AL VS LFR of 4th and why I'm so disappointed

Hello,

I've been very critical of the AL admins way of doing things. I find a lot of people agree with me and others don't, and then there are those that just want to be contrary. I'm going to express my reasons in a different way by comparing my experience with both RPGA systems.

4th LFR - LFR had its issues its true, but I felt the RPGA was run rather well. The region for LFR constituted the whole of the FR. Each region had its own flavor and its own story arcs. Each month mods were published for multiple regions. I'm a big fan of lore. I had characters that were customized for the region and had very flavorful backgrounds based on the lore.

Modules often gave out favors or story awards that would build on each other. If i did enough adventuring in one region I would eventually get titles or other boons. I could have a character that was a knight in one region or a lord in another.

Content was unrestricted. While this was a problem with the game because of the lack of content editing by Wizards, I was able to partake in the cool flavorful character concepts that were published.

We were able to fill the gaps in mods by creating our own adventures. One of our DMs made a full campaign that was LFR legal just by combining my realms and published mods. It was very immersive and very fun.

Story ARCs were capped at conventions with battle interactive. The regional story arcs usually finished with a large scale battle interactive involving 6-12 tables, and they were playable at the LOCAL cons. They were very immersive, very well run and extremely fun. They usually involved some con only certs as well.

Since these are long posts. I will do AL on another posts.

My experience with AL

AL - So far every season has been in the Moonsea. While it is an interesting region, FR has much more to offer, and the feel and tone of the mods really hasn't changed. An oppressed city being overrun by an evil cult.

There has only been one story award chain (Mulmaster cloaks), and the player characters don't really get a feeling of accomplishment or immersion into most stories.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Content is hijacked repeatedly under the guise of "exclusive content". Exclusive to who? The first season we got kicked out of Phlan by a Huge Green Dragon. Players around the world experienced this. Now the chance to reclaim the city was hijacked into exclusive content that less than 1% of those players will get to experience. How does that benefit the game? If it was exclusive to a local con. I could get around that. What they are doing is just ridiculous. Another example is Elisande. The girl and goat has made an appearance in all three seasons. Once again, players around the world are wondering what the hell is up with this girl. HIJACKED! Her story is now an Admin run only mod. You have the invite the admin to your game and pay for his trip in order to access this story. That is just outright idiotic! You don't even know if the admin can write well! Release the story. If it is well written and popular, then the admin will get celebrity status and get invited to run it based on that. That is how it should go! Lastly there is the blanket restrictions they are making. I understand the need for restrictions, but do it based on what is needed not what might be needed. I can't think of one combination between the Elemental Evil companion and the SCAG that would be broken, yet because of a blanket ruling I can't have a Genasi EK using Green flame blade or Booming blade. I could make a very flavorful character out of that.

We are stuck with the content they give us which is limited and not well edited. The module output is much slower than LFR, and there has been no method to allow self created mods which would be easy to implement and control. I am stuck with the story arcs given and can't use my extensive knowledge of the realms to expand on the region for my players and improve their experience.

The story Arch capstone issue is explained with my exclusive content rant above. My characters have no feeling of immersion into the story or sense of accomplishment. Saturday night gaming is getting kind of boring. I never had that issue with LFR.

I hope that explains my position on this better. [/FONT]

aarduini said:

I've been very critical of the AL admins way of doing things. I find a lot of people agree with me and others don't, and then there are those that just want to be contrary. I'm going to express my reasons in a different way by comparing my experience with both RPGA systems.

Click to expand...

Talking about your own experience is good and valid, and I can't really say that you're wrong to do so. With that said, I think you're emphasizing certain things and downplaying others in a way that makes LFR look better than it was and makes AL look worse by comparison. Cases in point:

Each region had its own flavor and its own story arcs. Each month mods were published for multiple regions. I'm a big fan of lore. I had characters that were customized for the region and had very flavorful backgrounds based on the lore.

Click to expand...

When LFR started it was a well-funded, intensely-supported program. Not only were there numerous regions with authors being paid to publish adventures in each region, but there were lots of little bonus add-ons provided by WotC as well. (If you ever heard or spoke the phrase, "Is there a +2 on the board?" then you participated in one of the first two seasons of LFR.) Even then, the quality of the adventures in different regions varied significantly -- I always felt the Waterdeep region was one of the best (and one of the folks running that region is currently on the AL admin team), while East Rift and Impiltur were...not as high quality.

By the end of Season 2, though, the cracks were showing. More and more adventures were late being released, and some were never released at all, including the entire second season of the Baldur's Gate region. Season 3 saw the regions collapse down to a more workable number, and WotC started withdrawing support for LFR in favor of the new Encounters program. Still, what remained was stronger, with a core of volunteers driving the quality of the program. A good number of those folks are still involved in OP today.

Modules often gave out favors or story awards that would build on each other. If i did enough adventuring in one region I would eventually get titles or other boons. I could have a character that was a knight in one region or a lord in another.

Click to expand...

Again, I think you're comparing apples to oranges here -- many of the 'title' boons were enabled in later season adventures, and (IMO anyway) a lot of them were cheapened by relaxing their requirements significantly. (One of the boons went from requiring 7 supporting story awards to requiring 2, as an example.)

AL appears to be offering faction mentorship as their first 'title boon', and other factions and benefits are available too, such as membership in the Cloaks of Mulmaster. With the guidelines in the DMG, I wouldn't be surprised if more such boons became available in later seasons.

Content was unrestricted. While this was a problem with the game because of the lack of content editing by Wizards, I was able to partake in the cool flavorful character concepts that were published.

Click to expand...

One person's 'cool flavorful character concepts' is another person's 'broken character that takes all the fun out of the game session'. I've more than once told the story of the laser cleric at my table at the first Adventuring Company adventure at GenCon who basically soloed the entire module, leaving the rest of us wondering why we were even at the table.

I am deeply appreciative of the admin team's efforts to keep munchkinism and character optimization to a minimum in AL, and I suspect many other players would thank them as well if they had any idea of how bad an unrestricted environment could get. (*cough*non-core Pathfinder Society*cough*).

We were able to fill the gaps in mods by creating our own adventures. One of our DMs made a full campaign that was LFR legal just by combining my realms and published mods. It was very immersive and very fun.

Click to expand...

MyRealm was an interesing, if flawed concept -- the first few modules I played in and wrote were motivated by a desire to explore areas of the Realms and parts of the main story that I felt were underdeveloped by the campaign itself, but as time went on, it became clear that most folks, at least in my area, who continued using MyRealms were using it either to shoe-horn their own campaigns into an LFR structure, or to simply provide XP and treasure farms that could be quickly run to power-level characters for big con events.

There are numerous arguments to be made both in favor and against MyRealms style content in AL, but at the moment, I don't think you can authorize such modules to be uploaded to the DMs Guild, which basically breaks the concept. I don't expect to see the return of MyRealms while the DMs Guild exists.

Story ARCs were capped at conventions with battle interactive. The regional story arcs usually finished with a large scale battle interactive involving 6-12 tables, and they were playable at the LOCAL cons.

Click to expand...

Just because a Battle Interactive *could* be played at a local con doesn't mean that it was *good* when run at a local con -- the biggest challenge, as with AL currently, was finding enough DMs who were both competent enough to provide a fun game experience and committed enough to stick to running the events while only able to play them in minimal 'slot zero' games. Our local BIs went from six to two tables by the end, which took a lot of the 'interactive' out of the 'battle interactive'.

I can't tell you you're wrong to be disappointed in AL, but I can point out that you're comparing a somewhat make-believe version of LFR to a program that was at least in part designed to compensate for the limitations of LFR, not necessarily to maintain every strength it had.

--
Pauper

aarduini said:

AL - So far every season has been in the Moonsea. While it is an interesting region, FR has much more to offer, and the feel and tone of the mods really hasn't changed. An oppressed city being overrun by an evil cult.

Click to expand...

The Expeditions modules were set in the Moonsea, but AL was more than just Expeditions. Encounters and the hard-cover modules are all AL-legal and have been set in the Sword Coast, in the Underdark, and will now be set in Ravenloft for the next season. Likewise, season 4 is being set in Ravenloft rather than in the Moonsea. So basically this complaint is being addressed.

There has only been one story award chain (Mulmaster cloaks), and the player characters don't really get a feeling of accomplishment or immersion into most stories.

Click to expand...

Maybe you don't, but when my paladin was roaming through Phlan looking for people to save and came across Ellison Berenguer, the fact that he had 'Favor of Ellison Berenguer' from a prior module felt very significant to me. Other story awards have had similar connections between modules. If you're not feeling immersed, perhaps you're just not making an effort?

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Content is hijacked repeatedly under the guise of "exclusive content". Exclusive to who? The first season we got kicked out of Phlan by a Huge Green Dragon. Players around the world experienced this. Now the chance to reclaim the city was hijacked into exclusive content that less than 1% of those players will get to experience.

Click to expand...

I think you're exaggerating the exclusivity of cons. I can't find any hard numbers, but at GenCon last year there were about 80 tables reserved for Expeditions play with about another 20 cycling through the season 2 and season 3 intro modules (DDEX 2-1 and DDEX 3-1); it wouldn't surprise me if over 2000 different people played some AL at GenCon 2015. If this represents 'less than 1%' of the total AL population, that means there are over 200,000 unique, regular AL players residing in WotC's RPGA/DCI database, and that seems a bit much.

I get that your point is that some things should be more accessible, but that goal stands in direct opposition to the goal of providing experiences at a big, destination convention that you can't get at your local con or home store. Why travel 1500 miles to play the same four adventures you can play at the FLGS in three weeks? Having big, con-exclusive events makes the cons more special, and AL is helping support smaller cons by providing them opportunities for adventure premiers and DDAO invites -- if your con invites Skerrit to run his goat-themed adventure, that's not one every other con will have access to. Congrats! You just got your own con-exclusive event.

Once again, players around the world are wondering what the hell is up with this girl.

Click to expand...

Some are. Frankly, I stopped being interested when she disappeared after DDEX 1-3. The chance to play in the 'who really is Elisande' module doesn't hold much draw for me, and that's fine. Not everybody is equally as interested in every story. The real question is, are there enough stories so that most folks who are interested in a story get to play it? People who want that opportunity can petition their local con organizer to invite Skerrit to run his mod and find out. And there's even been a suggestion (not official, but a suggestion) that particularly popular DDAO mods might be eventually publicly released -- there's an article on the D&D AL Organizers site asking that question right now. So again, all this is being addressed.

I can't think of one combination between the Elemental Evil companion and the SCAG that would be broken, yet because of a blanket ruling I can't have a Genasi EK using Green flame blade or Booming blade. I could make a very flavorful character out of that.

Click to expand...

Ah, yeah, I was wondering when we'd get to this point.

Allowing unrestricted content blending guarantees broken combos will come to the forefront -- we saw that in LFR, and we also saw that trying to ban broken combos after the fact simply doesn't work.

You're just going to have to decide if you can live with this, and if you can't, well, there are other broken games you can play instead. Sorry for not catering to your playstyle for the 7th OP campaign in a row.

Edit: I was irritated re-reading this after posting it, and after thinking about it for a bit, it finally hit me -- what's so 'flavorful' about a genasi Eldritch Knight with Greenflame Blade that it can't be captured with a half-elf or dwarf Eldritch Knight with Greenflame Blade? Or with a genasi Eldritch Knight with some other cantrip? It sounds to me like you're using the language of the role-player to try to justify munchkinism, which is a) something munchkins have been doing for years -- see 'Stormwind Fallacy' -- and b) manipulative and wrong. So while I can't say you're wrong about most of what you've written, I will say you're wrong about this.

there has been no method to allow self created mods which would be easy to implement and control.

Click to expand...

If the method is so easy, what is it? Let us know how such a process should work, for no money and for few volunteer-hours, and I'm sure the admins will implement it. Seriously. Having a course of free, high-quality AL material that they don't have to spend half their lives watchdogging would be a huge benefit to them. So please, share.

Saturday night gaming is getting kind of boring. I never had that issue with LFR.

Click to expand...

Again, I can't tell you you're wrong -- if you're bored, you're bored.

Based on your comments, though, I suspect you'll be a lot less bored starting in season 4, especially if you can take off the rose-colored glasses about how awesome LFR used to be.

--
Pauper

Pauper said:

Talking about your own experience is good and valid, and I can't really say that you're wrong to do so. With that said, I think you're emphasizing certain things and downplaying others in a way that makes LFR look better than it was and makes AL look worse by comparison. Cases in point:

Click to expand...

I intentionally picked the good aspects of LFR and the bad aspects of AL. I'm trying to show what it is about AL that frustrates me and give an example how my experience with this aspect of organize play was better with LFR.

Pauper said:

When LFR started it was a well-funded, intensely-supported program. Not only were there numerous regions with authors being paid to publish adventures in each region, but there were lots of little bonus add-ons provided by WotC as well. (If you ever heard or spoke the phrase, "Is there a +2 on the board?" then you participated in one of the first two seasons of LFR.) Even then, the quality of the adventures in different regions varied significantly -- I always felt the Waterdeep region was one of the best (and one of the folks running that region is currently on the AL admin team), while East Rift and Impiltur were...not as high quality.

By the end of Season 2, though, the cracks were showing. More and more adventures were late being released, and some were never released at all, including the entire second season of the Baldur's Gate region. Season 3 saw the regions collapse down to a more workable number, and WotC started withdrawing support for LFR in favor of the new Encounters program. Still, what remained was stronger, with a core of volunteers driving the quality of the program. A good number of those folks are still involved in OP today.

Click to expand...

I was with LFR from the start and remember the cards. Yes, the quality did start to wane. The main point I wanted to make was that there were more regions and more diversified stories. I admit i may have been too harsh about the quality of the mods and the frequency.

Pauper said:

Again, I think you're comparing apples to oranges here -- many of the 'title' boons were enabled in later season adventures, and (IMO anyway) a lot of them were cheapened by relaxing their requirements significantly. (One of the boons went from requiring 7 supporting story awards to requiring 2, as an example.)

AL appears to be offering faction mentorship as their first 'title boon', and other factions and benefits are available too, such as membership in the Cloaks of Mulmaster. With the guidelines in the DMG, I wouldn't be surprised if more such boons became available in later seasons.

Click to expand...

I hope your right about this.

Pauper said:

One person's 'cool flavorful character concepts' is another person's 'broken character that takes all the fun out of the game session'. I've more than once told the story of the laser cleric at my table at the first Adventuring Company adventure at GenCon who basically soloed the entire module, leaving the rest of us wondering why we were even at the table.

I am deeply appreciative of the admin team's efforts to keep munchkinism and character optimization to a minimum in AL, and I suspect many other players would thank them as well if they had any idea of how bad an unrestricted environment could get. (*cough*non-core Pathfinder Society*cough*).

Click to expand...

The restrictions are too broad and too heavy handed. We already have broken concepts like the Archery fighting style with Sharpshooter, and while broken they aren't game breaking. 5e characters don't have the ability to become too broken like they did in 4e. Also, there are restrictions like prohibiting wings, yet they give 1-4 level characters boots of flying. People say they aren't the same, but in an AL game they might as well be.

Pauper said:

MyRealm was an interesing, if flawed concept -- the first few modules I played in and wrote were motivated by a desire to explore areas of the Realms and parts of the main story that I felt were underdeveloped by the campaign itself, but as time went on, it became clear that most folks, at least in my area, who continued using MyRealms were using it either to shoe-horn their own campaigns into an LFR structure, or to simply provide XP and treasure farms that could be quickly run to power-level characters for big con events.

There are numerous arguments to be made both in favor and against MyRealms style content in AL, but at the moment, I don't think you can authorize such modules to be uploaded to the DMs Guild, which basically breaks the concept. I don't expect to see the return of MyRealms while the DMs Guild exists.

Click to expand...

I disagree with you about the potential brokeness of my-realms, but I do agree that they won't appear as long as DM guild is here. Which is a shame.

Pauper said:

Just because a Battle Interactive *could* be played at a local con doesn't mean that it was *good* when run at a local con -- the biggest challenge, as with AL currently, was finding enough DMs who were both competent enough to provide a fun game experience and committed enough to stick to running the events while only able to play them in minimal 'slot zero' games. Our local BIs went from six to two tables by the end, which took a lot of the 'interactive' out of the 'battle interactive'.

Click to expand...

From what I hear from people who went to GenCon, the guys running the epics weren't all that organized. The burden of the quality experience of the battle interactive should rest of the Con organizers. If they do a good job, their cons will be popular. If not, they won't. That's the American way. The ideal that it takes selected individuals to put together teams to run these mods is ridiculous. By hijacking these mods to those the admins deem worthy you are removing the experiencing (for good or bad) from over 99% of the players. Anyway I look at that, its bad for the hobby. [/QUOTE]

Pauper said:

I can't tell you you're wrong to be disappointed in AL, but I can point out that you're comparing a somewhat make-believe version of LFR to a program that was at least in part designed to compensate for the limitations of LFR, not necessarily to maintain every strength it had.

Click to expand...

I'm not quoting a make believe version of LFR. You can't make that claim for the same reasons you say i'm exaggerating. It was different for each individual. Al is overcompensating in a big way IMO. 5e doesn't have the same characteristics of 4e that made it broke. The restrictions are doing more damage than good IMO. The go to thought should be how to make it happen, not take it away just in case.

I think on the whole we're just going to have to agree to disagree on most of the points you raise, and it's good to see we even agree on some things. Still, your comment here basically explains all by itself why you're disappointed in AL:

aarduini said:

I intentionally picked the good aspects of LFR and the bad aspects of AL.

Click to expand...

Anytime you compare the good of one thing to the bad of another, you're going to find yourself preferring the former. That doesn't mean the latter thing isn't also good in its own ways.

--
Pauper

I somewhat agree with the OP on this one, but not in regard to LFR.
I started back in the Living City Days (i.e. cert collection phases).
I think Living Greyhawk for the first 2 years was incredible (maybe just me). But it later simply got out of control...many adventures were still written well, their scope expanded exponentially and wasn't fun.
LFR started well but quickly grew into Living rules-craft (not as bad as PFS) with monthly updates and rule changes that stressed any regular player. I joined the D&D Insider just to try and keep up with rules but later just gave up.

I feel that season 1 for AL was fairly decent. It was good on introductions, stuck to a mostly focused story line. I had many enjoyable play experiences.

Season 2 was / has been a disappointment. The stories seem fragmented...maybe 4 different bad guy factions were too much. It simply lacked. Even the interactive was meh.

Season 3 has been better but unless you run the hard back book and know the novels, it's hard to put everything together. We'll see how the second half goes.


On exclusivity, which I think the OP is "really" focused on, is simply relative.
Some players can play weekly or even daily in the right city / store area. That is a measure of exclusiveness.
Others only get the occasion convention because there simply aren't local participating game stores.
Some have the luxury of travel and unlimited finances and get everything.

and this has nothing to do with the campaign rules.

I like to see different stuff. I like to see other people with different stuff. I love regionalism and support variety.

Ultimately, living campaign players that love the system want validation. They want to show the world that they are playing in something bigger than just their area (city or even home). It's hard at times to listen to players talk about home games and everything they did because there is little validation; i.e. was it really hard, who oversaw it, how long, how fast, etc. Living campaigns provide that allure of a controlled MMO style environment where you can see exactly what was accomplished and know how it was done. I think the cert system lends to that validation as well as the exclusive content that is bantered around.

I can appreciate the OPs concerns; he can't get everything but that is the story of the world.
I struggle to play everything I can, but that is always limited by some outside force...a wife, 2 kids, work,....however even if I miss something, at least I know there is always more. and still more, is better, provided its done well.

aarduini said:

AL - So far every season has been in the Moonsea. While it is an interesting region, FR has much more to offer, and the feel and tone of the mods really hasn't changed. An oppressed city being overrun by an evil cult.

There has only been one story award chain (Mulmaster cloaks), and the player characters don't really get a feeling of accomplishment or immersion into most stories.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva, sans-serif]Content is hijacked repeatedly under the guise of "exclusive content". Exclusive to who? The first season we got kicked out of Phlan by a Huge Green Dragon. Players around the world experienced this. Now the chance to reclaim the city was hijacked into exclusive content that less than 1% of those players will get to experience. How does that benefit the game? If it was exclusive to a local con. I could get around that. What they are doing is just ridiculous. Another example is Elisande. The girl and goat has made an appearance in all three seasons. Once again, players around the world are wondering what the hell is up with this girl. HIJACKED! Her story is now an Admin run only mod. You have the invite the admin to your game and pay for his trip in order to access this story. That is just outright idiotic! You don't even know if the admin can write well! Release the story. If it is well written and popular, then the admin will get celebrity status and get invited to run it based on that. That is how it should go! Lastly there is the blanket restrictions they are making. I understand the need for restrictions, but do it based on what is needed not what might be needed. I can't think of one combination between the Elemental Evil companion and the SCAG that would be broken, yet because of a blanket ruling I can't have a Genasi EK using Green flame blade or Booming blade. I could make a very flavorful character out of that.

We are stuck with the content they give us which is limited and not well edited. The module output is much slower than LFR, and there has been no method to allow self created mods which would be easy to implement and control. I am stuck with the story arcs given and can't use my extensive knowledge of the realms to expand on the region for my players and improve their experience.

The story Arch capstone issue is explained with my exclusive content rant above. My characters have no feeling of immersion into the story or sense of accomplishment. Saturday night gaming is getting kind of boring. I never had that issue with LFR.

I hope that explains my position on this better. [/FONT]

Click to expand...

I'm not going to address each of these, as I feel Pauper and others have done so, but a few deserve clearing up of misconceptions:

aarduini said:

AL - So far every season has been in the Moonsea. While it is an interesting region, FR has much more to offer, and the feel and tone of the mods really hasn't changed. An oppressed city being overrun by an evil cult.

Click to expand...

That's sort of true, though not entirely. Expeditions are in the Moonseas. Hardcovers (previous Encounters) are in the Sword Coast. DDAO and Epics are anywhere we feel like. The separation was done intentionally. In previous campaigns, OP, novels, rules, etc... would walk all over each other's stories without realizing it. No the AL is canon in the Moonsea, so if we kill a guy, he doesn't show up in a novel two years later. If we set our entire story in a city, we don't need to worry about the video game burning it down tomorrow. The separation of stories lets everything stay on story. Also note that for season 4, 90% of the Expeditions involve the transposition of a part of the Realms into Barovia, so VERY different setting.

aarduini said:

Content is hijacked repeatedly under the guise of "exclusive content". Exclusive to who? The first season we got kicked out of Phlan by a Huge Green Dragon. Players around the world experienced this. Now the chance to reclaim the city was hijacked into exclusive content that less than 1% of those players will get to experience. How does that benefit the game? If it was exclusive to a local con. I could get around that. What they are doing is just ridiculous. Another example is Elisande. The girl and goat has made an appearance in all three seasons. Once again, players around the world are wondering what the hell is up with this girl. HIJACKED! Her story is now an Admin run only mod.

Click to expand...

Both parts of this are not really correct. The Epics are no longer constrained to large cons (though they continue to premier there). We just granted the S3 and S4 interactives to literally dozens of conventions (something we started doing around the end of S2). Truthfully almost 90% of those cons that filled the request form and met the minimum requirements were granted permission to run an Epic. If they weren't it was most likely because someone else was already running it within a week or two in the same general location of the con that asked.

As for the story of Elisande, not highjacked into DDAO3. If you look carefully you will note that the blurb begins with her truth already revealed! That's because her story plays out in DDEX3-16. You should totally go play that mod. I hear 3-16 is the best mod in the history of all mods and the author is also quite handsome! DDAO3 deals with a fun little romp alongside Elisande and does not affect the over meta-plot of the campaign. Rather its a sidetrek with an NPC who is memorable for some. I understand how you might think otherwise. Once you are unhappy with something, its easy to make the assumption that the people responsible are making additional bad choices and are out to screw it up, but I assure its not true. (Also please note since you liked LFR, THANKS! half the admin team is the same people who brought you LFR, with a dash of Ashes of Athas and Greyhawk sprinkled in).

aarduini said:

We are stuck with the content they give us which is limited and not well edited. The module output is much slower than LFR, and there has been no method to allow self created mods which would be easy to implement and control. I am stuck with the story arcs given and can't use my extensive knowledge of the realms to expand on the region for my players and improve their experience.

Click to expand...

As for editing, that was an issue. When we found a mistakes, the admins couldn't fix them because all layout and holding of the raw files was done WOTC and we didn't have them. Now that we've migrated our file hosting to OneBookShelf and it has a function to allow updating (and notify everyone who bought the file), we expect updates. As for output, please note we've been providing ~300 hours of content a year (actually more). That's with less staff for less pay. If you want to see more content, and sure who wouldn't love that, you vote with your wallet. Buy more mods off OBS and we can possibly put more out. As for a MyRealms possibly, as announced previously that's what we are testing with the DDAO mods. If they go well, we might expand the concept. Since you have already gone on record as disliking the DDAO mods, I'm not sure which was to go.

aarduini said:

The story Arch capstone issue is explained with my exclusive content rant above. My characters have no feeling of immersion into the story or sense of accomplishment. Saturday night gaming is getting kind of boring.

Click to expand...

Do you fill out the critical events summaries at the end of every mod so we can alter the plotline based on your actions? (I ask this because the response rate is roughly in the single digits) If you want to impact the story line, please fill out critical events! If you already do, congratulations, you are someone who has had a significant and disproportionate impact on the story! I note that your actions have changed things. For example in season one, the actions of the players caused the pact between Phlan and the fey of the Quivering Forest to be broken. Its only because of this that Vorgansharax was able to invade. You did that. Then in season two, actions of the players in critical events caused the city of Mulmaster (whom the people have Phlan had gone to for aid) to eject the Phlanites, forcing them to seek shelter in Hillsfar/Elventree. Here there have been more successes. So many in fact, that there is a chance to retake Phlan (because of the critical events summaries the few of you that filled out the online forms filled in). Indeed, some surprises in Epic4 may or may not happen based on the last of the critical events we are gathering now. Again, you did that.

skerritthegreen said:

Do you fill out the critical events summaries at the end of every mod so we can alter the plotline based on your actions? (I ask this because the response rate is roughly in the single digits) If you want to impact the story line, please fill out critical events! If you already do, congratulations, you are someone who has had a significant and disproportionate impact on the story! I note that your actions have changed things. For example in season one, the actions of the players caused the pact between Phlan and the fey of the Quivering Forest to be broken. Its only because of this that Vorgansharax was able to invade. You did that. Then in season two, actions of the players in critical events caused the city of Mulmaster (whom the people have Phlan had gone to for aid) to eject the Phlanites, forcing them to seek shelter in Hillsfar/Elventree. Here there have been more successes. So many in fact, that there is a chance to retake Phlan (because of the critical events summaries the few of you that filled out the online forms filled in). Indeed, some surprises in Epic4 may or may not happen based on the last of the critical events we are gathering now. Again, you did that.

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For the future, would it be possible to contact random folks who have responded to these critical event summaries (kind of like a sweepstakes or lottery) and ask them if their characters can be incorporated into the events? For example, if I got pulled from the pile of critical event summaries from Season 2, there might be a blurb in a future adventure that discusses how Lonic Tremolo, paladin of Helm, via his contacts in the secret police helped poison the well of good will (albeit unwittingly) against the refugees of Phlan and helped get them evicted from Mulmaster.

This would both make it more obvious where player feedback influenced the direction of the campaign, and possibly increase the frequency of feedback as players hope to be involved in the campaign exposition lottery. It would involve a bit more work for the admin team, but hopefully not an overwhelming amount.

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Pauper

Pauper said:

For the future, would it be possible to contact random folks who have responded to these critical event summaries (kind of like a sweepstakes or lottery) and ask them if their characters can be incorporated into the events? For example, if I got pulled from the pile of critical event summaries from Season 2, there might be a blurb in a future adventure that discusses how Lonic Tremolo, paladin of Helm, via his contacts in the secret police helped poison the well of good will (albeit unwittingly) against the refugees of Phlan and helped get them evicted from Mulmaster.

This would both make it more obvious where player feedback influenced the direction of the campaign, and possibly increase the frequency of feedback as players hope to be involved in the campaign exposition lottery. It would involve a bit more work for the admin team, but hopefully not an overwhelming amount.

--
Pauper

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That's actually built into the critical events. We ask you put unusual, heroic, funny things that happened at your table in response to one of the questions. That question is almost always left blank by those that answer, though some of the side references in adventures are referring to those comments.