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Very nice. Thanks for facilitating/conducting such an informative interview.

On simplifying the game, I think everyone can agree that complexity for the sake of complexity is bad. As Andy said in the interview, it's a no-brainer to make the game easier to run when you can do so without impacting the robustness of the ruleset. But I wonder whether some of the simplifications left players more constrained than they perhaps needed to be. Casters especially were left with sharply reduced versatility compared to what they had in 3rd edition, with fewer powers and no metamagic-like system through which those powers could be modified on-the-fly.

I suppose the real question is, what sort of person is going to play pencil-and-paper D&D when they can instead play an MMORPG? The call that the 4e team seems to have made is that these audiences will substantially overlap, and that the way to keep people interested in D&D is to offer the same sorts of things they can get from MMORPGs. But I wonder whether the casual gamer will ever have a reason to choose D&D when they can hop into an MMORPG without needing to read anything, secure in the knowledge that they can do fairly well no matter how much or how little skill they may have as a player. And if that's true, then those fleeing the MMORPG scene may actually be seeking complexity -- not in the sense of needless regulations that bog down gameplay, but in the sense of a robust ruleset that offers much more strategic and role-playing versatility than an MMORPG can ever provide.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think power points should be, and I hope will be, the first of many incremental changes that assume players can handle a bit more math and on-the-fly decisionmaking than assumed in the PH1.

The other point I would make has to do with whether it's worth putting new ideas into PH1 classes or whether one should instead introduce new classes that use those new ideas. As a general rule, I would agree with Andy that it's better to make new classes and see what "sticks" rather than constantly revise existing classes. But I would also say the PH1 classes are iconic for a reason, in that they embody fundamental fantasy archetypes that gamers want to play, and it just isn't fun when you'd like to play a wizard or paladin but feel like you can't because subsequent classes better fulfill those roles. For those classes, it may make more sense to keep them up-to-date design-wise even if it means sacrificing a few potentially interesting classes down the road.