Fictional positioning
When talking about action resolution, including skill challenges, combat actions, and simple skill checks, I think the key is that the system does not require any reference to your character's fictional position. We don't need to know the fictional details of your character's action to proceed with resolution
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My view is that good rules will force DMs to be "good". If the skill check resolution rules are written in a way that requires that we know the character's fictional position before action resolution is possible, we don't find ourselves in this situation as often.
I think this is a matter of degree - and hence depends a bit on the comparison class. For example, your stealth example could play out much the same way in Runequest, Rolemaster or 3E.
That said, I think you're perhaps a little hard on 4e here. To use stealth requires either cover, concealment or a distraction. So when the player says that his/her PC is going to use Stealth to sneak past the guard, the relevant cover, concealment or distraction has to be indicated, and there is a reasonable chance that that will help set up the next scene.
Skill Challenges: These have the same issue as simple one-off skill checks, but there's another wrinkle: how does each action build up to success or failure in the skill challenge as a whole?
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Five characters can make five totally unrelated skill checks and those unrelated checks can add up to success.
I think that what you describe here is a poorly-played and adjudicated skill challenge, but it's hard to work out what the designers had in mind because the rules are pretty poorly written, and the examples illustrate features of the system that the rules don't expressly mention (for example, the sample of play in the Rules Compendium illustrates the GM determining the complication that results from a failed skill challenge on a purely metagame basis, rather than as the natural evolution of gameworld causal logic, but nowhere do the rules point out the need/desirability of the GM adjudicating in this sort of way).
Let's say we want to talk to the Duke. The PCs take all sorts of different actions, none of which are really related. "I greet the Duke,", "I comment on his family's storied History", "I look buff and capable", etc. All of these are initial actions that should prompt a necessary further action along the same lines, but suddenly we have success on the challenge as a whole.
A good DM can get around this but it's a lot of work for the DM that isn't helped out by the system.
As best I can judge from the relevant passages in the PHB and DMG, the idea is that the GM should resolve each check in turn, presenting the new ficitonal situation that results from success or failure at each attempted check. This reduces the problem of unrelated actions at least a bit, in my experience. What the rules don't give advice on is how the GM can help bring the situation to a culmination as the final checks start to be made - there is nothing analogous to the discussion of narrating action point gain/loss in the HeroWars rulebook, for example, and guidance has to be extracted from the samples of play.
skill checks can be made without consulting the fictional situation: "I use Diplomacy", "I use Athletics", "I use History", etc.; this doesn't make sense, but the system doesn't require it to
The books expressly state that the player should give some account of what his/her PC is doing, and if you take seriously that the unfolding situation has to be narrated than such an account will be a necessary input. I agree that the books don't do a very good job of explaining how this all might work.
this was made all the worse by the write-ups of skill challenges with their "required skills" or whatever
I think that these examples are best read as examples of the sorts of notes a GM might make to help run a skill challenge, with the "required skills" treated more as a "here's how I envisage this might play out" crib sheet, which will have to be departed from to a greater or lesser extent as the challenge is actually resolved. There is no doubt that this could have been better handled in the rulebooks.
Combat actions <snip> the system works fine if you don't give fictional positioning any considerations.
It's my opinion that movement and position, including terrain, in the combat system is not fictional; it's part of the real world, just like character sheets and dice.
I think it's because tactical positioning, movement, cover, terrain, etc. are all put on the grid and interacted with by moving miniatures around.
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One of the players in my 4E hack game recently joined a regular 4E game. She described a lot of the things I noticed back when I was playing regular 4E - players staring at their character sheets, etc. She described an encounter in a forest with vines on the map as difficult terrain, but when she was playing she didn't imagine vines - she saw squiggly lines drawn on a sheet of grid paper.
I think this makes it harder to use fictional positioning in play. I can imagine a wand or orb wizard grabbing a vine to hold out in front of him to help parry a club or mace (but not a sword or axe), or using the vines to garrotte a foe, or possibly a trip attack. I don't think these often occur to players because it's too easy to focus on the lines on the paper instead of what they represent in the game world.
I think if you drop minis then terrain, movement, tactical positions, cover, all of that moves from the real world into the imagined game world, and it's more likely that it will be interacted with.
I'm not sure whether my experience here is different from yours, or whether your standards for engagement with the fiction (and the sort of engagement you might have experienced playing RQ, RM, AD&D, Traveller etc) are higher.
I'm not sure what I would expect my players to do with vines. I know that they interact with furniture from time to time (including to gain cover based on vertical rather than horizontal considerations) - which means that they're treating the squiggles on my map as guides to the fictional content rather than the content per se. They fly up into trees (which on my maps are green squiggles), take advantage of slopes and drops, etc. In the last session, too, a Spirehorn Behemoth crashed through some houses (no one disputed my ruling that peasant huts aren't more than difficult terrain for a Huge Behemoth) and one of the players reminded me that the huts between his PC and the Behemoth, which on the drawing are an obstacle, don't block line of sight to the Huge monster or its rider.
Maybe all this is in part because we use mostly abstract tokens (coloured pieces from old boardgames) rather than miniatures, and because my handdrawn maps aren't very good! So the physical reality of the props is very obviously not the situation with which the PCs are engaged.
In the end, I can only report that for me, at least (and those of my players who have commented on it) it is a phenomenological thing -
because the mechanics make it salient, the fictional geography seems more vibrant in 4e than in other games we've played. On the other hand, the physiology and facing of PCs and NPCs is less salient because the mechanics ignore it. For me,
this is the lesson from the prone snake -
prone is a condition that is on the cusp of incoherence in a game that doesn't care about facing or body shape (contrast RM or RQ, for example). But I don't feel the force of the generalisation from applying
prone to a snake or ooze in an abstract fashion, to a general problem with fictional positioning.
In my experience this leads to players focusing on their character sheets and the powers they have available instead of focusing on the game world and what their characters (and foes!) are actually doing
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the game system doesn't require attention to the fictional details
Yes and no. I don't think my players look to their sheets in 4e any more than in other games, but I do agree that their sheets are their first port of call. But at least in my experience I tend to find it is looking to their sheets to find resources to tackle the current fictional situation - so, for example, equipment (and not just magic items, but - for example - jars of wrestling oil that might be used to make the ground slippery and thereby enhance a force movement power) is one of the things they look at. I regard this as expressing a more general preference for deploying known resources than doing the additional cognitive work of building up a robust mental picture of the minutiae of the external environment (and probably also connects to a degree of actor or author stance by habit, rather than blurring into director stance). When the fiction of the external environment becomes as salient to the players as the fiction on their character sheets - for example, walls or furniture or pits or fires that they are dealing with in the course of their own round-by-round decision-making - then I find they will tend to engage with it more.
It's not that the system can't handle it; there's no reason you can't make a Cha-attack action that causes Psychic damage by intimidating an opponent or calling for their surrender. (The game's economy is simple: Standard Action, Cha vs. Will, +2 if trained in Intimidate, Hit: medium normal damage expression of your level psychic damage; if the target drops to 0 HP he surrenders.)
Something like this is written into an encounter in a recent module (I think the frost-caverns one from the Monster Vault). My players occasionally do stuff with Intimidate (and Religion against Undead) but mostly for effects rather than damage.
characters and situations are complex enough that it's difficult for players to keep both their powers/abilities and the fictional positions in their mind at the same time.
My experiences were generally that, even though I (as DM) allowed such actions, and when PCs attempted these actions the players noted that they were even better than their PC's at-will actions, I rarely saw this sort of thing happen.
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My experience has led me to believe that, unless the players are really focused on the fictional situation, the game's complexity makes it hard to deal with all the choices you've got on your character sheet as well as the ones the fictional situation presents.
I agree with this to an extent, but I'm not sure it's a flaw. It depends, in part, on what parts of the fiction one has in mind.
As I said, I agree that the character sheet is always the first go-to for my players when it comes to looking for resources to deploy. I think this is a natural consequence of a game that makes PC-build such a mechanically significant part of the game - players look to the resources that they have built into their PCs. But I don't think that this makes the fiction irrelevant, or even less relevant. Compare, for example, the player in my game playing the dwarven polearm fighter/warpriest of Moradin, to the typical player of a dwarven cleric/fighter going through White Plume Mountain. When it is time to proceed through the frictionless corridor, or to jump across the spikes of super-tetanus (? am I remembering properly) my player is probably more likely to look at his sheet first, than at taking doors of hinges and using them as surfboards. (In this respect, it is probably true that all 4e PCs are more like wizards in the old game, who always had their most reliable resources on their character sheets.)
But the upside of this is that the typical action the PC takes is, in at least some respects, more expressive of the character that the player has built, and hence reinforces other elements of fictional positioning that player and GM can jointly build on as part of the game. When this PC uses his polearm to do something tricky in a situation, it reinforces one element of the fictional position in a way that doing clever stuff with the hanging vines is less likely to. So I'm not too fussed about how much attention the system makes my players pay to the vines per se.
What I would like, though, is for the ranger with Acrobatics to pay more attention to the vines than he currently does! But I'm not sure if that's a system thing or a player thing - that is, I'm not able to judge whether my players who pay more attention to the fiction and use it to express things about their PCs are overcoming a system flaw, or are simply playing the game properly while the ranger player slacks off a bit (he is certainly the player least likely to be at the table at any given moment).
This is going to be a controversial statement. I don't want people to think I'm just bashing 4E or edition warring; it's made in good faith in an attempt to understand how 4E works.
In your posts at least I take this to go without saying!
