To get back on topic...
What D&D4e seems to be trying to do is to emphasise the "game" element in role-playing game. So, in combat, there are attempts to define various rules and actions. It strikes me that a D&D4e combat (and I say this is an outsider) is most analogous to a game of American Football. The players attempt to execute various moves based on their characters' roles and abilities and the GM opposes them with a NPC team. A "good" combat encounter is probably one in which the teams are "evenly matched" but the players prevail, narrowly, through clever use of tactics.
Thus, a D&D combat could be resolved without any "role-playing" if the players were so minded. Indeed, where the roleplaying comes in depends on the players. For example, a player might decide that their Paladin refuses to carry out the obviously "correct" action because some leering orc has just insulted his god and must be smote. I think what WotC has decided is that you can't enforce roleplaying. Rather you provide the game and let the players decide how much to roleplay. This is probably the correct decision.
Thing is, this has nothing to do with the D&D system as such, you could make exactly the same decisions with BRP. All you need to do are to define the rules and actions so that you can play it as a game. What the D&D designers seem to be doing is defining the rules so that they can be programmed into a computer and trying to analyse what it is that is enjoyable about playing D&D as a game. I think that's really quite interesting in a Windows Vista kind of way.
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