Miss 4e D&D

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I truly have never understood this term. Nor do I still.

It comes from an essay by Ron Edwards in 2002:

In the late 70s, this wasn't unreasonable. By the early 90s, though, things were considerably different. This essay is about some 1990s games I'm calling "fantasy heartbreakers," which are truly impressive in terms of the drive, commitment, and personal joy that's evident in both their existence and in their details - yet they are also teeth-grindingly frustrating, in that, like their counterparts from the late 70s, they represent but a single creative step from their source: old-style D&D. And unlike those other games, as such, they were doomed from the start. This essay is basically in their favor, in a kind of grief-stricken way.

You know, having stamina costs might be interesting, and encourage people to keep lower-level powers.

I'm with waddacku in being a little hesitant here. We see some precedent for this in PHB3 psionics, where the psion, battlemind, and ardent all get power points in place of encounter powers, and it leads to a term I've frequently referred to as "the psionic problem" where characters flog their best powers over and over until they're out of points.

I would also add that getting strong powers is a big part of the fun of 4e. New encounter powers are basically all you get at levels 3, 7, etc. We should let the players play with their cool new toys!

About "inventive play", it is in fact explicitly allowed and encouraged. The game never says powers only do their described mechanics and have no further effects, and IIRC the specific example of fire powers setting fire to things is mentioned as up to what the DM thinks makes sense and wants for their game. It provides both mechanical guidelines and advice on what to consider when adjudicating actions beyond the character sheet specifics. I firmly believe the game is better when played this way, and I don't think that's an unusual opinion (or would be, if the matter was discussed more).
Its flexibility and robustness are big parts of what's great about 4e. It allows for a wide range of interpretations, can handle inventiveness both before and during game time, and when you can't or don't want to improvise and invent for a while it just keeps trucking along being perfectly playable and enjoyable to just do what the book says until you feel like getting more mentally involved again. I think that's really cool. Of course, if you don't enjoy this kind of board game combat your mileage will vary.

I've seen very little of this in most 4e games & community discussion, which I think is because the game handles these scenarios pretty poorly. Of the fire-related DM adjudication scenarios, I remember two:

• One is in the improvised attack rules, which are exclusively interested in determining damage by using a lookup table. You pick the level of the character doing the attack, determine if it's easy / medium / hard, and lookup the damage associated with that attack (this means, e.g. stumbling into a vat of acid hurts more when a 30th-level character pushes you in compared to when a 1st-level character does). It's worth noting that the numbers in this table aren't good, because they start too strong and scale horribly (like the low-end suggested damage starts at 20% SMHP, ends at 7% SMHP)
  
  • In the example, an 8th-level character pushes an enemy into a flaming brazier, dealing 2d8 + 5 fire damage.
• The other is from a section that tells you that you will need to make snap decisions sometimes.
  
  • In the example, a character of indeterminate level turns a flaming brazier (yes, another flaming brazier) on an enemy, dealing 1d6 fire damage and imposing a -2 penalty on attack rolls for 1 round. It's worth noting that 1d6 damage isn't an option anywhere in the improvised damage table, and the 1-round attack penalty is similarly absent from the improvised attack guideliens.

The 4e guidelines for nonstandard activities are a couple paragraphs of "idk make something up!" plus a table of poorly-benchmarked numeric treadmills. It's very anemic, which is why even highly-enfranchised 4e players will outright ignore the game's improvised attack rules.

To LibraryOgre's example, there aren't any rules governing what the power budget is for editing an enemy statblock, and e.g. with fire, lot of 4e statblocks would play pretty badly with that. The Immolith, the Forgecaller, the Balor, they all have weapons that just deal fire damage. There's no underlying weapon damage to reference that can serve as a clear reward. That's probably why none of the smoldering/flaming/burning/etc monsters in 4e have ever implemented something like this, even in obscure Dragon & Dungeon articles. This inventive play isn't really something the game supports, at least not without a strong sense of system mastery and a lot of hacking.