As for DnD, the game was always combat oriented and lacked any storytelling advices. As for me, DnD is for hacking, slashing and fireballing countless monsters. It can be fun, but still, i'd play ED or SR anytime instead.
Read the 4E DMG & DMG2, they put a lot of emphasis into non-combat this time round.
Yes, the game is built from the perspective of "combat first, everything else second". However, when I look at people's character sheets for SR, WoD, and Exalted (and I'm sure others), the overwhelming majority of the sheet is dedicated to... combat and combat related gear (okay, so if you're the hacker, it might be Matrix combat, it's still combat).
Whether or not a game is combat oriented is a factor of the GM and the players. I can see SR being nothing but "you get the run, you go in, guns blazing, kill the corp bastards, take the loot and flee." I wouldn't have fun doing that, but it would fit the mechanics. It would butcher the game world, sure. But, you could do it without any serious game mechanics issue. Nothing in SR except the setting and the lethality really do squat to stop it from being combat monkey.
Same for WOD, same for Exalted.
Very true. SR, as well as many other games, can do just fine without combat, or even die rolls at all (the auto-hit mechanic is great for that). D&D4E rules are laser focused on beat-downs, or the other die roll intensive "skill challenge" that seems to be the substitute for, well, anything not combat related. It's just not my thing.
That's because the rules are built to be accessible to everyone. Specifically, there is a rule for everything and everything has a rule. Thus, game balance is easier to determine, difficulty is efficiently scaled. Does it suck for the creative types? Hell yes. That's why the first thing the DMG covers is the importance to make the rules fit your game. If you think that die rolling instead of roleplaying is unique to DND, ask yourself why you have a "negotiation" skill. What is that if not a method to substitute die rolling for non-combat roleplaying?
The trick is, just like with SR4 & every other game I've seen, you ignore or change the rules that impede the fun of your game. If that means the bulk of the rules, ask yourself why you're using the system.
It just seems to me that a session of D&D 4e with no combat at all would be pretty hard to imagine, correct me if i'm wrong? I haven't played much DnD4e, but in SR it's easy to go a long time with no Combat. It's not Call of Cthulhu, but it supports that kind of game-style. You could just be detecting, illusioning, charming, con'ing, intimidating, stealthing, hacking all day long and complete a whole shadowrun and never have drawn a gun and it's just as fun or even funner.
You're wrong. Frequency of combat in any game is a direct function of the GM and the players. I've had DnD sessions (in 3e, 3.5 and 4) that have been nothing but combat after combat. I've had sessions that were intensive planning, snooping, B&E, conning, negotiations for passage, and spelunking.
DND is geared towards high-fantasy swords & sorcery, so yes, by default, the look / feel / rules are geared towards resolving a problem with the local "evil-bad-man" by combat. The GM and players then tweak as much towards or away from that underlying "theme" as they like.
SR is geared towards gritty, cloak-and-dagger themes. So, combat is made more deadly (and then a pile of optional rules are presented to negate the deadliness), infiltration, stealth and negotiations are emphasized. And the GM and players can then tweak as much towards or away from that underlying "theme" as they like.
Despite comments that everything in DnD boils down to a die roll, the same is true of every game if you follow the RAW. Every one of these games is about having a character, represented in the abstract by a set of numbers interacting through a set of rules and a random-number generator (dice) to determine success or failure. This is true for every action in the game world for nearly every RPG.
Frankly, my group has to roll more dice and remember more rules for SR than it ever did for DnD. But, SR is so much more fun because I love the themes & setting. And we haven't figured out the rules we want to ignore yet.