Season 4 Curse of Strahd and Adventurers League

[skerritthegreen]

The adventures give nonstandard xp rewards (since we are focusing on those playing the intended way). If you left the series, played a bunch of mods, you would level out and not be able to play.

 

[CBattles6]

The adventures give nonstandard xp rewards (since we are focusing on those playing the intended way). If you left the series, played a bunch of mods, you would level out and not be able to play.

But you could presumably skip a few of the S4 mods and then jump back in, right?

 

[skerritthegreen]

You could easily bring a mid level PC in half way through the season (as an example). You could also play the first few, skip a few and then play the next. You do not have to play them in order, its just recommended. However, if you are playing, you cannot leave until you find an in game exit so depending on what you play, it will be hard to plan to exit if you jump around a lot.

 

[Coredump]

While the details could change things.... I am excited about it. I like the tighter format, and I think the restrictions let the designers do things they could not otherwise.



Have you guys thought about how it will impact replay-ability during future seasons? Next year can we just do 4-5 (or whatever)?



I think this is going to mess with conventions a bunch....since to 'premiere' 4-7, the only PCs are ones that have already played up through 4-6. This could be really cool for conventions...or really bad. I am intrigued to see how it turns out.

 

[Steve_MND]

I would note that this statement in particular is something that we'll stretch many times over upcoming seasons. We plan to try lots of new things, evolve and change, so to say AL is suppose to be a specific thing and always that, well, that's going to be hard. We want to offer lots of ways to play.

I'm not talking about my personal vision of AL, I'm talking about the one, single inviolate rule that the very concept of Organized Play is based on: the concept of portability. That you can take a legal character anywhere, across the country, or the continent, or the globe, and sit down and play with another table. It can be bent a little, but the more restrictive you make changes, the more it's going to impact playability.

Season 1, as long as my character was legal, I could go to any con or store running season 1 mods, and I could have a seat and play, regardless of whether I played the one before it, or never planned on playing the one after it. Same for season 2, or season 3. But now, with season 4, it looks like once you have played any character in a season 4 mod, that character is LOCKED. You can't play him in a season 3 mod at GenCon you may have missed, because he's stuck in Ravenloft. Until you play him in a mod that allows for the exit conditions to be met (judging from how it's been described so far), he's stuck. The idea of portability has been severely curtailed. This will drastically, and negatively, impact both convention offerings and game day options, and is, IMHO, pretty much completely antithetical to the central concept of an Organized Play campaign.

I will possibly play a brand new character in the new story arc, but I I'll most certainly not play ANY of my other characters in it, because once in, they're stuck. Next week had a season 2 mod I missed? Nope, can't play with this guy until he's out of Ravenloft. So I won't be taking any existing characters in, because by doing so, I'm negating the future possibility of playing other mods with him until I'm done with the whole season. Neither will most of my gaming friends, for the same reasons.

Like I said, I'll reserve final judgement to seeing what options season 4 comes with to address that problem, but until then, I can only see this causing complications and problems. As I said, for a number of otherwise-playable characters, the current proposed setup means that AL effectively won't have a season 4, and we'll be waiting for season 5 to do stuff with them again.

I like the idea of a tightly-scripted and exclusive story arc or campaign -- but as a parallel track to a season, and not as a replacement for one.

 

[Tazawa]

I am really excited about a more organized story for the upcoming season. We run 2-3 tables twice a month at a local gaming store. We play for 4-5 hours, so if 2-hour adventures are available, we double them up.

We had a lot of trouble running a coherent story for the Rage of Demons season. The release schedule was simply too slow, especially for the lower levels. We ended up interspersing a bunch of adventures from the two earlier seasons. This meant that characters (and players) lost the connection to the overall story.

Will the release schedule support our pace of play? Will we have ~8 hours of adventures available each month so we don't need to fill in with older adventures while we wait for new releases?

 

[pukunui]

Yes, the AL adventures conclude in such a manner that you could escape the demiplane or go right into the main meat of the hardback.

Does that meant that the "main meat" of the hardback doesn't start until 8th level?

 

[Tyranthraxus]

First: So happy about the Ravenloft reveal.

I ran Ravenloft for about 4 years in 2e. I was always the dm (bar 2 months), but really dont know Ravenloft as well as I should .But to be honest, it sounds like are only getting Barovia.

Second: THe need to only play Season 4 scenarios with a particular Character

Of course as the DM I have no issue with this, and I hope its going to help a lot with players and theri game memory. I can symthpathise on how some players might find this hard going, but due to the fact I use Warhorn to plan all my Expeditions games its not a huge issue. In fact I might offer one Season 4 scenario a month. ( I run expeditions at 2 difrerent stores on a once a fortnight basis).

The more I think about it the more I love the concept of being locked in to the demiplane.

 

[darjr]

Another bold move by a campaign not afraid to push boundaries. It does look like a bit of a gamble, but I'm sure it'll be awesome.

 

[Mirtek]

I can symthpathise on how some players might find this hard going, but due to the fact I use Warhorn to plan all my Expeditions games its not a huge issue.

How does that make any difference to the players? Their situation is still crewed up, being pressured to never being too late to sign up or not being able to skip a Werk due to traffic, work or simply wanting to rather go to the cinema that week or risk loosing the character for an unkown amount if time.

Even if I knew exactly the exit mods, I'd still might not want to play that particular evening for a multitude of reasons.

There's also zero replayability für any mod without an exit, they might as well not exist when planning events in later seasons