Ad-hoc certs in AL?

Over on Facebook, a conversation blew up when someone posted that there are apparently certs in the wild that allow players to play material from Unearthed Arcana. As UA material has been pretty definitively classified as 'not allowed in AL', I and a number of others chimed in as such.

Apparently, though, this is a thing -- Mike Mearls has been running adventures at conventions he attends, and coming up with special rewards, including the ability to playtest Unearthed Arcana material in AL games. This seems pretty problematic to me -- though I understand the desire to come up with something cool and unique to reward players who participate in Mearls's games, and I can see a benefit in knowing there are at least some players out there actively playtesting the UA material, I think it's a bad idea to simply do this on an ad-hoc basis without any sort of deliberation or group decision involved.

I can say that, if a player came up to me at a convention and claimed he could play, say, a Mystic from the psionics playtest in an AL game because Mike Mearls wrote him a cert, I'd respond that there's nothing in the ALPG or ALDMG saying that Mike Mearls can declare exceptions to the Allowed Rules for player characters and have him pull out a legal character or leave the table. Then again, I'm known to be a no-fun DM, apparently, so I'm curious what the consensus is on this point.

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Pauper

I foresee this having the potential to be both beneficial to the overall product and detrimental to the AL.

The reason that I see this as having potential to do good for the overall product line is that it could serve as a way of early access to upcoming materials. As long as the certs that Mearls is distributing are only of UA materials that are pretty much complete and just awaiting insertion into a product, I see little harm in doing so. It would increase the awareness and demand of upcoming products that include such content.

However, this good is far outweighed by the potential for harm to AL. Not only does it bring the risk of unbalanced materials disrupting the normal AL experience, but it did something far more egregious. It set a nasty precedent of allowing a non-AL team member to insert new materials into AL without any oversight by the AL team nor announcement to the AL DMs around the globe that such certs would be put into circulation. It doesn't matter that this is probably happening on just a small scale for now. There's still a bad precedent from this situation that could grow into a far greater problem down the road.

Id much prefer this topic talked about here than on the social media groups (ie Google + and Facebooks) as people there can get on edge very quickly.

At the end of the day, if Mike Mearls wants to hand out AL certs for this and that he can.

As a person who is the LC for area FAR FAR removed from the Core real of AL, I can confidently say with near absolute surety that I will never see such a Cert at my tables. Most of players are what I would term casuals (with a few solid 'hardcores'). Im also generally the DM at each game Im in attendance at.

However I do emphasise with those who may get exposed to it. I think with guidance was the Campaign Admin this isnt a huge issue, perhaps just a list of what he has given out might be the way to go.

As to those deciding to turn this into a crusade against WOTC, just please think about what you are doing. WOTC is not the bad guy here

Pauper said:

I can say that, if a player came up to me at a convention and claimed he could play, say, a Mystic from the psionics playtest in an AL game because Mike Mearls wrote him a cert, I'd respond that there's nothing in the ALPG or ALDMG saying that Mike Mearls can declare exceptions to the Allowed Rules for player characters and have him pull out a legal character or leave the table. Then again, I'm known to be a no-fun DM, apparently, so I'm curious what the consensus is on this point.

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It's an AL legal cert that provides a special exception to the rules. It's no different from the Cleric of Kelemvor or Aasimar certs, or magic item certs from Fai Chen, for that matter. If you run by AL rules, you must allow official AL certs.

NeverLucky said:

It's an AL legal cert that provides a special exception to the rules. It's no different from the Cleric of Kelemvor or Aasimar certs, or magic item certs from Fai Chen, for that matter. If you run by AL rules, you must allow official AL certs.

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Mike Mearls is not an AL official as far as I know, so unless he is, nothing he gives out is AL-legal unless the DM is willing to accept it at his/her table for that one session. Only the official AL admins and the people who write the AL Guides can make something AL-legal. Just like only Jeremy Crawford can issue official rulings, but no other rules opinions count as official, not even Mike's.

NeverLucky said:

It's an AL legal cert that provides a special exception to the rules. It's no different from the Cleric of Kelemvor or Aasimar certs, or magic item certs from Fai Chen, for that matter. If you run by AL rules, you must allow official AL certs.

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And how would you know that what you're looking at is real?

At the end of the day we have to hope people are being honest or its all over. There is no point going into a game thinking that someone is going to cheat you or its just not worth playing.

There were people around here coming back from Winter Fantasy and GenCon with all kinds of special certs. There were special certs awarded by Certs for Sam. I imagine that if Mike Mearls is running an AL-sanctioned mod, the rewards from that mod are bona fide. It's fun for the players and has little, if any, detrimental effects on anyone's AL game.

Warmaster Horus said:

There were people around here coming back from Winter Fantasy and GenCon with all kinds of special certs. There were special certs awarded by Certs for Sam.

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I'd consider that a little different - Certs for Sam was an announced program and approved by the AL admins. Anything written for that program I'm assuming has been reviewed by AL staff.**

Though Mearls is now part of the AL team (he's listed as being a member of the D&D Adventurers League Wizards Team on all the Season 4 modules), I'm not as confident that the certs he's giving out ad-hoc are actually approved by the AL, rather than simply being something he thought was a cool idea, specifically because we've seen no official AL announcement about it (at least, none I'm aware of). If an official announcement were made, that would make a huge difference in my book.

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Pauper

** - Though my understanding is that people were being asked to donate their own character certs to be auctioned off to raise money for Sam's treatment -- it's possible new certs were written up and added to the mix to 'sweeten the pot', so to speak, but I don't think that was the main goal of the event.

I could hope certs would be approved by AL Admins, but if it's at least coming from Mearls(who wrote and ran an Author-only AL mod) I'm fine with it. It's actually pretty cool, since he's one of 5E's designers.