I am trying DESPERATELY to accept 4E. It has many interesting new features. But... it is more and more simply a "combat strategy" game and almost nothing like a roleplaying adventure game.
I hate being a curmudgeon all the time. But combat is only one part of adventuring. The more I dig into 4E, the more I see how un-DnD it really is.
At this point, 4E is only good for the combat scenarios of an adventure. And I'm going to have to bring out the 1E/2E books for the other half of the game...
At first blush you will probably dislike what I have to say, but please bear with me; there is a point.
D&D has
always been
primarily about facing challenges - largely combat challenges - and overcoming them. The reason and backing for this are the experience system, even in "modified" form, and the "levelling" system. Those are pretty fundamental to D&D. And, regardless of the spin you put on them, they expect players to "do something" with their characters (the "something" being defined by what xp are given for) and be rewarded by having their characters be more powerful. This has been the basic structure of the game since "Men and Magic"; it's not some new-fangled slant developed recently.
Now, as the '70s turned to the '80s many folk explored the boundaries of what "roleplaying" could be used for, and they came up with other, interesting things that RPGs could do. A popular one was world-dream exploration (fully immersive or otherwise); you seem to hanker for this mode of 'roleplaying'.
Immersive "world simulation/exploration" is a very fine roleplaying mode. My favourite world and system of all - Hârn and HârnMaster - are primarily (if imperfectly) aimed at this activity. But it's not what D&D is for and it never was. D&D just gets conflicted and confusing when trying to do this - which is why I abandoned D&D entirely for most of the '80s and '90s. I was looking for a game mode that it didn't support, so I got frustrated with it and, as a result, distainful and dismissive of it. Which was a shame, because it represented a whole other 'mode' of roleplaying that I also (eventually) came to hanker for without really knowing it.
So, what I have discovered is that challenge-busting play and sim-immersive play are different things, like cycling in the countryside and watching a play. I enjoy both activities, but trying to do them both at the same time, or with the same equipment, is asking for trouble. So I do them separately - and it works fine. I commend the method to anyone with the patience to read this far
Aside from expanding the skills section...
Timekeeping.
Mapping.
Movement (various environs)
Weather
The basics of these are already in 4E; the rest are mainly world-specific, and only become important if they are relevant to a challenge, in any case.
Equipment section (explaining how they're used in adventuring).
Equipment and goods (everyday items encountered in the DnD world).
Food (sources, duration, mechanics for starvation, etc)
Light (sources, duration, etc)
All of these are covered as far as necessary to feed the challenge mechanics. Note that by "challenge" I don't mean only combat (although doing 100% combat is a pitfall that's easy to fall into). I mean any opportunity for the
players (
not the characters) to apply their skill, smarts and/or chutzpah to overcome obstacles. This includes skill challenges and whatever else the DM can come up with. It's an area that needs more work in 4E, but, to be fair, at least some of the design team acknowledge this.
Social, political, economic factors (nobility/feudalism, etc, and how it plays in the DnD world)
Ranks of nobility
Guilds
All world specific and not really required in a rule book.
It's a challenge, if it is relevant to play - just as is anything else that is relevant to play. Having it as a regular element of character development is unhelpful and potentially unbalancing in a game with any 'competition' tension (such as D&D - any version).
To me, THAT stuff is what makes DnD better than playing a video game. DnD used to be vastly superior to any fantasy video game. But 4E has LESS roleplaying in it than Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. And that's just sad.
You are welcome to your opinion, but I can't really comment since "roleplaying" is such a poorly defined and diverse term that I have no clear idea what you mean. I think D&D 4E does generate "roleplaying" (for some value of 'roleplaying'), but its main focus is not on addressing story issues nor on creating and experiencing another world. There are other (good) games that do focus on those two areas, but D&D has never been really good at either.
