I guess I just don't see things the same way -- I mean, I wouldn't expect to be able to take the arcanist I'm playing in a friend's Kingmaker campaign and just show up at someone else's Pathfinder game and expect to play it, then take that same character back to Kingmaker.
That's exactly my point tho -- those
aren't Organized Play campaigns you are referring to there -- those are two
home campaigns. The idea of an Organized Play campaign (as it's been used for the last 15 years or so at least), was designed to allow people to do
exactly that: take a character that they've played in a particular OP Campaign and take him to
any other table that was running that same OP Campaign with
any other players and be able to play him at there as well. Once you start mucking about with limits on that kind of portability (once you've played Module X, you can't play certain other ones anymore, etc.), I personally feel you are starting to erode one of the main reasons why OP was created in the first place.
Before OP Campaigns became a thing, you were pretty much limited to one of two types -- either home campaigns, which was just a bunch of friends sitting around playing whatever games they wanted, with whatever rules they wanted, or Convention games, which were typically one-shot modules that were run at a big conventions like GenCon, and usually had their own internal set of rules and pre-generated characters. OP Campaigns, when they came about, bridged those two -- they allowed a person to have a character they created themself, using a set of shared rules and guidelines that all DMs that were participating would follow, and participate in a series of modules developed for that campaign that may have been being run by dozens, hundreds, even thousands of DMs across the world. As a result, the freedom to be able to go from one table to the next (and being sure that your character was acceptable there as well) was pretty game-changing. That portability -- whether it be not having to play modules in a particular order, or the idea of not being locked out of certain things -- I feel is critical to how an OP Campaign should operate.
That said, I have started seeing the term being used across the industry with far, far less precision. I've heard people refer to the Kingmaker campaign settings and Call of Cthulhu's A Time To Harvest both as "Organized Play," where they're really not. Neither has an internal set of rules that the DM is not supposed to expand beyond, and there is no internal consistency to allow the free roaming of characters from one table to the other, for example.
And if they do create character for new seasons, then do they not already have characters that they 'don't play' for long stretches at a time? (I have ten characters currently in my 'AL stable', and a good half of them haven't been brought out of the folder in over a year now.) Is 'this character is stuck in Ravenloft' such a stigma that your players simply won't touch it, even though they have characters in their binders that, for all they play them, might as well be stuck there?
I'm in the same boat. But I feel there's a big difference between planned obsolescence and accidental obsolescence.
I guess your players are just different from mine, then -- I had a player take the exit from tier 1 and bring in a different tier 2 character, simply because he thought the party needed better balance. It just doesn't seem to be an issue for our group.
Your group is probably also large and active enough that he figured he'd be likely to have the opportunity to play in any of the modules he wanted to. Smaller groups may not have that luxury. Our store group is small enough that we are very unlikely to ever play a second table of
any of the Ravenloft games, so if someone misses one, it's unlikely they'll ever get the chance to play it again here, because once we cross that level 4 threshold, we don't have enough players with legal characters they feel like risking to garner to make that second table. Compare that to earlier seasons, where we would often run several mods multiple times, because there was no 'commitment' to the character. Once they played that mod, they weren't locked into anything, and could use them again if needed in whatever the next mod down the pike was.
Well, your players are your players and they'll choose their fun however they like -- that's not an issue. But the guy above who brought in a new Tier 2 player was one of the guys I went to GenCon with, and if anything the stuff he played there made him more excited to keep playing Adventurers League. He's waiting for Baldman to drop their mods in the DMs Guild so he can run them for the folks who didn't make it.
All my remarks on Baldman have been my own. It just turns out that they are shared by the majority of our 'core group' here (which I'm sure is not a coincidence, as we all went to genCon together and tended to play the same games together). I don't expect our experiences to be representative of everyone's there, just ours.
I have no way of knowing if your group or mine is more representative of AL as a whole, though, so I'm not sure what this says about what the admin staff should do.
Your's is probably more representative, I'll admit, but I still feel it's important that both sides are presented, and to let the Admins sort it out. I've been an OP Admin once before, and while I loved it, I won't argue that it can be a pain in the arse.
Here is where I think our disconnect occurs -- you seem to believe that the entirely of Adventurers League is one single campaign.
That would be because it is.
But the campaign has already been run in segmented seasons to this point, which each new season bringing new adversaries, new adventures, and yes, new mechanics into the campaign.
And that's actually my concern.
AL is in fact a
single campaign. A character you created in Season One is legal to be played in a Season Five adventure. A character you created in Season Three could play in a module from Season Two that somebody was running. Magic Items and character boons and XP gained and gold procured is legal and valid in
any mod, from
any season. Thus, that's a single campaign by any meaningful definition I can think of.
But what AL is doing is running a single campaign but, as you say, as segmented seasons. Different mechanics, different flavors, etc. They have created a single campaign that shifts like the winds each season, and personally, I don't like that approach. I don't like the mechanical aspect of having my character slaughtering lesser demons left and right in grand Lord of the Rings style one module, only to turn around and have to have him make a Madness check when he encounters a misshapen Dretch in the very next module.
Personally, I would have preferred to see each of these seasons operated as a separate, self-contained campaign. I also admit that my perceptions are colored in the heyday of Living Greyhawk, when the original campaign was planned out to be an epic 5-year story arc, covering dozens of modules per calendar year. That, for many of us, what was the Organized Play was designed for -- to allow for a long-term, awe-inspiring epic storytelling journey. You rotated characters in and out of that journey, depending on what module availability dictated, but regardless of who you were playing, the
overall story was a solid, continuous arc.
LG was the engaging, long-term investment of these first six seasons of Game of Thrones. AL, on the other hand, feels more like the disjointed episodes of a sitcom in comparison. That said, I freely admit that I am apologetically making a very unfair judgement on AL -- they could not possibly be able to replicate what happened with LG. That was a perfect storm of enthusiastic corporate support, a massive player base, and a well-run, decentralized structure that allowed for massive variety across the board, yet still kept things within the same games-mechanics umbrella. The Admins can only go with what they have available to them.
I'm not saying that a different way of handling these things would have been likely -- or even possible, given WotC's current approach to these things -- but that doesn't mean I can't think about what could have been, and whether or not it would be possible or even advisable to be steered in that direction in the future.
That's well and good -- sharing your experiences and thoughts does help the admins get a better picture of what is happening out in the world that's playing their game. But, and this is something I've had to figure out myself, just because you're having an experience doesn't mean that your experience is representative of the global experience. And, more to the point, your experience might well just be the 'necessary evil' to get the campaign working the way the admins want it to work.
Trust me, I don't in any way assume my experiences here to be indicative of the entire player base. But I also don't think my store group is just a statistical anomaly either. But as long as our voices are heard, I'm fine with that. We'll both continue to make suggestions and argue for or against certain things, as everyone who plays this campaign should, but by the same token, if there comes point in time where the bother begins to outweigh the fun, it's time to move on to other things.
And with the new OGL up and running, and new things on the horizon, AL is no longer going to be the only option out there for Organized Play built around 5e. WotC would be wise to consider how they want to handle this new market. They dismantled the RPGA because they didn't like the idea of potentially 'promoting' competitor's games (as opposed to TSR's more inclusive, founding approach to the RPGA, which was 'a rising tide lifts all boats'). I'm curious to see if we're going to see a repeat of the massive industry growth we saw back in the heyday of 3rd edition. And if so, how WotC handles it this time around -- and what role AL does or doesn't play in it -- should prove to be interesting.
) wasn't deeply grounded in story, background, atmosphere and theme.
