Season 8 Changes (Adventurers League)

[darjr]

Make suggestions, they are listening.

Also not announcements are due. I think Fai Chen’s and dm rewards are changing a lot.

 

[guachi]

I've played AL. It was may first exposure to 5e play, largely because all you really need to do is show up at the store.

However, 5e AL play doesn't really seem like playing in a living breathing fantasy world. The treasure changes further divorce AL from that feeling.

 

[Oofta]

Make suggestions, they are listening.

Also not announcements are due. I think Fai Chen’s and dm rewards are changing a lot.

It's a question of who to make suggestions to. The admin Greg Marks (Skerrit) suggested over in twitter thread I linked to before suggested calling customer support because their direction was coming from WOTC corporate. In fact, he was the one who suggested that you use treasure points to buy then sell heavy armor for gold.

I think there are always going to be goofy things about a living campaign, it's kind of inevitable because we're using published mods instead of mods written specifically for AL. But a loophole that everyone can exploit but that you only know about if you happen to read the right thread is odd.

It would be better if they just said "you can exchange ___ treasure points to get ___ GP for your PC", but apparently their hands are tied.

 

[nswanson27]

What was wrong with the trading rules? 15 downtime days to trade an item unless you are at the same table and they must be of the same rarity. Any less would lead to massive exploits and anything more is probably unnecessary. Sure there is some wonkiness going on with certificates and unique items, but those are the result of online play (lack of certificate) and hardcover adventures (unique items).

Lots wrong with it. First off, the rules themselves are spread out across various places (docs, online posts). Secondly, the rules are very anti-immersive and complicated. They can change without notice, are retroactively applied, and players are expected to potentially find and revert trades. And how do you justify tiered restrictions with trades? "There's some unseen force that prevents you from exchanging this item with this person in front of you, saying 'Iiiittt'ss ttthhhee wwrrroonggg ttiiieerrr'." ....?????? It's like 100% metagame, and it flies right in the face of the spirit of the design of 5e. Why not just have it so lower-tiered characters can't use higher-tiered items, much like a lower-leveled wizards can't learn or use higher-leveled spells? Attunement was a great idea - easily understandable and believable in-game, simple, and gets the job done. More of this is what's needed.
I get the need for watching out for abuses with MA trading, but there are other concerns that relate to the quality of the game that I feel like are being ignored here.

 

[Pauper]

Didn't AL already go there with the option to purchase from your faction? Alas, too late for me ...

Sort of -- in practice, it was difficult to get a 'special mission' in order to rank up to faction rank 3 before reaching Tier 2, so you'd still end up with a magic weapon, it just would take longer.

With the new rules, you no longer have to wait even that long.

It's easier than you think. For me it was when those stupid Ravenloft session rules were announced. I first tried my best to argue against those, but once it became clear that the admins are too enamored with this crap, I had this conversation with myself, decided that I would have none of that and have stopped playing D&D.

I didn't have a problem with those (per se), because I could see the rationale behind them -- Ravenloft is supposed to be a place that's hard to get out of, so restrictions along those lines made sense to me. (That the restrictions got ignored on an ad-hoc basis and got relaxed to the point where its now easier to get out of Ravenloft than it is to get back from being plane-shifted to some random plane if you're not a spellcaster are other issues that speak more to your point.)

But I suppose any change is risky -- my YouTube feed is full of 'why I'm quitting League of Legends' videos, after all. People who have the most invested have the most to lose when things change.

And it's not as though I'm not playing D&D -- I've just finished the first adventure in an Age of Worms game converted over from 3.5, and we're adding a new player tonight for the second adventure, so I'm just as happy with D&D as a whole as I ever was. Adventurers League, though? That just seems to be getting more and more 'meh' for me. I get your point.

--
Pauper

 

[Mirtek]

Sort of -- in practice, it was difficult to get a 'special mission' in order to rank up to faction rank 3 before reaching Tier 2, so you'd still end up with a magic weapon, it just would take longer.

With the new rules, you no longer have to wait even that long.

You may be right about that. My two characters who immediately went on a shopping spree were just start of T3 and very end of T2. But both had saved up all their gold/DT ever since getting a full plate, since there just wasn't anything worth buying / spending DT before. Both immediately bought arms and armor and one of the other items of their factions.

Ironically neither ever got to use any of their purchases, since I never played them in any AL mod after the purchase. The log has the last played game in January 2016, the purchases in January 2017 (1 year hiatus already) and not a single game played after the shopping.

I didn't have a problem with those (per se), because I could see the rationale behind them -- Ravenloft is supposed to be a place that's hard to get out of, so restrictions along those lines made sense to me. (That the restrictions got ignored on an ad-hoc basis and got relaxed to the point where its now easier to get out of Ravenloft than it is to get back from being plane-shifted to some random plane if you're not a spellcaster are other issues that speak more to your point.)

But I suppose any change is risky -- my YouTube feed is full of 'why I'm quitting League of Legends' videos, after all. People who have the most invested have the most to lose when things change.

And it's not as though I'm not playing D&D -- I've just finished the first adventure in an Age of Worms game converted over from 3.5, and we're adding a new player tonight for the second adventure, so I'm just as happy with D&D as a whole as I ever was. Adventurers League, though? That just seems to be getting more and more 'meh' for me. I get your point.

--
Pauper

I didn't plan on stopping D&D. It was only that AL was my only opportunity to play D&D (as were LFR and LG before that. It had been a long time I had a group outside of organized play). I absolutely planned to return after the season had passed. However since I had to find other things to do during the time formerly allocated to AL and those things did not just go away when AL/D&D became "available again" it just so happened that for me returning to playing AL lost the competition against the "fillers" I had found since then.

It was not unsually to only "read" D&D (aka novels and sourcebooks for their advancement of the canon timeline) while not actually playing D&D for years at a time. This time however there are no new FR novels anymore and canon story advancement has become rare indeed, so my "lifeline" tethering me to D&D has become rather thin.

A shame since I really like 5e. I just happened to start reading the first Pathfinder novels, maybe that will rekindle my passion (at least for a while, there's only 38 of them and they also have not released new ones in over a year).

 

[gyor]

You may be right about that. My two characters who immediately went on a shopping spree were just start of T3 and very end of T2. But both had saved up all their gold/DT ever since getting a full plate, since there just wasn't anything worth buying / spending DT before. Both immediately bought arms and armor and one of the other items of their factions.

Ironically neither ever got to use any of their purchases, since I never played them in any AL mod after the purchase. The log has the last played game in January 2016, the purchases in January 2017 (1 year hiatus already) and not a single game played after the shopping.



I didn't plan on stopping D&D. It was only that AL was my only opportunity to play D&D (as were LFR and LG before that. It had been a long time I had a group outside of organized play). I absolutely planned to return after the season had passed. However since I had to find other things to do during the time formerly allocated to AL and those things did not just go away when AL/D&D became "available again" it just so happened that for me returning to playing AL lost the competition against the "fillers" I had found since then.

It was not unsually to only "read" D&D (aka novels and sourcebooks for their advancement of the canon timeline) while not actually playing D&D for years at a time. This time however there are no new FR novels anymore and canon story advancement has become rare indeed, so my "lifeline" tethering me to D&D has become rather thin.

A shame since I really like 5e. I just happened to start reading the first Pathfinder novels, maybe that will rekindle my passion (at least for a while, there's only 38 of them and they also have not released new ones in over a year).

There is a new FR novel coming this year by RA Salvatore.

 

[MNblockhead]

As an occasional AL player (I played a couple times a year) does this mean I have read up on the new rules and make conversions to my existing character? My wife and kids will be visiting my wife's family for a few weeks and I was thinking of dusting off my AL character and playing a few sessions in one or more of my FLGS. I really don't want to start with a new 1st-level character.

 

[Oofta]

As an occasional AL player (I played a couple times a year) does this mean I have read up on the new rules and make conversions to my existing character? My wife and kids will be visiting my wife's family for a few weeks and I was thinking of dusting off my AL character and playing a few sessions in one or more of my FLGS. I really don't want to start with a new 1st-level character.

Starting in September, yes. But for an existing character all you have to do is convert XP to points. Oh, and your faction probably doesn't matter anymore.

 

[MNblockhead]

Thanks. Not that I've ever had a DM scrutinize my logs anyway, but I like to keep clean records. I assume I only need to convert my XP total.

The PG 8.0 doesn't really explain the advancement checkpoints, but the DMG 8.0 along with XGE explain (very oversimplified explanation=a checkpoint for each hour an adventure is designed to last).

But neither explain how to convert existing XP. Say that I'm level 4 with 5,100 XP. I assume that I would start with 16 advancement points (4 for each level).

Next, I would take my XP (5,100) and subtract the number of XP needed to reach level 4 (2,700), leaving me with 2,400 XP.

Then I determine how many XP I need to get to level 5: 6500 - 2700 = 3,800.

To my "unused" earned XP (2,400) is 71% of what I need to get from level 4 to 5 (3,800)

So, do I give myself 2 advancement points or 3?

Or am I expected to look up every adventure on my log and calculate the hours--because that would seriously suck.