Steve_MND
First Post
Since AL has stated several times you are not taking the time to evaluate the content separately and relying on your blanket rule to keep things in line, you might as well leave it to Wizards. As long as they hold to their promise to balance content against the Player's Handbook, all should be good.
Which is why they are not relying on Wizards, because we know Wizards will end up going back on that the first time they feel they can make more money off of not bothering to stick with that, whether it be an intentional decision, or unintentionally just by not playtesting/editing as throughly as they had been. D&D has had literally decades of that same cycle, and I see no reason to think it'll just magically stop now. I agree it's annoying you can't have the oft-referenced genasi green-flame-blader in the campaign, but on the other hand, if you see a particular character idea as literally only viable with a single, solitary trick, you have bigger design questions to ask yourself when creating your character.
I don't think that it can get much more broken than a character with archery fighting style with the Sharpshooter feat on a Fighter/Vengeance Paladin/rogue wearing boots of flying.
Well, I'll agree with you on the Boots of Flying bit. AL has let two or three really, really broken items into the campaign, and the Boots are definitely one of them. Which also shows perfectly why a myRealms sort of blanket access to a range -- even a restricted one -- is not a good idea. But otherwise, I'm not seeing anything especially broken about your fighter-paladin-roque build. It's very costly to multiclass into to that with the point buy in place, meaning while you can do it, you're definitely stripping your potential in other spots.
I think the vast majority of players will say this rule was over the top while the Admins will pat themselves on the back for a job well done. I'm sorry, but I just don't think you are listening. I think you guys are too busy telling us we don't understand and how you know better.
Well, in a very real sense, the Admins/WotC DO know better (remember that an awful lot -- much more than I had originally anticipated -- of how AL has been run on decrees from WotC). That's because they have access to more information and material than we do. They have records and survey results and firsthand-experience on how other large-scale campaigns worked or didn't work (from the admin side of things, not the player side of things, which is important because those two tend to be terribly different). Not to say they can't make mistakes -- they are only human, after all. You can't please everyone, and to even try is sheer folly. Best you can do is ply a middle ground that works best for as many people as possible, knowing that you're going to lose some outliers on both ends of the spectrum.
And I'm okay with that. I personally don't like about half the decisions made by the AL campaign, and I think other approaches would have done better. But I also understand that those changes would also, coincidently, make it much more along the lines of what I personally would like to see in an OP campaign, which automatically makes it suspect that I'm not looking at it completely objectively.
Any OP-style campaign is about two things -- first, pleasing the corporate masters, because without them, there's no campaign to offer to the players in the first place. But after that, it's about the player base, because without them, there's no point to the campaign either.
But the player base isn't about you. And it isn't about me. It's not about Pauper, it's not about Kalani, and it's not about any of us individually. Rather, it's about the player base as a whole. Individually, we'll all have issues we don't agree with. But the goal is get something that works collectively, even with the individual disagreements factored in. Not an easy task even in the best of situations.