smerwin29
Reluctant Time Traveler
Some thoughts in general on Organized Play campaigns:
It is perfectly fine to provide feedback on what you like and don't like about an OP campaign. Collecting, analyzing, and managing player feedback is part of what a campaign staff is "paid" to do. (I put paid in quotation marks because payment is generally in mangy chickens.)
It is also important to remember a few other things when participating in an OP campaign:
1) An OP campaign may have goals or mandates for what it is trying to achieve that we players are not privy to. Those are going to dictate the form and function of the campaign. In almost all cases, those goals and functions are going to fail to meet the wants of a segment of the gaming community, while at the same time being exactly what a different segment wants. We players in a campaign have no idea what "a lot" of players want, because we don't talk to "a lot" of participants. We know our own desires and biases, and we usually seek out those with those same desires and biases until we think we know what "a lot" of people want. We actually know very little. It's one of the countless perks of not being an administrator of a campaign--being so very comfortable with our own ignorance.
2) Watching people try to objectively compare one OP campaign to another should be a paid event--the entertainment value is incomparable. While I was an admin in the early days of Living Forgotten Realms (LFR), I wish I could have jumped in a time machine and come forward specifically to grab this threads original post. Then I could have gone back with it and showed the millions of people (I may exaggerate) who absolutely despised that campaign (while still playing weekly) to show them that, not long in the future, LFR would be held up as an example of the crowning achievement of its day. Just like I could also show all the people who complained about Living Greyhawk in its time how that was the perfect campaign in retrospect. And don't even get me started on the veritable Pax Romana that was Living City....
3) No campaign is ever going to please everyone--all it can do is hope to meet the goals that spawned its existence and get more than a handful of people together to make up stories and have fun. Show me a single campaign rule or structure, and I will find people who will swear that it is greatest thing and they know everyone thinks so and everyone plays this campaign because of that rule, and I will find you people who think it is the worst thing ever and everyone thinks so and no one plays this campaign because of that rule.
4) Let's just look at one example of a rule: the one that limits rules to 1-2 sources per storyline season. Right now it is not unreasonable to say, "How come I can't mix content from the SCAG and EE Player's Guides?" I mean, it's just two sources, right? Well, it turns out there are many reasons. When polled in past campaigns about what made them stop DMing or would make them stop DMing, most DMs said it was rules bloat and broken PC combinations that made the game not fun for nost just DMs, but for other players at the table as well. WotC has already stated that each rules supplement released would be balanced only against itself and against the core rules--not against other supplements. To alleviate DM fatigue on the thing they said fatigued them most, the admins went with WtoC's recommendation: use all the rules, just don't mix them.
So why, one might ask, don't the admins just rule on things individually to rule out just the broken stuff? Because down that path lies madness. That was done in Living Greyhawk, and it created new documentation and countless arguments that led to quite a barrier to entry to the campaign. Not to mention countless hours of work.
But right now, one might say, there are so few supplements that it is not a problem. And that might be true, but it is better to set the precedent now than to add the limitation later. Because if you think we players howl and complain about not having access to something, the din we create when something is taken from us that we already have is deafening.
5) Five, as always, is right out.
In the long run, the good news in all this is that this is a hobby and not our livelihoods. With the Internet and the DMs Guild, we can all go out and start our very own Organized Play campaigns. And since we all know the perfect way to run a perfect OP campaign--because we know that everyone agrees with our own personal preferences for playing the game that somehow magically line up with how the perfect OP campaign should be run--it should be no problem in getting thousands of players and DMs lined up in short order. I'll be the first one in line at Origins to play!
Shawn
It is perfectly fine to provide feedback on what you like and don't like about an OP campaign. Collecting, analyzing, and managing player feedback is part of what a campaign staff is "paid" to do. (I put paid in quotation marks because payment is generally in mangy chickens.)
It is also important to remember a few other things when participating in an OP campaign:
1) An OP campaign may have goals or mandates for what it is trying to achieve that we players are not privy to. Those are going to dictate the form and function of the campaign. In almost all cases, those goals and functions are going to fail to meet the wants of a segment of the gaming community, while at the same time being exactly what a different segment wants. We players in a campaign have no idea what "a lot" of players want, because we don't talk to "a lot" of participants. We know our own desires and biases, and we usually seek out those with those same desires and biases until we think we know what "a lot" of people want. We actually know very little. It's one of the countless perks of not being an administrator of a campaign--being so very comfortable with our own ignorance.
2) Watching people try to objectively compare one OP campaign to another should be a paid event--the entertainment value is incomparable. While I was an admin in the early days of Living Forgotten Realms (LFR), I wish I could have jumped in a time machine and come forward specifically to grab this threads original post. Then I could have gone back with it and showed the millions of people (I may exaggerate) who absolutely despised that campaign (while still playing weekly) to show them that, not long in the future, LFR would be held up as an example of the crowning achievement of its day. Just like I could also show all the people who complained about Living Greyhawk in its time how that was the perfect campaign in retrospect. And don't even get me started on the veritable Pax Romana that was Living City....
3) No campaign is ever going to please everyone--all it can do is hope to meet the goals that spawned its existence and get more than a handful of people together to make up stories and have fun. Show me a single campaign rule or structure, and I will find people who will swear that it is greatest thing and they know everyone thinks so and everyone plays this campaign because of that rule, and I will find you people who think it is the worst thing ever and everyone thinks so and no one plays this campaign because of that rule.
4) Let's just look at one example of a rule: the one that limits rules to 1-2 sources per storyline season. Right now it is not unreasonable to say, "How come I can't mix content from the SCAG and EE Player's Guides?" I mean, it's just two sources, right? Well, it turns out there are many reasons. When polled in past campaigns about what made them stop DMing or would make them stop DMing, most DMs said it was rules bloat and broken PC combinations that made the game not fun for nost just DMs, but for other players at the table as well. WotC has already stated that each rules supplement released would be balanced only against itself and against the core rules--not against other supplements. To alleviate DM fatigue on the thing they said fatigued them most, the admins went with WtoC's recommendation: use all the rules, just don't mix them.
So why, one might ask, don't the admins just rule on things individually to rule out just the broken stuff? Because down that path lies madness. That was done in Living Greyhawk, and it created new documentation and countless arguments that led to quite a barrier to entry to the campaign. Not to mention countless hours of work.
But right now, one might say, there are so few supplements that it is not a problem. And that might be true, but it is better to set the precedent now than to add the limitation later. Because if you think we players howl and complain about not having access to something, the din we create when something is taken from us that we already have is deafening.
5) Five, as always, is right out.
In the long run, the good news in all this is that this is a hobby and not our livelihoods. With the Internet and the DMs Guild, we can all go out and start our very own Organized Play campaigns. And since we all know the perfect way to run a perfect OP campaign--because we know that everyone agrees with our own personal preferences for playing the game that somehow magically line up with how the perfect OP campaign should be run--it should be no problem in getting thousands of players and DMs lined up in short order. I'll be the first one in line at Origins to play!
Shawn
