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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3391951" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem with going digital is that digital content is enherently more labor intensive than using your imagination.  The pencil, paper, dice, and your imagination manage to create what is a pretty high tech system which has features that just never will be obseleted.So I don't see D&D moving to an all digital format.  Besides, while I've had some really intense on-line RP sessions and there are certain sorts of mature content (violence, sex) that seem to 'prefer' the less confrontational, less awkward, less emotionally intense digital interaction, there is something to be said for face to face contact and real human social interaction.  Tables will remain a part of gaming pretty much forwever.That isn't to say that mature MMORPG's won't become a great RP outlet.  I suspect that they will undergo the same evolution we say in text based adventures before they were killed by visual games, the same evolution toward maturity we saw in 2D CRPG/adventure gaming, the same evolution in 3D CRPG/adventure gaming and so forth.  While the current generation of 3D MMORPG's are generally providing no more of a RP experience than Nethack, I don't assume that that will always be the case.  We will likely see the same sort of progression in the technology we saw between say Nethack, an early 90's MUD, and a mid-90's MUSH or MUX.  One other reason that MMORPG's won't ever kill the table top game is that one of the lessons MMORPG's are teaching us is that you can't have the same story experience for a massive player game that you have come to expect from a table game.  In a table game, the PC's are always the center of the game universe.  In a MMORPG as they are played today, no one is actually the center of the game universe.Similarly, while I'm certain WotC will continue pushing high dollar multiple purchase high profit margin products like minatures and such - because they are a company, people will buy them, and it works so well in thier other product lines - the shear economic investment involved will prevent a large percentage of gamers from ever playing in that way.  One of the great things about pencil, paper, dice, and imagination is that they are all inexpensive.  If WotC ever tried to force that as a required part of the experience of play, a plurality of thier player base would just ignore them.I'm similarly skeptical of any predictions for large amounts of change in the mechanics of 4th edition.  I anticipate some changes in spells, some rollbacks of ill considered changes in 3.5 to 3.0 rules (meaning most of them), and some other things that weren't addressed updated.  What I don't anticipate is a lighter, simplier, more unified system.  The reason for this is that there is significant economic pressure not to go that way.  A lighter rules set means selling less books.  No rules light game system has ever been a major commercial success in the history of RPG's.  They've always been fringe games that attract a few fans, last a while, and then disappear.  Moderately complex game systems always evolve under economic (and lets face it, fan) pressure into complex games with lots of options, optional rules, and heavy detail in areas formerly glossed over.As for Mearls, and a 'per encounter' basis, I can see a bit of that creeping into the game where appropriate, but I can't imagine it completely elimenating the notion of 'per day' balance.  For one thing, the notion of an encounter is in practice very vague and even confining once you get away from sterotypical dungeon crawling (and don't get me wrong, I'm not insulting dungeon crawling).</blockquote>

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