Originally Posted by
Karro
Not to be too snarky, but does 1st Ed. D&D have a lot of rules for non-combat situations? I'm afraid I didn't get on the D&D bandwagon until 2nd ed, so I'm not so sure about 1st Ed, but as I recall 2nd really didn't have much in the way of non-combat rules. What did exist was tacked on and clunky.
The point I'm trying to make: AFAIK, D&D has always been a fantasy combat simulation with role-playing tacked on and thrown in the mix because it sounded fun! Non-combat rules have always been few and far between, and rarely fully functional (at least until 3rd Ed. standardized it), and it's always been up to us to to provide the roleplaying color. So, insofar as 4th Ed provides a clear and cleaner and fairer set of rules for combat (not saying it does, as I haven't had the opportunity to evaluate that), then that makes this a superior edition of D&D. If, OTOH, you want your RPG ruleset to be more robust in the non-combat department, there are numerous games, both paid and free, that do just this (I myself was working on one, at one point, before other larger life-issues sucked time away from that project).
To mollify my tone a bit, though: if you like 1st Ed. D&D fine, then I, personally, think that's great. Though I've never played it, I would hope you continue to get years of joy out of it. I just think that knocking 4E for being too combat-centric is an invalid criticism of a game that, ultimately, evolved from fantasy wargame ruleset. (Or rather, it's not a valid criticism when comparing editions of D&D; it's perfectly valid when comparing two very different RPGs.)