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[Pauper]

While I agree with this sentiment as far as the actual setting is concerned, the idea of an 'escape hatch' (or to a lesser extent, knowing where the 'exit' mod is) has zero to do with the setting. It has everything to do with the structure of an Organized Play Shared Campaign, which is based (by definition) on the idea that a player can theoretically take any legal character to any other table of that OP campaign and play there.

You seem really focused on this idea of OP being all about portability. It's true that is a big part of it, but it's not the totality of it.

I can recall running SPEC 3-3: Dance of the Sun and Moon repeatedly during the days of LFR, despite their being a story award in it that all but guaranteed that one PC from that module would become entirely unplayable until the player ran through SPEC 4-1 or SPEC 4-2, which played out the character's rescue. Not everybody liked it, but a number of players absolutely *loved* it, even though it basically is exactly what you're saying is wrong about Season 4 -- that there's a chance you'll never get to play with your character ever again.

If you really dislike the idea of Season 4 possibly stranding characters in Ravenloft, the solution is either to not run Season 4 modules, or to run so many of them that players have lots of chances to escape the demiplane. That's up to you, if you're organizing, or you can point that out to the people who are organizing in your area. I should also point out that any player savvy enough to figure out Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds can play Season 4 modules online to finish their Ravenloft adventures even after their local area stops running Season 4 mods.

To look at it a different way, take, for example, if the same rule was put in place with the mid-tier module 1-10, Tyranny in Phlan. What if when you played any modules from 1-1 through 1-9, you HAD to have played and succeeded in getting out of Phlan in 1-10. If you did not get that opportunity to play that mod -- or worse yet with the current no-replay rules, did not successfully complete it -- then that character would NEVER be able to play in ANY other Adventure League module, ever again, because they were still stuck in Phlan. And what, especially, if that story arc was designed to be very insular and tightly-knit from the beginning, meaning it'd be relatively unlikely for that one mod to be randomly played by a group or table, because it really only makes sense properly within the context of the entire story arc.

You're right, some players might not like it. Others might play through the tightly-woven plot of the numerous adventures, realize the high stakes at play when they might not actually escape Phlan, and end up having the greatest OP experience of their lives as a result. I think that's the calculus the admins are using here, with the added bonus that, since they're using Ravenloft as the catalyst for the 'forever trapped' mechanic, and the many fans of the setting are fully aware that being trapped in Ravenloft is always a threat when playing 'weekend in Hell' style adventures there, that the odds of more people deciding the experience was awesome outweighs the likelihood that some will be turned off by it.

That is -- as far as we've heard -- essentially what they are proposing for Season 4. These suggestions that have been proposed have nothing to do with Ravenloft's setting

You must not know Ravenloft -- the fear of being forever trapped there has been a common feature of Ravenloft adventures, going all the way back to the original I6 when you realize the Mists surrounding the castle will kill you if you try to go through them before you deal with 'the devil Strahd'. The mechanic almost certainly wouldn't exist if it wasn't so germane to the setting being used this season.

These aren't proposed as a way of lessening the tension of the Season 4 setting; they're proposed to provide an alternative for those people who inevitably have Real Life interfere with their gaming.

I get that you have a reasonable concern about combining an intense storyline with casual play; I suspect that if feedback comes back that more players are taken aback by the possibility of not coming out of Ravenloft and it's hindering attempts to run the season, the admins will come up with safety valves or other solutions to help. Also, I doubt the admins will need to publish which adventures have 'exits'; if people are interested, they'll share that information themselves and the modules with ways out of the demiplane will be fairly common knowledge by the time all the modules are released.

It's not that I don't think you have a legitimate concern; it's just that your degree of concern about it is probably greater than it needs to be. It's something to keep an eye on -- not something that needs to be resolved before the season even begins.

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Pauper

 

[Mirtek]

I can recall running SPEC 3-3: Dance of the Sun and Moon repeatedly during the days of LFR, despite their being a story award in it that all but guaranteed that one PC from that module would become entirely unplayable until the player ran through SPEC 4-1 or SPEC 4-2, which played out the character's rescue.

except it didn't. It specified it was all fluff and you could immediately play this character again. Before playing the rescue and even if never playing the rescue.

 

[Mirtek]

. In Ravenloft, the unknown can hurt you, and has nasty big pointy te

And that never worked, because it has that elsewhere and worse.

A stinking rotting zombie or long teethed werewolf jumping from the shadows is nothing compared to the walking embodiements of evil that are fiends.

After smiting a glabrezu back to tge abyss there's simply no material plane creature that can compare. It may have a higher CR, but it's never pure evil having learned to walk like fiends are

 

[Steve_MND]

You seem really focused on this idea of OP being all about portability. It's true that is a big part of it, but it's not the totality of it.

I am, because it is one of the defining characteristic of what makes an Organized Play campaign and Organized Play campaign to begin with, and not just a series of scattered, independently-run home campaigns.

If you really dislike the idea of Season 4 possibly stranding characters in Ravenloft, the solution is either to not run Season 4 modules, or to run so many of them that players have lots of chances to escape the demiplane. That's up to you, if you're organizing, or you can point that out to the people who are organizing in your area. I should also point out that any player savvy enough to figure out Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds can play Season 4 modules online to finish their Ravenloft adventures even after their local area stops running Season 4 mods.

While I agree that I may well be overestimating the concern involved in this particular mechanic, I think a lot of people may be underestimating it. First off, not every group/location/etc CAN run as many tables of these as they'd like. While I hear about a lot of places that have two, three or more tables of AL per week, a lot of locations have just a small smattering of players, and are lucky if they can get a single legal table of the game in occasionally. My town is along those lines, and altho we can generally get a legal table each weekend or so, it's essentially with the same small subset of around three regular players, four on-again off-again players, and a rotating handful of college kids that wander by the store. Locations like that simply don't have the opportunity to run 'so many of them.' Furthermore, as others have mentioned elsewhere, trying to schedule and organize stuff like this is awkward at best, what with the extremely tight-knit story-arc. You're not going to the opportunity to say 'hey, how about this weekend we run 4-X?' as casually as you could have, with say, any of the other random Season 1-3 mods. And we're not going to be able to just casually generate up a table of random mid-tier characters to help out a stuck player like we could with a low-tier random mod.

And I suspect people overestimate the usefulness/frequency of online gaming for a lot of players. While it can help for some players, it is by no means a catch-all solution.

You must not know Ravenloft -- the fear of being forever trapped there has been a common feature of Ravenloft adventures, going all the way back to the original I6 when you realize the Mists surrounding the castle will kill you if you try to go through them before you deal with 'the devil Strahd'. The mechanic almost certainly wouldn't exist if it wasn't so germane to the setting being used this season.

It's certainly not my favorite D&D setting, but I am familiar with it (as a huge Lovecraft fan, I'm quite fond of the horror genre). And I'm perfectly fine with the idea of characters getting trapped there. But if they get trapped there, I want that to be because of in-character actions and decisions, not because of an administrative decision that penalizes the player, instead of the character.

It's not that I don't think you have a legitimate concern; it's just that your degree of concern about it is probably greater than it needs to be. It's something to keep an eye on -- not something that needs to be resolved before the season even begins.

I will disagree with you on this one -- before the season begins is exactly when this stuff needs to be decided by the Campaign Staff. As mentioned before by several people, inertia is hard to overcome, and the Staff would rather make decisions beforehand than change things midstream, and once a season's Player's Guide has been finalized, we'll be unlikely to see changes made to it until the next season -- which will be of marginal use in a situation like this. Easier to take care of potential issue like this now, while the document is still in development, than after the fact.

But as I said, I'm still holding out that there will be some sort of escape hatch system in place to accomodate those players who, through no fault of their own, have their characters stuck. We'll see come Season 4, and our group -- and others -- will make our play choices based what we get.

 

[Pauper]

But as I said, I'm still holding out that there will be some sort of escape hatch system in place to accomodate those players who, through no fault of their own, have their characters stuck. We'll see come Season 4, and our group -- and others -- will make our play choices based what we get.

Based on something Scorpienne posted in her spoilers thread, it looks as though at least one 'escape hatch' might end up being a campaign-wide event rather than being tied to a specific module; if that's the case, then I suspect the option to exit Ravenloft or stay in (to play through the Curse of Strahd hardcover) will act like the free rebuild offered after the release of the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide -- globally available, but only for a limited time. If that's true, then despite not being a perfect solution for every situation, it should cover most players who might need to get their PCs out of Ravenloft.

It also might assume that the admins get enough feedback on the Ravenloft mods to determine that Strahd's plan was foiled -- in that sense, it might be interesting to see what happens if Strahd actually succeeds in the plan being detailed in the AL modules...

--
Pauper

 

[Steve_MND]

Based on something Scorpienne posted in her spoilers thread, it looks as though at least one 'escape hatch' might end up being a campaign-wide event rather than being tied to a specific module; if that's the case, then I suspect the option to exit Ravenloft or stay in (to play through the Curse of Strahd hardcover) will act like the free rebuild offered after the release of the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide -- globally available, but only for a limited time. If that's true, then despite not being a perfect solution for every situation, it should cover most players who might need to get their PCs out of Ravenloft.

Not the optimal solution from my point of view, but if this is how it ends up playing out, i think that'd be a decent compromise.

 

[Z. H. Darkstar]

I got a different inference from Scorpienne's post, that the exits are tied to specific modules that wrap up the story arcs within the DDAL 4-X series.

 

[Pauper]

I got a different inference from Scorpienne's post, that the exits are tied to specific modules that wrap up the story arcs within the DDAL 4-X series.

If the same event occurs at the end of the tier 1 mods as occurs at the end of the tier 2 mods, then it's not strictly a mod-specific event; it's something that happens when Strahd's plan is defeated, and is effectively a campaign event.

Now it'll certainly be easier for the players in those modules to take advantage of that event, and there may even be added benefits for doing so, particularly story awards or the like. Those sorts of things are rightly exclusive to modules, as different parties may interact with the module in different ways, allowing them to earn (or not earn) different awards.

The idea of campaign-wide global events is something I wouldn't mind seeing the admins explore and develop. For example, a Season 2 global event might have coincided with the release of DDEX 2-10: Cloaks and Shadows, representing the Cloaks newfound interest in the arcane abilities of the elemental cults -- the next time an arcane caster character who is not a member of the Cloaks participates in a Season 2 adventure (to keep the 'event' reasonable, this would likely only occur during a specific date range, such as the month following the adventure's release, so a character who doesn't feel like participating can avoid the event by participating in other adventures), that character would need to make a check or be (mis)identified as a possible cult accomplice. Failure would mean the PC would need to roll on the Sentencing table at the end of the module as if he'd been caught using arcane magic in violation of the Arcane Edict; success would give the character a one-time bonus to any roll on the Getting Caught chart (including any roll made during the current adventure) to represent the character's success in getting the Cloaks off his trail.

The idea is to make the campaign seem more 'alive' by representing that things are happening even when adventurers aren't actively pursuing their own goals in an adventure -- the factions and the power structures in place take steps to react to events or maintain their influence. It also gives DMs and venues incentive to run the most current season, as, for example, a DM running Season 1 mods isn't going to be able to incorporate a Season 2 campaign event when it fires.

Just my $0.02US.

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Pauper

 

[Z. H. Darkstar]

I see your point, and agree with it. It would definitely make the campaign feel more alive.

However, I feel like the fact the DDAL 4-X modules will use a modified xp progression is a sign that 4-7 through 4-14 are meant to be played by those who wish to remain in Barovia to see it through to the end. The last two seasons have seen modules that have different paths based on tier that lead to the same endings. This season feels different, as it doesn't introduce any T2 adventures until the second half of the season. I think that the midpoint exit is for those who don't fully buy into Ravenloft, but don't want to abandon their characters either.

 

[Pauper]

However, I feel like the fact the DDAL 4-X modules will use a modified xp progression is a sign that 4-7 through 4-14 are meant to be played by those who wish to remain in Barovia to see it through to the end.

Ah, you're right -- the T1 and T2 adventures in Season 4 aren't two parallel tracks that end at the same station. In that case, your idea makes perfect sense, as the bridge to T2 would be exactly the point where some folks might want to 'jump off' to be able to play other mods at local conventions or the like. This might cause some weirdness with people who otherwise have gotten used to using the 'catching up' rule to skip over 4th level, but I don't think that's a huge concern.

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Pauper