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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4942872" data-attributes="member: 22779">RC - that would be very, very cool.  It basically marries the best of both worlds.  You can play D&D by yourself on the MMO, then play with a group.I suppose an issue would be if you wanted to play with the same group week after week.  If your achievements ported back and forth between systems, how would you do it?  You would have a 1st level character suddenly (possibly) jump three levels between sessions and have all sorts of loot as well.  I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but, it would be very difficult for DM's to run anything more than one shots.---------------------After all this talk of why changes were made, allow me to re-introduce my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.  I freely admit I have nothing more than circumstantial evidence and this has some very serious holes in it.  But, in my mind, I think that there is a very strong, single element that informs almost all the changes made with 4e.The RPGA.Let me present my evidence, such as it is.  What is the biggest impediment to organized play?  To me, it's vague rules that allow players to do stuff the designers can't prepare for.  So, 4e yanked almost all those elements.  Organized play runs much, much smoother.Think about it for a second.  Take cohorts/pets as an example.  It's extremely difficult to prep an adventure with the assumption of cohorts/pets.  They can dramatically increase the abilities of the party.  ((Imagine for a second that 4 players sit down to a RPGA game and all have cohorts - that's a much stronger party than 4 players without))  So, cohorts/pets are gone.  This has a secondary effect I'll get into later.We saw this as well in late 3e Living Greyhawk with the various rewrites of polymorph.  Polymorph in a home game probably wasn't that big of a deal.  In organized play, it was huge.  So, yank, gone.Another thing is the whole "everything is core" idea.  In RPGA, everything is core.  You can generally use any book outside of setting specific ones.  So, if you are going to focus on the RPGA, why not make that the standard?Going back to the cohort/pet thing.  In organized play, it's quite possible that players have paid to play.  I'd be pretty annoyed if I sat down with my rogue and my turn in combat takes thirty seconds and the guy next to me takes five minutes because he has a pet, summoned creatures AND a cohort.  And that's if he's on the ball.  If he's not on the ball, the game grinds to a halt.Same with the more complicated rules like grapple.  Sure, in a home game, you work out how grapple works as a group.  But in RPGA, you don't play with the same people all the time and it's quite possible that the DM or a player doesn't have a firm grip on the rules and you spend way too much time futzing about.  So, again, yank, gone.  This also has the effect of not limiting adventure design.  You have to design for a 4 hour session.  That means you can't use a bunch of grapple monsters (for example) because you will grind the session to a halt.  Removing grapple removes that issue for designers.RPGA is now giving very tangible rewards.  We've seen a few posts on people getting nice little goodies from the RPGA for playing.  That's gotta be a huge expense.  But it sure brings in people to the group.  Everyone likes getting free stuff.  And getting free stuff for playing D&D?  WIN!Another post here talked about how at a recent large con, there were no 4e games.  It wasn't that there were no 4e games, but all the games were under the auspices of the RPGA.  That's a huge shift.  And, in my mind, a sign of things to come.To me, this also explains the abandonment of the OGL.  After all, OGL material isn't used in RPGA play.  It doesn't do anything for the RPGA and actually allows people to play D&D in a non-RPGA environment.  Keeping everything under the WOTC umbrella means that even non-RPGA tabletops are still playing RPGA style games (at least rules wise) which makes transition very easy from a regular tabletop to an RPGA tabletop.To me, the reason that 4e looks the way it does is to facilitate RPGA play.  It's easier to design for and the rules have a lot less fudge factor, making it much easier to adjudicate for strangers.  It's not to create a MMO.  That doesn't really sell books.  But, a strong RPGA means you can sell books forever.  Last RPGA number I saw, which was a few years ago in Dragon, put RPGA membership at about 150 000.  Imagine for a second they can ramp that up to 500 000.  That's 500 k players, many of whom will buy the latest book because they will very likely USE it in their RPGA games.  And they can use it because it's core.  Anyway, that's my conspiracy theory.  Take from it what you will.</blockquote>

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