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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6854546" data-attributes="member: 17607">I think this is the key insight, but if it's accurate, I think it also outlines a flaw in the thinking of how AL is organized.The insight is that the designers always include combat as an option because every character has some combat ability, and if the PCs 'fail' the adventure because they get killed by the monsters, then it's easy to put that failure on the shoulders of the players -- if you were better in combat, you wouldn't have failed the adventure. But that simply highlights how we're actually encouraging min-maxing by trying to avoid a failure state, and leaving the default failure state as 'players didn't optimize enough'.The problem as I see it is that we can't just decide to hand-wave failure (the whole 'fail forward' thing, which is probably worth a separate thread), because that makes the stakes pointless. Why bother setting up a scenario where you have to race across a city collecting clues when you already know that the big-bad isn't going to start his city-destroying ritual until you get there?So on the one hand, you have the option to build adventures with a real chance of failure if the party doesn't come properly prepared with a full slate of abilities, which has the potential of leaving some newer players disillusioned that they failed without knowing what they were supposed to do to succeed. On the other hand, you can bake in combat as a failsafe, but that simply encourages players to optimize for combat, which is already known to be a factor that turns off new players from joining the campaign (see LFR, Pathfinder Society, etc.). And assuming there even is a middle ground here, finding it requires you to build very specific types of adventures when your target is to produce literally hundreds of pages of adventure content for each season, without making those adventures feel same-y or repetitive. I don't envy the admins their task here.I'm not sure how you're running your combats, but I'd love to be able to finish a typical non-speed-bump combat in 3-5 minutes. In Fourth Edition, the choice was between 15-20 minutes of RP or an hour of combat, and though 5E has streamlined the combat process somewhat, you'll still almost certainly spend over half your typical 4-hour adventure block adjudicating combat. In most cases, providing an RP solution would actually speed up most adventures, especially those that resort to weird, gimmicky combat mechanics as a novelty. (I'm looking at you, Bane of the Tradeways.)Well, as I point out above, they're on the horns of a dilemma here -- if they don't do anything about the unintentional min-max focus, that's going to ruin the campaign right there, given enough time. (I happen to think the recent DM Quest program is going to accelerate that process, but again, that's a different issue that deserves a separate conversation.) So it might just be a question of 'how do you want the campaign to fail?'I hate to be cynical enough to suggest that the answer is 'let's leave the incentive to min-max in the adventure design, but publicly tell people they don't need to optimize as a way of trying to convince new players that they won't have to wade through min-maxers to play a fun game, that way we maximize the amount of time before the whole thing collapses under its own weight'. I want to think that the admins are sincere when they say they want new players to not feel the pressure to optimize in order to enjoy their adventuring in AL mods and storylines.--Pauper</blockquote>

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