At my store, we've got 8 or so RPGA judges that come to it. Of them, 6 are well-respected, excellent, veteran judges many of whom post here. Hi, guys.
I see in them a tentative and willing embrace of the DM empowerment bit, but I also see a strong tendency to run the mods as tightly as they can/as the mods are written on paper. It's not that they can't, and it's not that they don't, change things...it's that it sorta seems to go against the grain of their experience. I imagine that's the case for many folks.
Me, this year's the first one I've gotten into the RPGA, so I don't have any of their experience with the way things were in the past. I love DM empowerment. But I can see how other people don't. I don't presume to be better'n anyone else, but I think maybe an exchange of ideas on it could be useful...and maybe my take on things could be a change in how you look at stuff too.
From my perspective, the RPGA provides these following important things:
1) the ability to play with other people without having to schedule a weekly or biweekly game, and to do so without having to coordinate the schedules of all of your friends who may have things preventing them from attending;
2) The ability to avoid a DM that you don't like or players you don't like without causing unnecessary drama;
3) Cards (which are cool, but aren't necessary);
4) A measured advancement system that keeps characters at the same relative power levels.
1) and 3) aren't what this post is about. 2) and 4) are.
DM Empowerment lets the DM do whatever he or she wants to a mod. Technically, so long as the XP and the rewards are the same, the DM could run anything they wanted and call it "BALD 1-1" or whatever mod is advertised. I wouldn't RECOMMEND that, mind you, but that's possible. I think most people would agree that the mod should, at the very least, include the same general encounter concepts and follow the RP issues revolving around the mod. After all, the story awards have to make sense.
I point to the golden rule, bolded at the start of every LFR mod: "Make decisions and adjudications that enhance the fun of the adventure when possible."
It used to be, and the argument I see most often, that the goal of the DM was to make sure that the play experience is absolutely identical for every player. While important in competitive tournament play, this is not important to any other RPGA mod or playstyle. Not anymore, and I think this is a great thing. It makes the mods more *living*.
It also corrects for errors in editing the mod and playstyles. A party of 1st level adventurers needs more help tackling some mods than a party of 4th level ones do at the same tier. More than that, however, the players' level of experience requires more adjustment than their characters' do. Some players are very new to D&D and need to be helped; others require a different playstyle entirely--some want more roleplay, others want less roleplay.
Entire combats can be changed. You have PCs who want to talk rather than fight? Change the mod; alter the combat encounter to be a skill challenge with the same XP and difficulty level. Did the PCs go off the reservation? Wing it; you can make decisions based on the context of the adventure and find a way to get them back on track. RPGA modules no longer need to be railroads.
Probably the best aspect of the RPGA DM Empowerment concept is that individual characters can *MEAN* something. This works best in a smaller community, but it can be turned into something even greater than that. PCs make backstories for their characters...why not alter the mod to include plot elements related to that PC's background? Bob's from Arabel and the mod takes place in Arabel...maybe the skill challenge that cites a DC of 17 for the Streetwise check is an automatic success for Bob as his best friend happens to know what's going on. Sarah's PC has a deep and abiding hatred for orcs; maybe the skill challenge involving orcs will never work out and should be modded to be a combat challenge with the same rewards at the end rather than denying her the reward because a combat is an "automatic failure" that offers less XP or denies a story or item award.
Make the game *FUN*. Encourage it to be a *roleplaying game*. How the mod is written is, ultimately, much less important than that.
One of the biggest complaints about D&D 4E that I hear in my experience as a retailer is that it's too much like a board game, with fixed moves and limited non-combat experiences and too much restriction hampering roleplaying. The RPGA paradigm doesn't do a whole lot to discourage this, and I believe the DM empowerment thing is supposed to alter this.
I'm not some crazy anarchist who thinks that the integrity and similar play experience of the mod should be totally abandoned. However, D&D 4E provides us with a really, really good and uniform idea of what a challenge is supposed to be; and unlike earlier editions, these challenges can be used interchangeably, like Lego blocks. There are differences, of course--certain party types and compositions will have an easier time with one type of level 3 encounter versus another type of the same level, because of the relative applicability of their skill/powerset to the specific encounter. However, that's what D&D is supposed to be about. Ultimately, in terms of numbers, a level 3 challenge of any sort is equal to any other level 3 challenge: AC, HP, skill DCs, to-hit numbers, all of these are pretttty tightly balanced. Re-skinning challenges to better fit a group can only improve things.
That's my two cents.