D&D 5E Organized play character creation vs home campaign games.

[Minsc]

IMO, creating any character for any kind of organized play is a bit different than creating a character for a regular home campaign.

1) You tend to encounter more powergamers in AL than in a home game.

2) The characters I've seen tend to be a bit more self-sufficient (you never know if there will be a healer in the group, or a tank, ect.).

Do you guys agree with these assessments? What kinds of characters do you tend to see, or what would you be willing to play in one type of game, but not another?

 

[Crothian]

Honestly, I don't play in organized play anymore because of the problems with the other players at the table. I've learned there are plenty of D&D players that I don't want to play with through organized play. At home I get to invite over only the people we want at the table. It is more then just having people meet our playstye but also about having gamers that can interact with wives and children and not be a problem.

I ran into more power gamers at organized play then at home. But too be fair at home we have zero power gamer and that was a choice we as players in the group made. I like to play characters that are fun and not optimized. I think it can be enjoyable to fail and then see what happens. This is a mindset that people do not appreciate at organized play. Their goals were always different to get the treasure and to accomplish the adventure and get the certificate. There was also very little group cohesion. These where characters they were only going to see once and they treated them like that.

 

[Minsc]

I play in both kinds of games. Both have their merits, and while I prefer home games, there's no reason you can not role play a character with optimized stats.

Besides, you can meet lots of people at organized games and sometimes they end up in your home games.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Honestly, I see the same number of power gamers in my home campaign as in OP. But that's mostly because almost my entire home game are the same players that show up to our public OP campaign. I've also been volunteering in, playing, and running OP for so long that my home campaigns tend to resemble OP in structure.

As for your assessments, I don't think there are more powergamers in OP than outside of it. However, I think some DM's campaigns encourage or discourage powergaming more than others. I think powergaming tends to vary more based on the amount of experience of the players in the game and the mentality of the DM.

For instance, if you have a DM who almost never runs combats, players in that campaign aren't going to care nearly as much about how powerful their characters are in combat. If combats happen 10 times a session and many of them are extremely hard, you'll find players working to make their characters better at combat.

Likewise, people who've never played D&D before don't optimize because they generally don't know HOW. Also, they never learned to focus on that aspect over others. OP players tend to be veteran players. Most who stumble into OP do so because they are looking for another avenue to play D&D because their once a week home game just isn't enough for them. That's changing a lot in more recent years as the OP department at WOTC spends a lot of effort trying to focus OP towards new players over veteran players. Still, our OP games are 90% experienced players with a couple of new players mixed in. Most of the new players come for a while and then get bored and stop coming.

I agree that characters tend to me more self sufficient in OP. As you say, you can't be sure the table will have a healer of any kind so you tend to hoard magic items that heal yourself or protect you from damage way more than in a home campaign where you know you have a cleric to take care of those things.

 

[Riley37]

One could survey the percentage of powergamers and the prevalence of powergaming in Adventurer's League or other organized play, if one visited organized play at many game stores, many conventions, etc.

How could you guess what's typical in anyone else's home play experience? How could you estimate what's common and uncommon in home games? What's your method of observation? Your experience of home play might differ radically from mine. How would you know?

Have you put micro-cameras into copies of the Players Handbook, so that when people buy PHB and take it home, the micro-camera takes recordings of home play and transmits those recordings to you?

 

[aramis erak]

IMO, creating any character for any kind of organized play is a bit different than creating a character for a regular home campaign.

1) You tend to encounter more powergamers in AL than in a home game.

2) The characters I've seen tend to be a bit more self-sufficient (you never know if there will be a healer in the group, or a tank, ect.).

Do you guys agree with these assessments? What kinds of characters do you tend to see, or what would you be willing to play in one type of game, but not another?

I've seen no difference.

in fact, the one player in my home game who is also playing AL, she used the EXACT same build.

But then, rules wise, the only difference is Aarakokra are allowed, Drow aren't, rousing from sleep takes 1d3 actions, and ailing a death save by 5 has lasting consequences.

 

[Fralex]

I've done one AL campaign before, and for the most part everyone was fine. One or two players were annoying, but I began to make friends with a couple that I liked so it evens out. For me the main difference is whether or not I can try out my latest homebrew experiments.