New Faction Rank Document!

[CapnZapp]

To each his own, but I feel the campaign is already on shaky ground by not retiring the Season One adventures prior to this point.

Most Season One adventures don't make narrative sense if run for characters who have already played an adventure from any other season -- Season Two presumes that the dragon has already attacked Phlan and many refugees have made their way to Mulmaster, while Season Three presumes that, after the Fall of Mulmaster, the Phlan refugees migrate toward the city of Hillsfar. The initial Season Four module presumes that the characters are sent by their faction representatives to investigate a threat to their plans to re-take the city.

I could understand managing to fit DDEX 01-11 to -15 into a character's log who also has played one of these other modules, but it simply doesn't make narrative sense for someone who's played, say, DDEX 02-11 Oubliette of Fort Iron to then go back and play DDEX 01-03 Shadow on the Moonsea -- not only does it present Phlan in a state that doesn't exist as of the time of DDEX 02-11, but it presents Elisande, a character the group interacts with in DDEX 02-11, as if the group had never seen her before.

Granted, a good DM can overcome some of these problems, but a good DM shouldn't have to -- the campaign should be presented in such a way that the DM can focus on telling the current story without having to be an expert on every previous season, otherwise it becomes challenging to recruit new DMs who aren't already experts in AL lore. And even more to the point, as AL moves away from the Moonsea and focuses more on adventures in the Sword Coast area, and as more and more convention developers use the Moonsea to develop their own stories, the disconnect between the old AL Moonsea adventures and the current state of both AL and the Moonsea becomes more and more difficult to reconcile.

Lastly, retiring the old adventures allows the rewards used in those adventures to be re-used in newer adventures, as a way of allowing players who didn't get to play the old adventures to still gain certain treasures that were only available in those modules. It also allows the campaign staff to effectively remove problematic treasures from the campaign by not renewing them in new modules, meaning only the oldest characters, who by now are high enough level that new players won't likely interact with them, have those difficult-to-balance-for magical items.

In short, there are lots of good reasons for the campaign to retire older adventures, and some good reasons for the oldest adventures to already be retired. A categorical opposition to adventure retirement seems to me to be a foolish position to hold.

--
Pauper

I would think it easier to simply say "don't play modules out of order if you're bothered by continuity".

You seem to assume DMs need to take every other module into account. They don't. It's perfectly alright to DM a season 1 module straight, and simply ignore any continuity issues.

You seem to assume players expect the story in AL to match their home campaigns. They don't. It's perfectly alright to assume players can handle the fact they might experience stories out of sequence.

I fully understand you might aspire to a higher storytelling and continuity standard, Pauper, but then you could simply elect to not touch older modules yourself.

 

[rooneg]

I would think it easier to simply say "don't play modules out of order if you're bothered by continuity".

You seem to assume DMs need to take every other module into account. They don't. It's perfectly alright to DM a season 1 module straight, and simply ignore any continuity issues.

You seem to assume players expect the story in AL to match their home campaigns. They don't. It's perfectly alright to assume players can handle the fact they might experience stories out of sequence.

I fully understand you might aspire to a higher storytelling and continuity standard, Pauper, but then you could simply elect to not touch older modules yourself.

Yes, precisely that. I play AL with the full knowledge that this is a weird pseudo replication of a D&D campaign, where my PCs jump from party to party and adventure to adventure while constantly messing with their locations (both physical and temporal in many cases) and I honestly am not bothered by it. For me it's either "play the adventures that are offered in the time/place I can actually play" (normally conventions) or "don't play at all". Not everyone needs their AL games to form some sort of coherent storyline. It's neat that the adventures do that to some degree, but it's so very far from a hard and fast requirement that I don't see any reason to go out of your way to preserve it beyond what is already done when writing the adventures.

 

[Mirtek]

Yes, precisely that. I play AL with the full knowledge that this is a weird pseudo replication of a D&D campaign, where my PCs jump from party to party and adventure to adventure while constantly messing with their locations (both physical and temporal in many cases) and I honestly am not bothered by it. For me it's either "play the adventures that are offered in the time/place I can actually play" (normally conventions) or "don't play at all". Not everyone needs their AL games to form some sort of coherent storyline. It's neat that the adventures do that to some degree, but it's so very far from a hard and fast requirement that I don't see any reason to go out of your way to preserve it beyond what is already done when writing the adventures.

I fully agree

And AL is certainly far from being the worst offender. If I had to calculate travel times for how my PCs popped up all over Faerun for their LFR mods, they certainly would all have to retire due to old age just from time spend traveling between mods

 

[Pauper]

I would think it easier to simply say "don't play modules out of order if you're bothered by continuity".

Continuity of story is kind of the point of a living campaign -- otherwise, you're just playing an in-person MMO with the DM as the server.

--
Pauper

 

[rooneg]

Continuity of story is kind of the point of a living campaign -- otherwise, you're just playing an in-person MMO with the DM as the server.

--
Pauper

You're welcome to your opinion, but for some of us an in-person MMO with the DM as the server is just fine.

 

[Pauper]

You're welcome to your opinion, but for some of us an in-person MMO with the DM as the server is just fine.

If you have a DM who is OK with that, then more power to you. I know I bring more to a game than an MMO server, so players who just want to kill monsters and tally loot don't add much to the games I run.

I think this is the biggest reason that I haven't run very many convention games -- that seems to be the norm among convention goers, which is very disappointing to me.

--
Pauper

 

[rooneg]

If you have a DM who is OK with that, then more power to you. I know I bring more to a game than an MMO server, so players who just want to kill monsters and tally loot don't add much to the games I run.

I think this is the biggest reason that I haven't run very many convention games -- that seems to be the norm among convention goers, which is very disappointing to me.

--
Pauper

Seriously man, I get it that you enjoy the ongoing plotlines, and you are able to run consistent tables of players through them in a reasonable order. That's super cool. Some of us don't have that option though. We play at inconsistent times, with varying groups of people, and we're limited by what adventures happen to be offered when we can get away. That doesn't mean we're treating the whole thing as a combat centered "who can DPS faster" game, it just means that we make sacrifices regarding intra-adventure consistency. There's still role playing, we still have great DMs that give us memorable experiences, we just do it with different people every time, and we gloss over the fact that the last time we played this PC we were in Mullmaster, but today we're in Phlan, even though the overarching storyline says things should happen in the opposite order.

 

[Koren n'Rhys]

For those who pop in and out of stores, or hit the occasional convention, there is no rhyme or reason to what they are playing, beyond "That sounds like a fun adventure in my character's tier" so it's just a series of random adventures that are completely unrelated and logged for the rewards after play. There's no storyline being followed, nothing being run "in order". Tables are made up of whoever happens to show on a given night, so again, no continuity of party. Isn't that drop-in, drop-out play the nature of the program by design?

Given that assumption, I see no reason to retire the older stuff. You simply accept the story in the moment and often ignore the bits that connect to a wider world, IMO.

 

[Pauper]

Seriously man, I get it that you enjoy the ongoing plotlines, and you are able to run consistent tables of players through them in a reasonable order. That's super cool. Some of us don't have that option though.

Why not?

It seems like most of your issues are due to local organization (or the lack of it).

We play at inconsistent times,

Again, why? The big 'win' of the Expeditions program was that it established Wednesday night as 'D&D night'. Establishing a consistent time for your gaming would seem to be better for everybody: your DMs, who can plan around that schedule more effectively, your players, who know and can look forward to 'game night', and your host, who can prep consistently for the added traffic that the game will bring to the venue.

with varying groups of people,

This seems directly connected to the inconsistent scheduling. Fix that, and this gets fixed, too.

How can I be so confident? Because the weekly game I play AL in runs at 10pm on a Wednesday night, and frequently goes past midnight. People who have jobs and school the next morning still show up consistently, because the gaming is good and we run the modules in order. If we can get consistent turnout at one of the worst possible times to schedule a game, so long as we schedule the game consistently, then I'm pretty sure that consistent scheduling is important, regardless of the actual time scheduled.

and we're limited by what adventures happen to be offered when we can get away.

I'm not really sure what this means. Right now, our Wednesday group is running Season 2 in order, and we started with 2-1, so everybody created first-level characters for that season. The occasional Tier 2 mod that pops up before our initial characters have leveled up high enough to play that mod gives us a chance to play our higher-level characters, and then we go back to the lower-level characters when the tier drops again.

There's a ton of content out there, and there would still be a ton of content if the first ten Season One modules were retired.

There's still role playing, we still have great DMs that give us memorable experiences, we just do it with different people every time, and we gloss over the fact that the last time we played this PC we were in Mullmaster, but today we're in Phlan, even though the overarching storyline says things should happen in the opposite order.

That's cool that you're having fun -- it just seems as though if someone were better at organizing your group, you'd be having *even more* fun, because you'd also be getting the story experience that the admins worked very hard to put into each season.

Is there some reason why your group seems so disorganized?

--
Pauper

 

[Pauper]

For those who pop in and out of stores, or hit the occasional convention, there is no rhyme or reason to what they are playing, beyond "That sounds like a fun adventure in my character's tier" so it's just a series of random adventures that are completely unrelated and logged for the rewards after play.

For convention play, that makes some sense -- and the new convention-specific modules AL is trying to promote to add new content specifically to conventions is very much along this style of 'random play'. Even then, though, the convention authors are likely going to include some kind of internal story through their offerings, with the idea that playing the adventures in a given order will be the most enjoyable way to play them. (If you played through the Baldman adventures at Origins or GenCon, you know what I mean.) So even then, there's going to be a preferred 'order of operations' and someone who just decides to 'drop in' is doing himself a disservice. Caveat emptor, I guess.

Isn't that drop-in, drop-out play the nature of the program by design?

I see this a lot -- because transferability of play is a feature of the program, some have elevated it to be the most important feature. It's not, simply because most players never make use of that feature. In fact, as Organized Play has evolved, systems that existed in previous iterations mainly to feature transferability (the 'region' system in Living Greyhawk comes to mind, where certain adventures were only playable in certain regions, and if you wanted to play them, you have to go to that region) have been dropped as being antithetical to the more important goals of Organized Play.

You simply accept the story in the moment and often ignore the bits that connect to a wider world, IMO.

What's the enjoyment in that? Even an MMO tries to ground its dungeons and other quests within the context of a wider world, because that's what makes the adventures meaningful. I mean, what's the point of 'saving the world' if you don't bother even caring what the world is?

Honestly, though, if I were going to start retiring adventures, I'd probably start with Season Four rather than Season One -- it's already compartmentalized as it is, and given the restrictions involved in playing that season, most groups who had an interest in doing so have probably already started or even finished the season.

--
Pauper