New Season 7 Death Curse rules posted

View attachment ToA Primer Preview.pdf

Even more poorly thought out than madness rules from OotA

Thanks for all the support! Glad you like it.

I like the rule, with some tweaking, but I think its going to piss off a ton of people, particularly AL groups playing the hardcovers from previous seasons when it goes into effect.

Apart from the fact that I dislike the rule, as D&D is a game built with the assumption that PCs do die and get resurrected as early as 5th level (see the spell revivify), I simply hate that it applies to previous seasons too.

I originally expected that I would hate the curse rules whatever they turned out to be, but looking at these rules, I'm mostly fine with them, with one major caveat. I'm glad that they're not forcing us to play through ToA with every character, and they're exempting T3 and T4 characters who can't play ToA to fix it. The pregen situation is a bit confusing (I'm sure plenty of new players will think that they can just start playing as a level 5 pregen since those now exist in AL), but I'm glad that it exists to allow new players to continue playing at a reasonable level after a character dies in ToA.

What I have a major problem with is the fact that the curse applies to everyone playing any adventure, regardless of season. I'm glad that you can opt out if you're just playing season 4 or older adventures (Curse of Strahd would become laughably unplayable otherwise), but the curse is majorly disruptive to anyone playing Storm King's Thunder, Yawning Portal, or CCCs with no real reprieve unless they can find someone to speed run them through the last chapter of ToA. If you want to play a straightforward SKT or TYP campaign like the ones we played in past seasons, you basically can't; the campaign is irrevocably different because of this curse. While that's interesting in some ways, it also adds an unnecessarily complex and disruptive element to campaigns regardless of whether players or DMs want it around. In a similar way, CCCs are a great addition to AL since they add a lot of unique content to conventions, but once the new rule goes into effect, it becomes pretty much impossible to play at conventions anymore without risking perma-death. New players can come to a convention, play a few T1 games, die, and then be told that their character is now lost forever unless they do some complex things with high level characters that they don't have access to, even if the convention games in question have nothing to do with season 7 and were never written with that in mind. I'm sure that really makes those players want to keep playing AL.

One of the strong points of AL in the past is the fact that you can run a hardcover as a private home game as long as you keep logs and adopt a few rules with regards to treasure distribution. Right now, if you want to play Hoard of the Dragon Queen or Out of the Abyss or Storm King's Thunder as written with your private group at home, you absolutely can. AL is necessarily a bit more restrictive than a true home campaign, but all of those additional rules (on treasure, magic items, character building, etc) are necessary for the function of an organized play campaign. This death curse, on the other hand, is complex and very much not necessary. If I want to start an SKT campaign next month, if it's an AL game, then we're forced to adopt this death curse into our campaign, even though the book was never meant to be played like that. Even if none of the players want to play with the rule, we have no choice in that regard. If we want to enjoy SKT as it was written, we can't in AL, unless we perform some metagame actions (running last chapter of ToA) that wouldn't even be possible unless every player in the group has a high enough level character to achieve that.

The decision of whether or not to run a campaign as AL has always comes down to additional rules and restrictions vs portability. If you play AL, you need to abide by the extra rules, but you can port your character to other adventures and campaigns. Whenever AL adds more restrictions or takes away from portability, the balance tilts away from running AL. It's very important to examine whether changes in these areas are worth the cost of making AL a less appealing option. The Barovia rules, for example, really hurt portability, and I think in hindsight the immersion added was not worth the cost to portability. Today, Season 4 modules are some of the least run mods in AL, and they're pretty much out of the question when it comes to one-off adventures to choose from for game days and conventions, even with the Barexit rules which were not around during the season itself. I think the death curse applying to older content suffers the same problem, where the added benefits of applying the curse to older adventures (are there any?) are not worth the cost of adding a significant and disruptive rule to campaigns not designed for its existence.

Ultimately, for all of these reasons, AL would be better served with the death curse applying only to characters that have played in season 7 adventures, rather than forcing it upon characters playing older seasons (and CCC) as well.

High-Level Play. Players can free their characters from the curse by participating in Tier 3 or Tier 4 adventures. Players exercising this option can’t return to Tomb of Annihilation with any formerly deceased characters. Which character is freed depends on what the player plays, as follows:
• Season 7 Adventure. All of the player’s characters are freed from the curse.
• Non-Season 7 Adventure. The character playing the adventure is freed from the curse.

So if I play a SINGLE Season 7 Tier 3/4 adventure then ALL my PCs are free of the curse?

AL keeps finding new and interesting ways to keep me from signing up!

The document has already been updated due to feedback and will probably continue to be updated until the official release when season 7 starts.

A third revision will go out today. (which is why the document is labeled as PREVIEW)

Exactly, I love the flavor of the rule, but not the implementation, even the mechanic itself is very clunky and un-5e like.