@ Chrono:
Exploration has a consequence for failure: It cost healing surges if you fail endurance checks: thus its an encounter (skill challenge). The rules are explicit about that.
How is this a perk? I don't know about you, but my favourite part of D&D has always been the idea of exploring a locale. The imagery of a party rapelling down a mineshaft into a dungeon hallway, and then lighting some torches... and then proceeding to crawl through tiny tunnels, avoiding rats tearing apart the body of a dead goblin. Each little scene leading to the players asking questions and interacting with their environment, sometimes getting small rewards, and other times getting nothing... that to me is the best part of D&D.
To sum all that up with "Okay, everyone make an endurance check as part of this skill challenge, and then there's a FIGHT!" does not make a selling point to me.
You can say "Well, GMs can ignore that if they'd like" and I certainly do. That's not the point. The point is that to make that an explicit part of the rules means that the game is explicitly suggesting a style of play that runs counter to what I believe D&D is all about. You cannot really argue that 4e is implicitly - if not explicitly - about the combats to the detriment of non-combat encounters.
While I can ignore it (and I do), it still bugs me. Especially when I buy an adventure and realize I'm mostly putting together my own encounters and only using the first few pages and setup as opposed to the actual adventure, because I realize it's a grind.
Rituals are costly, because noone should point his finger at the door before someone even tried to open it with his picklock.
You know, I'd agree with this in one way, and disagree in another. In earlier editions, if someone were able to do that, it'd cost a spell - or at least a scroll. In other words, a non-renewable resource. This didn't nerf the thief at lower levels... it provided an alternate means of moving on if the thief failed his check or wasn't present. So, it worked in older editions. But you are right that, in 4e's "a/e/u/d" set-up, it shouldn't work.
My big beef with rituals in 4e is that the feat system encourages combat choices over non-combat choices, and the utility system mostly supports combat abilities as well. Meaning that ritual use still often becomes the way of succeeding in non-combat situations. Also, I think the designers didn't go far enough with rituals... I'd love to see rituals that turn into mini skill challenges (example, speak with dead doesn't mean you speak with the dead guy... instead, it turns you into a wraith and you fly to the plane of dead and question him, all the while trying to bypass angry spirits that want to hijack your material plane body so they can finish goals they had in life).
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One thing I find implicit about 4e is the idea of the GM creating a "Campaign path" at the start of the campaign and running it - the game encourages this play in multiple sources. To me, I think this is more in line with 2e thinking, whereas 3e was following the 1e reasoning (which was a bit looser). I don't really know if I find this change a good thing or a bad thing - I'm still completely undecided on it. I can definitely see the benefits of having a rough idea of where your campaign is going to end, that's for sure.
