der_kluge
Adventurer
This will probably be long, and ranty, so you've been warned.
Couple of weekends ago, I went to Phoenix FanFusion (previously ComicCon). My daughters go, and I like to be near them, in case they need me, and turns out, they have a gaming area, so I spend my weekend in that section playing games. Way back when, RPGA was a thing, and I played a few RPGA games, and I found that the games were terrible, and the people were generally worse, so I vowed to stop playing them, and focused mostly on just individual games ran by individual GMs, or I just ran my own. That worked out well, and was generally my Gen Con policy for years. Fast forward a bit, and Pathfinder Society becomes a thing. I played in a couple of PS games in a FLGS circa 2009, and ended up with 2nd level paladin. Pretty sure I still have that character sheet somewhere. I didn't have a horrible experience with it, but I found that the games I played in still followed some pretty annoying tropes - mainly, that the end fight had to be strange and unusual in some way, and if the writer could toss in an encounter with a swarm in it, that the PCs would be wholly unprepared for, that would be awesome.
Fast forward again to a couple of weekends ago, and the gaming section at the con is dominated by Adventurer's League. And despite the new name, and the fact that it's tied to 5th edition, it is every bit as annoying, and awful as it's ever been. This year, the convention hosted the first ever "Open" (which I'm told was a big deal), and the following night was an "Epic" (or was it Epoch?), also which was supposedly a big deal. I played in both, and found both to be pretty terrible.
These games tend to suffer from many of the same problems, though the Epic and Open were terrible on their own level. Generally speaking - the GMs are terrible. I'm sure they could be good, but they all seem to be woefully unprepared. During the open we got frustrated that our GM was constantly flopping through loose leaf notes trying to find an answer to a question. Unlike a regular game, these GMs can't just make something up - they have this whole umbrella of rules hanging above them, and it has to be "by the book" so to speak. Even though some GMs actually did majorly screw up in some ways (I was told stories after the fact), and while my GM wasn't good, apparently some of them at the other tables were far, far worse.
But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, let me backtrack. The modules here tend to be awful. I know that writing a module for a 2 or 4 hour D&D session isn't easy. But it's almost like the authors of these things pride themselves on going out of their way towards making it so weird. Like, implausibly weird. The game I played on Sunday, the last day of the con, was actually pretty good, and had a good GM, but the gnome NPC in it believed he was a leprechaun. This bit made no sense whatsoever, and added absolutely nothing to the story other than to just be weird. And I'm left puzzled as to why this hyper-intelligent gnome (who was a super-high level wizard) could also be so delusional as to believe he was a leprechaun. It was just implausible and silly to me. But that's a pretty benign example.
The open was terrible. This was a game that was ran simultaneously by 16 different tables, and each group had the same mission, and each was awarded points for solving various puzzles. It had no combat at all, unless you initiated it. It was also very, very hard, and to call it D&D would be generous. Really, it was a puzzle game for the players (not the characters) to solve. We, as players had to figure out how to solve all these various puzzles. Our characters were just vehicles by which we had some tools available to be able to do that. Role-playing was completely out of the question. Actually role-playing an encounter at the bar penalized you, since it just ate up valuable time. And the games were presented with so many options, you were left bewildered by where to even start. It also made the GMs job super hard, since they constantly had to flip back and forth to figure out what various NPCs knew, or whether a certain door was locked, etc. In the end, the experience was extremely frustrating. And because the game was ran in "real time" when the time was up, you literally stopped that scene, and moved to the next, regardless of what was happening. The same was true in the epic. It was a similar concept, except that every group was doing more or less different stuff, and we all hard to work together to achieve some goal. I liked it better in concept, but our tier I group ended up deciding to fight a tier II side quest. Something I was unaware of until later. Our group consisted of mostly level 1 characters, and the "side quest" featured a minor version of a kraken in an underwater scenario (with all the difficulties that implies) and it had 129 hit points. Luckily, we were stopped short of a TPK by the timer, only to be shoved into another nasty battle, which basically did result in a TPK. Although people took away a marginal victory by claiming that because they'd made their death saves, they survived, although I don't know what respectable lizardman is going to let them live if we're all technically unconscious (or dead) on the ground. In my book, that's a TPK. We should have never been allowed into the tier II side quest, and the whole thing was a huge debacle. Again, too many options for us to even know where to start - no time for actual role-playing (that just wastes valuable time), and the whole time you're playing it, you've got this great sense of time pressure to achieve some result, and you just sit there as a player trying to metagame the encounter in order to figure out what the writer must have been smoking when he wrote it.
These games are also a travesty for new players. I get it. Playing D&D at a convention isn't normal. You probably don't know the GM, and you'll never play that character again. I always got kind of weirded out by convention games when the GM would actually try to award XP or magic items at the end of a game. I never really got the point of that. So, I respect these organized play for at least trying to mitigate some of that by allowing you to retain your character from game to game, but that alone also creates a terribly awkward situation. While your character might be consistent to you, you often end up playing it with different players almost every time, and maybe different GMs. You could also play with idiots, and technically die, so then you get to what - reroll a brand new one and start from scratch again? And the games themselves could be anywhere. Your character could go from a forest cave to a seaside harbor, to a mountain village in the span of a day. So while I like the concept in general, the execution of this idea tends to be terrible.
People play these games because they are often the only choices available. I know they dominated the convention I was at. The RPGA tended to do the same at conventions I was at in the past as well. I'm not really sure why that is.
I also played some AL games with brand new players. And I felt sorry for them. They were confused when the GM told them they couldn't loot the sentinel shield at the end of the game. "Oh, but you can buy it with treasure points". Oh my god. Adventurer's league needs a module just for brand new players. Trying to bring the magic of D&D with the shell of Adventurer's League to brand new players is a huge injustice. At least at this convention, the organizers had made a lot of pre-gen characters. So that made character creation much easier.
I can't help but wonder if a slightly different model would be better. Instead of letting players take a character from game to game, each game comes with a set of pre-gens that players could choose from. And instead of being forced into specific tiers, I could play any freaking game I wanted to. And if we die, we die. Stuff happens. But if we win, then we as players get rewards, or maybe points which I can use to buy rewards. I could get things like magic items, which I could then add to my pre-gen characters. Or, I could get inspiration points. Or I could get other bonuses like a +1 level boost, or a stat boost, or a really nice mount, or a really cool familiar - I don't necessarily have to use all the things I have, but I could if it made sense. Maybe I could have a "get a tip from the GM" as a special power that I could call up - that would likely be a one use a done, kind of power. But you get the idea. This would give people a lot more flexibility in what games they could play, and what games GMs could run. And new players wouldn't have to be bombarded by so many ridiculous rules.
Anyway. This was long. I needed to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading.
Couple of weekends ago, I went to Phoenix FanFusion (previously ComicCon). My daughters go, and I like to be near them, in case they need me, and turns out, they have a gaming area, so I spend my weekend in that section playing games. Way back when, RPGA was a thing, and I played a few RPGA games, and I found that the games were terrible, and the people were generally worse, so I vowed to stop playing them, and focused mostly on just individual games ran by individual GMs, or I just ran my own. That worked out well, and was generally my Gen Con policy for years. Fast forward a bit, and Pathfinder Society becomes a thing. I played in a couple of PS games in a FLGS circa 2009, and ended up with 2nd level paladin. Pretty sure I still have that character sheet somewhere. I didn't have a horrible experience with it, but I found that the games I played in still followed some pretty annoying tropes - mainly, that the end fight had to be strange and unusual in some way, and if the writer could toss in an encounter with a swarm in it, that the PCs would be wholly unprepared for, that would be awesome.
Fast forward again to a couple of weekends ago, and the gaming section at the con is dominated by Adventurer's League. And despite the new name, and the fact that it's tied to 5th edition, it is every bit as annoying, and awful as it's ever been. This year, the convention hosted the first ever "Open" (which I'm told was a big deal), and the following night was an "Epic" (or was it Epoch?), also which was supposedly a big deal. I played in both, and found both to be pretty terrible.
These games tend to suffer from many of the same problems, though the Epic and Open were terrible on their own level. Generally speaking - the GMs are terrible. I'm sure they could be good, but they all seem to be woefully unprepared. During the open we got frustrated that our GM was constantly flopping through loose leaf notes trying to find an answer to a question. Unlike a regular game, these GMs can't just make something up - they have this whole umbrella of rules hanging above them, and it has to be "by the book" so to speak. Even though some GMs actually did majorly screw up in some ways (I was told stories after the fact), and while my GM wasn't good, apparently some of them at the other tables were far, far worse.
But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, let me backtrack. The modules here tend to be awful. I know that writing a module for a 2 or 4 hour D&D session isn't easy. But it's almost like the authors of these things pride themselves on going out of their way towards making it so weird. Like, implausibly weird. The game I played on Sunday, the last day of the con, was actually pretty good, and had a good GM, but the gnome NPC in it believed he was a leprechaun. This bit made no sense whatsoever, and added absolutely nothing to the story other than to just be weird. And I'm left puzzled as to why this hyper-intelligent gnome (who was a super-high level wizard) could also be so delusional as to believe he was a leprechaun. It was just implausible and silly to me. But that's a pretty benign example.
The open was terrible. This was a game that was ran simultaneously by 16 different tables, and each group had the same mission, and each was awarded points for solving various puzzles. It had no combat at all, unless you initiated it. It was also very, very hard, and to call it D&D would be generous. Really, it was a puzzle game for the players (not the characters) to solve. We, as players had to figure out how to solve all these various puzzles. Our characters were just vehicles by which we had some tools available to be able to do that. Role-playing was completely out of the question. Actually role-playing an encounter at the bar penalized you, since it just ate up valuable time. And the games were presented with so many options, you were left bewildered by where to even start. It also made the GMs job super hard, since they constantly had to flip back and forth to figure out what various NPCs knew, or whether a certain door was locked, etc. In the end, the experience was extremely frustrating. And because the game was ran in "real time" when the time was up, you literally stopped that scene, and moved to the next, regardless of what was happening. The same was true in the epic. It was a similar concept, except that every group was doing more or less different stuff, and we all hard to work together to achieve some goal. I liked it better in concept, but our tier I group ended up deciding to fight a tier II side quest. Something I was unaware of until later. Our group consisted of mostly level 1 characters, and the "side quest" featured a minor version of a kraken in an underwater scenario (with all the difficulties that implies) and it had 129 hit points. Luckily, we were stopped short of a TPK by the timer, only to be shoved into another nasty battle, which basically did result in a TPK. Although people took away a marginal victory by claiming that because they'd made their death saves, they survived, although I don't know what respectable lizardman is going to let them live if we're all technically unconscious (or dead) on the ground. In my book, that's a TPK. We should have never been allowed into the tier II side quest, and the whole thing was a huge debacle. Again, too many options for us to even know where to start - no time for actual role-playing (that just wastes valuable time), and the whole time you're playing it, you've got this great sense of time pressure to achieve some result, and you just sit there as a player trying to metagame the encounter in order to figure out what the writer must have been smoking when he wrote it.
These games are also a travesty for new players. I get it. Playing D&D at a convention isn't normal. You probably don't know the GM, and you'll never play that character again. I always got kind of weirded out by convention games when the GM would actually try to award XP or magic items at the end of a game. I never really got the point of that. So, I respect these organized play for at least trying to mitigate some of that by allowing you to retain your character from game to game, but that alone also creates a terribly awkward situation. While your character might be consistent to you, you often end up playing it with different players almost every time, and maybe different GMs. You could also play with idiots, and technically die, so then you get to what - reroll a brand new one and start from scratch again? And the games themselves could be anywhere. Your character could go from a forest cave to a seaside harbor, to a mountain village in the span of a day. So while I like the concept in general, the execution of this idea tends to be terrible.
People play these games because they are often the only choices available. I know they dominated the convention I was at. The RPGA tended to do the same at conventions I was at in the past as well. I'm not really sure why that is.
I also played some AL games with brand new players. And I felt sorry for them. They were confused when the GM told them they couldn't loot the sentinel shield at the end of the game. "Oh, but you can buy it with treasure points". Oh my god. Adventurer's league needs a module just for brand new players. Trying to bring the magic of D&D with the shell of Adventurer's League to brand new players is a huge injustice. At least at this convention, the organizers had made a lot of pre-gen characters. So that made character creation much easier.
I can't help but wonder if a slightly different model would be better. Instead of letting players take a character from game to game, each game comes with a set of pre-gens that players could choose from. And instead of being forced into specific tiers, I could play any freaking game I wanted to. And if we die, we die. Stuff happens. But if we win, then we as players get rewards, or maybe points which I can use to buy rewards. I could get things like magic items, which I could then add to my pre-gen characters. Or, I could get inspiration points. Or I could get other bonuses like a +1 level boost, or a stat boost, or a really nice mount, or a really cool familiar - I don't necessarily have to use all the things I have, but I could if it made sense. Maybe I could have a "get a tip from the GM" as a special power that I could call up - that would likely be a one use a done, kind of power. But you get the idea. This would give people a lot more flexibility in what games they could play, and what games GMs could run. And new players wouldn't have to be bombarded by so many ridiculous rules.
Anyway. This was long. I needed to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading.
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