What would Ryan Dancey do?

[Morte]

1) Add on-line tools for character & monster creation accessible for a subscription fee

2) Add on-line tools for campaign management (magic items, NPCs, persistent "objects" of consequence (titles, land, relationships, etc.))

4) Deliver a stand-alone (or internet connected) service that manages the world environment (weather, time tracking, trade & commerce, international relations, actions of major NPCs, etc.)

[...]

There are various other tools that can be added along this path to add value. An on-line "dungeon creator" that could produce a final output that matched the standard D&D look & feel would be nice. A character portrait generator would be nice. A system to allow players to upload & exchange adventure content with peer-reviewed ratings & rankings would be nice.

Those should have been the key points of 3.5e, never mind 4e. I refuse to waste time on PnP D&D while it involves so much paperwork. As somebody said: "twenty minutes of fun, packed into four hours". Oh, add another four hours homework for the GM. [Even Piratecat, possibly the most famous D&D GM in the world, wanted to use some sort of hero point mechanic partly so he wouldn't have to calculate XP any more.]

Do WOTC, in this day and age, seriously expect me to fight a six round battle between four adventurers and six orcs and spend whole hours on it, when it takes 36 seconds in NWN (simplified realtime combat) or about 2 minutes in the ToEE CRPG (somewhat faithful turn-based)?

3) Deliver a stand-alone (or internet connected) service that "runs the monsters" for DMs (maximizing their lethality and ensuring that the diverse powers & abilities are put to the best use).

5) Deliver a stand-alone (or internet connected) AI DM which can run a game by itself without human intervention.

Judging by the state of computer gaming, which involves budgets WOTC can only dream about, I think that sort of AI is at least one decade away. Unfortunately.

However, the MMORPG games are showing us by contrast what parts of the tabletop experience are dragging down interest in the format and leaving potential players out of the network. The time commitment, rules knowledge, and speed of play of the current tabletop games are negatives which need to be addressed.

You got it nailed.

Do you think this means 4e might go for a less "exception and extension based" approach to mechanics to simplify computer implementations? Feats are pretty much exceptions from the normal rules, and they're hard work for computer programmers since they add extra code to be implemented/tested/debugged. They're especially hard to add onto existing code, which is a problem for "publish core rules now and extra stuff later". It can be orders of magnitude simpler to add something mildly concept-shifting like "spring attack" to an existing paper ruleset than an exisiting computer program.

IMO, having rules working on unified principles that are finished then released is the holy grail of computer-based RP game programming. But it would mean a huge change to the business model of selling extra rules (splat books etc). I think WOTC are between a rock and a hard place on that one.