D&D 5E How many gamers ACTUALLY play in AL?

MerricB said:

No. They're not available generally.

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They're not available officially or legitimately, leaving players with no affiliated stores or outside the states with few options.

(A more complete answer)

aramis erak said:

It's worth noting that the passwords generally wind up on the internet - and they are NOT that hard. And the DDEX series are quite well pirated, too.

Plus, you can ask your FLGS if they will let you know the download password - some stores do.

I wish they'd put them up for legit use outside the league use.

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Yes. As always, this restriction hurts people with morals only, and adding more adventures to the general 5e playing public would probably be better for building the customer base anyway.

But what do I know, I don't work at WotC...

delericho said:

That's... impressive. Is the Mom a (former?) gamer, or is it the kid who's keen to experience different GMs?

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His mom plays in one game the Kid DM's... that's his home game. She may have been playing last session; they weren't at my table this time. (They were two months ago.)

Now, in Corvallis... of the regular 5, only 2 have a regular game outside. However, a LOT of the semi-regulars (That store varied from 3 people to 24 people based upon what was happening at OSU) had outside games - in fact, except for the full time five, almost all of them mentioned outside games. Since I returned to Anchorage, I'm aware of two people running games besides D&D in Corvallis... they play D&D at the store, and non-D&D home games. Those are just the folk I'm still in touch with.

At JustAGameCon (a local game con for the greater Corvallis/Albany area), there were 4 tables running at one point, and only 10 of the people playing did I recognize from Matts' Comics. Several came south from Portland... And that's not counting the 20-something Pathfinder players.

I would guess there are around 5,000 AL Players in the US.

CapnZapp said:

I understand that AL players want official material.

I hope they in return understand how that want is incompatible with WotC's strategy for 5e, i.e. a massive decrease in official material, options and alternatives, compared to previous editions and Pathfinder.

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Your assertion makes no sense. It is WotC that has been making the AL Official material.... 30 adventures a year, plus 4 Epic adventures a year.

Sure seems to be compatible with their strategy....

mflayermonk said:

I would guess there are around 5,000 AL Players in the US.

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That seems awfully low. I think WotC are still estimating about a million regular D&D players (it may well have gone up again), and I'd expect AL to represent a non-trivial percentage of that. So we're talking tens of thousands, if not in the low hundred thousands.

That would be my guess, anyway.

Psikerlord# said:

What good reason could there be for not making them available for free to the community...

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I believe they're written by AL members, not the WotC staff writers and contractors like the published modules, so there might be a quality gradient that they're concerned about.

I haven't actually read any of them so I could be entirely wrong though.

Also, if you want access to them without running a game at a store, you can set up an online game that broadcasts it's actual play sessions on You Tube or Twitch, and they'll give you access to Expeditions modules.

delericho said:

That seems awfully low. I think WotC are still estimating about a million regular D&D players (it may well have gone up again), and I'd expect AL to represent a non-trivial percentage of that. So we're talking tens of thousands, if not in the low hundred thousands.

That would be my guess, anyway.

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The Facebook group has 7,831 members.

We have about 50 players in my region of 3 million people. How about your local region?

mflayermonk said:

The Facebook group has 7,831 members.

We have about 50 players in my region of 3 million people. How about your local region?

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As I said up-thread, it effectively doesn't exist in my world.

I'm not saying your estimate is wrong, since I don't know the actual numbers. It just seems that 5,000 is really low. But then, maybe that's because AL is really small.

delericho said:

I'm not saying your estimate is wrong, since I don't know the actual numbers. It just seems that 5,000 is really low. But then, maybe that's because AL is really small.

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To give you an idea of how little penetration that Facebook group has, there are about 35 players I would class as fairly regular players here in Ballarat. Four of them are in the Facebook group. One ninth.



Cheers!