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Ravenloft Al modles Jasper questions and rants. Spoilers
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<blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6900556" data-attributes="member: 17607"><p>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. Then again, I played D&D for 20 years before I ever participated in an Organized Play event, so I can see where my expectations would be different from yours.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't have hard data, but the anecdotal data I have from local stores around the Twin Cities area is that we didn't see that same problem -- though that might be due to both our being a larger area, and to many players in the area being relatively new to OP, and thus more open to the idea that they'd create a character specifically for the Ravenloft season and not expect to play it in another game, since they have other characters for those other games.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This seems weird to me -- do these players simply not make new characters at all? They must find it odd that AL keeps putting out level 1-4 mods, then, since they likely no longer have a character who can play them.</p><p></p><p>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?</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I guess I don't see that -- I like it when things get shaken up, because doing the same thing over and over is a good way to breed complacency and boredom. If I'm playing the same mods in the same style today that I did when I first started playing Living Forgotten Realms, then I can't see myself staying interested in the game. And I really don't see any rule as a 'sacred cow'; go ahead and threaten my character with perma-death, because that's how I know things mean something in this game. If all I'm doing is putting my character on an escalator from level 1 to 20, and it doesn't matter what I do or how I play, then why bother?</p><p></p><p>With that said, I won't argue that Season 4 was perfect by any means -- to my mind, the biggest problem with Season 4 is that the team wanted to provide a tight, linear storyline, but didn't go 'all in' on what would be required to provide that level of a story. For instance, in previous seasons, if a mod proved to be not up to the quality of surrounding mods, a DM could legitimately skip that mod and either run a different mod to replace the XP or simply keep the players doing on the season storyline with a later mod. That wasn't really an option in Season 4, which expected you'd play all the mods in order, and thus you had no real choice but to run the mod you'd scheduled, even if you thought it was a poor mod.</p><p></p><p>But despite the presumption that you'd play all the adventures in order, the admins still chose to compartmentalize the season so that, if you did end up skipping a number of mods, for some reason, yet still was able to play the campaign, you wouldn't feel too lost or that you'd missed too much story material -- they accomplished this by basically disconnecting all the mods from each other after 4-5, and turning the season episodic -- you were introduced to a new villain who hadn't been significantly foreshadowed, whose influence on the plot ended at the end of the adventure. If I had one major frustration with Season 4 (and my own efforts to run the season are focusing on fixing that major frustration), it is that the adventures don't really feel like a connected series of stories that form a larger story -- they just feel like a series of things you do until you get to the end of the adventure.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Here is where I think our disconnect occurs -- you seem to believe that the entirely of Adventurers League is one single campaign. 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.</p><p></p><p>Granted, I wasn't a big fan of the madness mechanic in Season 3, either, once it all played out, but the idea that the admins had to have worked out how it was going to work before the campaign even launched? That would be pretty much impossible. Not only that, but the logic of your argument suggests that the campaign should also never include new rules sources or source books like the Elemental Evil Player's Companion or the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, since those also 'change the rules' in the middle of the campaign. I doubt anybody would be interested in that static of a campaign.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I would argue that this is exactly what we have, if you play it the way it was designed. Each season begins with a new level 1 module, and progresses though a number of additional mods until the end of the season's story. Then the new season begins, starting over with the intro level 1 module. The designers, instead of throwing out storyline seasons, could have introduced a 'you can only play mods associated with your storyline season' mechanic, and I'm not convinced it would be all that damaging to the campaign. Based on how many times we had to answer that question, many people just assumed that this was the whole purpose of the storyline season mechanic anyway.</p><p></p><p>The admins haven't gotten rid of 'portability', but the design of the campaign suggests that it's just not as big a deal in the current incarnation of Organized Play as it was in previous incarnations -- otherwise, why bother with all the new low-level content?</p><p></p><p>It would be different if Organized Play were run like an online MMO, like Neverwinter. In Neverwinter, Tyranny of Dragons is a set of content you can run once you hit level 27. Storm King's Thunder doesn't start until you hit level 70. The game expects you'll be playing all this with the same character, and so sets up the content where they expect your character will be when it comes out. But if anything, that model would be far worse for the tabletop game -- if you had to be level 11 to play any Storm King's Thunder AL mods, then I can easily think of numerous players who would be unable to participate in those mods, including myself.</p><p></p><p>AL isn't an MMO, and it's not Living Greyhawk.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I think you're overestimating the influence of Baldman Games, based solely on their decision to use CORE as an adventure designation. As far as I can tell, Adventurers League has no core content in the same sense as Living Greyhawk's Core adventures, for instance.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>Thanks for sharing.</p><p></p><p>--</p><p>Pauper</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pauper, post: 6900556, member: 17607"] 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. Then again, I played D&D for 20 years before I ever participated in an Organized Play event, so I can see where my expectations would be different from yours. I don't have hard data, but the anecdotal data I have from local stores around the Twin Cities area is that we didn't see that same problem -- though that might be due to both our being a larger area, and to many players in the area being relatively new to OP, and thus more open to the idea that they'd create a character specifically for the Ravenloft season and not expect to play it in another game, since they have other characters for those other games. This seems weird to me -- do these players simply not make new characters at all? They must find it odd that AL keeps putting out level 1-4 mods, then, since they likely no longer have a character who can play them. 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 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. 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. 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. I guess I don't see that -- I like it when things get shaken up, because doing the same thing over and over is a good way to breed complacency and boredom. If I'm playing the same mods in the same style today that I did when I first started playing Living Forgotten Realms, then I can't see myself staying interested in the game. And I really don't see any rule as a 'sacred cow'; go ahead and threaten my character with perma-death, because that's how I know things mean something in this game. If all I'm doing is putting my character on an escalator from level 1 to 20, and it doesn't matter what I do or how I play, then why bother? With that said, I won't argue that Season 4 was perfect by any means -- to my mind, the biggest problem with Season 4 is that the team wanted to provide a tight, linear storyline, but didn't go 'all in' on what would be required to provide that level of a story. For instance, in previous seasons, if a mod proved to be not up to the quality of surrounding mods, a DM could legitimately skip that mod and either run a different mod to replace the XP or simply keep the players doing on the season storyline with a later mod. That wasn't really an option in Season 4, which expected you'd play all the mods in order, and thus you had no real choice but to run the mod you'd scheduled, even if you thought it was a poor mod. But despite the presumption that you'd play all the adventures in order, the admins still chose to compartmentalize the season so that, if you did end up skipping a number of mods, for some reason, yet still was able to play the campaign, you wouldn't feel too lost or that you'd missed too much story material -- they accomplished this by basically disconnecting all the mods from each other after 4-5, and turning the season episodic -- you were introduced to a new villain who hadn't been significantly foreshadowed, whose influence on the plot ended at the end of the adventure. If I had one major frustration with Season 4 (and my own efforts to run the season are focusing on fixing that major frustration), it is that the adventures don't really feel like a connected series of stories that form a larger story -- they just feel like a series of things you do until you get to the end of the adventure. Here is where I think our disconnect occurs -- you seem to believe that the entirely of Adventurers League is one single campaign. 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. Granted, I wasn't a big fan of the madness mechanic in Season 3, either, once it all played out, but the idea that the admins had to have worked out how it was going to work before the campaign even launched? That would be pretty much impossible. Not only that, but the logic of your argument suggests that the campaign should also never include new rules sources or source books like the Elemental Evil Player's Companion or the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, since those also 'change the rules' in the middle of the campaign. I doubt anybody would be interested in that static of a campaign. I would argue that this is exactly what we have, if you play it the way it was designed. Each season begins with a new level 1 module, and progresses though a number of additional mods until the end of the season's story. Then the new season begins, starting over with the intro level 1 module. The designers, instead of throwing out storyline seasons, could have introduced a 'you can only play mods associated with your storyline season' mechanic, and I'm not convinced it would be all that damaging to the campaign. Based on how many times we had to answer that question, many people just assumed that this was the whole purpose of the storyline season mechanic anyway. The admins haven't gotten rid of 'portability', but the design of the campaign suggests that it's just not as big a deal in the current incarnation of Organized Play as it was in previous incarnations -- otherwise, why bother with all the new low-level content? It would be different if Organized Play were run like an online MMO, like Neverwinter. In Neverwinter, Tyranny of Dragons is a set of content you can run once you hit level 27. Storm King's Thunder doesn't start until you hit level 70. The game expects you'll be playing all this with the same character, and so sets up the content where they expect your character will be when it comes out. But if anything, that model would be far worse for the tabletop game -- if you had to be level 11 to play any Storm King's Thunder AL mods, then I can easily think of numerous players who would be unable to participate in those mods, including myself. AL isn't an MMO, and it's not Living Greyhawk. I think you're overestimating the influence of Baldman Games, based solely on their decision to use CORE as an adventure designation. As far as I can tell, Adventurers League has no core content in the same sense as Living Greyhawk's Core adventures, for instance. 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. Thanks for sharing. -- Pauper [/QUOTE]
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