became obscured by such things, at lower levels, for instance - there where definitely tactical options and consideration. Surprise, high ground, flanking, etc made positioning of some importance, and AoOs complicated positioning. In addition to melee attacks characters could trip, disarm, sunder, bullrush, or initiate a nightmarishly complicated grapple. The main addition I've seen with 4e is that there's involuntary movement, and AOs are a bit easier to avoid than AoOs, so you get more actual movement.
In 3E, I think the complexity in tactical choices had more to do with spellcasters (and spells in general). ... 4E has none of that; instead, every player must know his powers inside out, and how these powers interact with other PCs.[/quote]Certainly, which is still orders of magnitude easier than learning spells inside out for prepped casters. A 3.x wizard needed to know all the spells he learns inside out - he needs only a passing familiarty with the whole list to choose which one he wants to learn. The divine prepped casters just plain needed to know their whole lists. Sorcerers and other spontaneous casters had it easier, but they still ended up knowing dozens of spells at high level.
4e characters get basic attacks plus two at wills, an encounter and a daily - 6 powers to 'know,' if you count both melee and ranged basic attacks. Three more if you want to consider charge, bullrush, and grapple (which is sooo much simpler). A 1st level 3.x fighter had could attack melee or ranged, charge, bull rush, grapple, disarm, trip, sunder and/or fight defensively. That's actually comparable. By Paragon a 4e character adds 3 encounters, and, late in paragon, a fourth daily, bringing him up to 15 attack options at 20th. A 3.x Sorcerer (the simpler sort of caster caster) at 11th level would have 19 spells known (not including cantrips, of course) to choose from each round. The comparable level 3.x fighter would have added Full Attacks to his options, and, perhaps, feats like Spring Attack, WWA, Power Attack or Expertise or Power Attack - five or six feats from his class features, though it's unlikely /all/ would add combat options, a number of them could - a 12th level fighter who just went for WWA would have that, Spring Attack, Expertise, and Full Attack as additional combat options, bringing him up to 13 combat options.
The 4e characters about top out at 20th, after that, they most trade out encounters and dailies, maybe pick up some sort of additional power with their Epic Destiny. 3.x casters continue to grow in complexity, of course, but even the lowly fighter could add a few more options before completely running out of interesting feats.
Now, this sort of stuff used to be more relevant to spellcasters, but now every PC has to think of the "group synergy" (i.e. "Which of my powers will be most useful to group in this particular situation?") and it can very easily lead to "power paralysis". I've even seen some people badmouthing less tactically-inclined players for playing "stupidly".
I do like that the roles, forced movement, and ally-affecting powers have made teamwork more important. Players who don't like that can gravitate towards strikers - some striker builds (most other than the rogue, I think) require very little coordination to work well. And, indeed, striker is a popular role. ...
For the DM this also means he that he/she must create balanced encounters that challenge the players; although 4E provides a lot of tools for this, not all of us can easily juggle the hazards, terrain effects and "synergy" effects from monster roles and powers. Running a typical 4E combat would be a nightmare for me, because I don't just need to try to use tactics to the best of my ability; I also need to keep track of marks, effects, zones and whatnot. It's just too tactical for me.
Certainly, if there's a player/DM disparity on the tactical decide, it could be a problem. Mostly if the DM is too tactically enclined, though - a single very tactical player still has to engage in the cat-herding required to get any tactical advantage or synergy out of his allies - an overly tactical, overly competative DM can be overwhelming, since his monsters can always coordinate perfectly. Some restraint is actually called for in the DM role.
My current DM was not at all tactically enclined as a player, but she finds it easy to occassionally have monsters engage in good tactics when she gets the infrequent urge to do so, for that reason.
I still think 4E does a lot "right"; it's just the heavily emphasized tactical depth that's keeping me away from it. And that is why I hope 'Essentials' product line will introduce less complex combat rules and classes.
I haven't seen anything to indicate less complex rules options. The martial classes are stripped of daily powers, but have about the same number of options -though some of those options seem simpler to understand.
Now that PF RPG has introduced a new array of options with APG, I'm starting to feel the same with PF NPCs; there's just so many new choices, and some of them are even "overlapping" (e.g. a feat copies an effect that archetypes X and Y already offer at levels 5 and 9, respectively). The end result is that I don't feel I can manage all the fiddly details, and I wish the designers would have created a separate subsystem for handling NPCs.
4e does at least let you design monsters and NPC more easily and with less extraneous detail than 3.x did. The work load on the DM to prep 4e encounters is much reduced. That might help make up for the greater demands for 'tactics' in-play. Of course, if your players aren't a bunch of wererommels, it might not be a problem.
there's nothing in the rules that would mechanically enable a player to seize control of the narrative in the same way it's hardwired into many Indie RPGs.
I personally wouldn't probably ever interfere in the way a player described a power taking place in the story, unless I felt it's a bit too "anime-ish" or "supernatural" (for a martial PC, that is).
What if the player was really into anime and envision his character that way? I gamed with one guy who really was that way (to the point of having his character say stuff in Japanese - which the DM eventually ruled was 'Deep Speech'), and he had a great time. While some of the rest of us kinda rolled our eyes over it at time, the fun was contagious, my warlord eventually took Linguist and chose Deep Speech as one of his languages so I could give IC orders in the characters native language.
"Shana-kun! Totsugeki-
da!"
