I think that community is a big part of AL's value. Even with Encounters it can be fun to see how different groups tackle the same adventure. With Expeditions you add greater persistence, because you are in the same region and things will likely change. Maybe the church in town is demolished. Maybe an NPC is elevated in power. These developments happen in a home game, but through AL they gain a community. And, you get a chance to impact the campaign and be a part of it.
I agree with this for the most part. But I believe the community feel is lost with the new rules put into effect. Most people feel that in a campaign where 10,000 people are playing and the results of any particular storyline are entirely decided by the 500 of them that go to Origins, Gen Con, and PAX that normal people have no real effect over the campaign. It doesn't matter what most people contribute because they don't matter.
We had that feeling to a lesser degree in LG, for sure. There were people here in Winnipeg who felt the entire region of Ket was decided by people living in or around Toronto only. But I think that's because our region was too large.
Whereas in a home game your actions directly affect the outcome of the story. I actually think this one is a negative for Organized Play. It's been something we work AROUND rather than a benefit of the campaign.
My initial draw into LG was because I traveled for work. I couldn't take part in a regular home campaign. LG allowed me to play the 'next chapter' whenever I could, and still be part of a story.
For me, this was the initial draw as well. I heard good things about LG and made up a character and played 2 or 3 adventures for fun here in Winnipeg. But I wasn't sure if I was going to keep playing LG or not. It seemed like a glorified home game with a bunch of disadvantages. Then I traveled to Australia for a year. I didn't know anyone and I felt a little lost. But then I found out that they were running LG and my character was legal and could join their adventures. It immediately gave me a game I could play in weekly and play 2 adventures a week to satisfy my D&D cravings.
Not only that, but the flavor of their adventures were different than the ones from Ket. I got to be the guy who was the strange foreigner with a different culture. Which was great, because I often felt like that in real life while I was there, so it helped to play my character that way as well. I played up the difference between my culture and theirs over and over again. I told stories of the strange country none of them could experience unless they visited our country in real life. It was an experience. Part of what made it exciting is that when I returned home I had stories to tell of my character visiting a strange land and could bring back tales of the events happening in a country none of them would ever see. But the events happening over there still affected things happening here because the Triads would speak to each other and metaregional plots caused some results of stories happening in other regions to bleed into others. It felt like we were all connected...but not all precisely equal. I got a real benefit that other people didn't by traveling. Much like the benefit of traveling in real life. I got to see and experience things that I couldn't at home.
As I played more, I found advantages. I had not landed a great home group in my area. With LG I played at tons of different tables, meeting a lot of different gamers. That variety was great, plus it eventually introduced me to friends who are incredibly special to me still today. From all these gamers I learned a ton of techniques. It made me a better player and DM to be part of such a vast community.
I agree 100%. However, I think LG had such a community because of how invested the players were. It attracted the best DMs and players because it was the type of campaign that catered to the people who loved D&D the most. Therefore, those people were the most likely to have the most experience running and playing the game. They showed up every week and tried their absolute best to keep the campaign going because they really believed in it and enjoyed it. New people showed up periodically, but the only ones to stay were the ones who REALLY liked D&D enough to want to dedicate their time to the campaign.
That's what made the community great. It was entirely made up of people who would take their lunch break at a gaming convention and discuss the differences between their run of an adventure and someone else's run of the same adventure. They compared the way they defeated the monsters, the interesting things that people did in order to solve the puzzles, and so on. Even between games, what was on their mind was LG.
The campaign worked BECAUSE it catered to invested people.
Contrast this to LFR that no longer catered to invested people. We attempted to run it the same way. We ran a weekly games day with 2 or 3 adventures every Saturday. We ran out of new adventures so quickly that the entire community of people had played all the adventures available about 3 times each by the end of the first year. Then people started showing up, finding out that there were no new adventures and going home rather than playing. They didn't show up again the next week. Some of them never came again.
Adding to this was the disaffection that people were feeling because of the new rule that allowed people to create characters at higher level, which caused people to feel the effort they put into their existing characters was a waste because the game no longer felt persistent. People felt that there used to be a reward for showing up every week. You got access to the higher level adventures that no one else did unless they equally dedicated their time. Now, what was the point?
Our numbers kept dwindling over time and by the end of the 2nd year, I was calling people up and home and begging them to come so we could have a minimum table of 4 in order to run a game each week. Which I felt was my responsibility because if I didn't make sure there was at least one game every week then the campaign would essentially have 0 presence in our city. After about 3 months of that, even calling people up at home failed and we couldn't form tables, so we stopped showing up entirely. I haven't played LFR in nearly 3 years now(Except at Gen Con). Neither has anyone else in our city since I was the one organizing it. Maybe there are secretly a bunch of people ordering adventures for home play, but I doubt it. I know most of the D&D players in the city.
The community died entirely because the most invested felt like the campaign was not for them.
After a while I wanted to give back, so I started helping with playtests and writing small pieces. Then I began writing adventures and administering meta-orgs. Then I became an admin and an author for published works. At every step, there was a community hook that made that possible.
Yeah, I was the same way. I became a Triad member for LG because I wanted to become more involved. I applied for LFR admin at Gen Con the year the campaign was announced because I was super excited to have a campaign based around a more balanced rule set while still having everything I loved about LG. I became an admin, helped to edit and write a couple of adventures. I tried to make LFR the best campaign it could be.
However, it was readily clear that what caused me to want to play LG in the first place was precisely what they attempted to remove from LFR. The longer the campaign went on the most of it they wanted to remove. I argued against it but even though the admins were split about 50/50 about whether to allow characters to start at higher levels, WOTC made it clear that they had the final decision and the game was going to be designed more casually so more people could play.
Despite all that, I really had(and still hold on to) high hopes for AL. I applied for the Community Manager position and am looking forward to attempting to run AL at one of the stores in the city. I have heard a bunch of interest already from some of my friends who really want to try it out.
I'm just concerned that it is going to go the way of LFR. Lots of interest for a year before everyone gets frustrated that there's not enough play opportunities followed by everyone leaving.
