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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7041477" data-attributes="member: 17607">Let's start with the obvious one: Dedicated DM. Run 24 hours of mods, from any season, and you get to pick a magic item from any mod you've run for your character. The award says that the item must be tier-appropriate, but that restriction is effectively unenforceable, given that not every item specifies a rarity, and that other DMs must enforce the restriction at their tables. It's pretty disheartening to see a tier 1 character with the Sun Blade from Curse of Strahd, as an example. (And sure, I can say that won't fly at my table, but that doesn't stop the player from trying it at every other table he plays at, until he actually reaches tier 2 and there's no longer any indication that he did anything wrong.) Note as well that the award is currently restricted to WotC-produced mods (DDEX, DDAL, and hardcover mods), but there is already some pressure to expand this to CCC mods, which would utterly open the floodgates. This would be a far less broken award if it were restricted to only selecting a magic item from the current season, and only from a DDAL mod from the current season (which would neatly avoid the problem that most of the really problematic items in AL get in via the hardcover mods).The Level Up award is basically an XP windfall for grognards, and worse than a typical award for anyone who's just getting started in DMing. At this point, it just seems like a bone to the folks who've served as coordinators, and thus have been involved in the campaign from the beginning. It honestly does very little to aid with recruiting truly 'new' DMs.The various 'double the DM awards' quests don't explicitly specify that they only double the awards granted in the module being run. I've actually gotten into a conversation with a DM who insisted that, since his 'Saint of Ilmater' game was also the game that qualified him for 'Dedicated DM', that he thus gets to choose two magic items, since 'Saint of Ilmater' "doubles the DM rewards", and every benefit under the DM Quests is listed as a "DM Reward".Lastly, DM awards that break other AL rules (such as King of the Ordning) are a phenomenally bad idea, because it sets the precedent that some rules can be broken just because someone is doing something seen as beneficial. Since the AL allows this for DMs who run a lot of games, why wouldn't they also turn a blind eye to, say, DMPCs, or DMs giving bonuses to their favorite players in-game?Lastly, the fact that the entire rewards system is run on the honor system is problematic for convention play -- players walk in from far-away places that nobody in the room knows anything about but them, and they claim to have run the entire Storm King's Thunder season twice at their local game store. It takes a particularly confident DM to even ask for the player to justify his claim, and even if she does so, there's no actual logging or other documentation requirement for DMs, so when the player simply says he doesn't have any proof of his claim, the DM simply has to go with her gut feeling as to whether the player is being honest or exploiting the system for his own benefit at the expense of the other players at her table.And again, it's difficult to believe that I'm the only one who has seen these problems in play. If you guys want to keep the quests as they are because you want to keep exploiting them, that's fine -- just own up to it.--Pauper</blockquote>

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