DDAL Running a DDAL season as a home campaign

[pukunui]

Hi all,

Like [MENTION=6702445]jayoungr[/MENTION], I am considering running a DDAL season as an episodic campaign for one of my home groups. Advice I’ve read elsewhere is that most seasons’ adventures can be run in numerical order by tier in order to make a more or less chronological story.

I am leaning towards Season 3 (Rage of Demons) for thematic reasons, although the ability to easily mix in adventures from Lost Tales of Myth Drannor to plug gaps and/or continue the campaign is appealing as well. Season 2 (Elemental Evil) is probably the runner-up, although I find Mulmaster a little off-putting.

Has anyone else done this? If so, do you have any suggestions or recommendations?

I’m a bit concerned that some of the seasons don’t have a good enough spread of adventures across levels, so that I would end up having to plug some other short adventures in to fill the gaps. Would that be the case with Seasons 2 and 3 in particular? Or is there enough there to run PCs from Tier 1 straight through to Tier 3?

Please let me know if you need any more details.

Thanks in advance,
Jonathan


p.s. In case it isn’t obvious, as this will be a home campaign, I’m not fussed about AL rules and restrictions.

 

[MerricB]

Just use milestone advancement, and you should be fine.

Season 2 has nine Tier 1 adventures and six Tier 2 adventures.
Season 3 has six Tier 1 adventures, seven Tier 2 adventures and two Tier 3 (8 hour) adventures.

Cheers!

 

[pukunui]

Just use milestone advancement, and you should be fine.

Are there any guidelines for using milestone advancement in AL adventures? I was going to use XP since it's nicely built-in, but I do actually prefer milestone leveling myself.

Also, I note on your blog that you've run Season 3 several times now. Do you have any tips on running it as an ongoing campaign? Any issues I should look out for?

Do you know if there are any additional resources for the Moonsea region - e.g. maps and such? Or will I need to scrounge up older edition maps of the area?

 

[MNblockhead]

Are there any guidelines for using milestone advancement in AL adventures? I was going to use XP since it's nicely built-in, but I do actually prefer milestone leveling myself

As I understand it no. There are some rules to help move borderline characters to the next tier. I think using downtime. A DM did that for me once, but it was a while ago and I don't remember the rules. Besides, there have been some pretty big updates to the AL rules since then.

But are your player planning on following AL rules for their characters so that they can use them in other AL games? For example, are you enforcing PHB+1. Are you not allowing them to keep found treasure? If not, then the characters are unlikely to be AL legal. But if this is just for your home game, who cares?

I've run a number of AL games for my home game, but not an entire campaign. What *I* would do, is determine all the adventures you'll use in your campaign. Easiest is to just stick to adventures in a specific season and run them in order. Then, just level up the characters to meet the suggested levels for that adventure. You can just select one adventure for each level, or, if you want to run ALL the adventures for that season, have them play two or more adventures at certain levels. I wouldn't worry too much about WHICH adventures you keep them at the same level. The AL modules do a good job advising you how to tweak the difficulty based on the number and levels of characters.

 

[pukunui]

But are your player planning on following AL rules for their characters so that they can use them in other AL games? For example, are you enforcing PHB+1. Are you not allowing them to keep found treasure? If not, then the characters are unlikely to be AL legal. But if this is just for your home game, who cares?

No, the AL rules and restrictions don't appeal to me. I just want to run AL adventures for my home group.

Then, just level up the characters to meet the suggested levels for that adventure.

The problem is that the optimal levels don't go in an even spread.

Season 2 has one adventure with an optimal level of 1, five adventures with an optimal level of 2, four adventures with an optimal level of 3, three adventures with an optimal level of 6, and then three adventures with an optimal level of 8.

Season 3, meanwhile, has two adventures with an optimal level of 1, five adventures with an optimal level of 3, seven adventures with an optimal level of 8, one adventure with an optimal level of 12, and one adventure with an optimal level of 13.

Season 2's spread isn't too bad, and some of the adventures could be up- or downgraded to fill in the gaps. Season 3 seems a bit more sporadic, with nothing between 3rd level and 8th level and nothing between 8th and 12th.

Perhaps I'd be best off running Season 2 in that respect.

This is also why I'm thinking XP might be useful, even if it's not my preferred option.

 

[jayoungr]

My tip is to read, or at least skim, all the adventures first so you know how they fit together and what things would benefit from some foreshadowing. Introduce characters early who are going to become important later, so the players have some connection with them. Then when their time comes to play major parts in the story, you can just say, "Remember So-and-so, from the market? She comes to you looking worried..."

I'm using regular XP advancement in my season 4 campaign, and it's working fine. I like the fact that each adventure tells me how to tweak it for parties of lower or higher level than the intended, so I feel like where they are is never a big deal. Does season 3 not do that?

If you do want to use milestone advancement, then I suggest planning where the "tentpoles" of the campaign will be: where are the endpoints of each mini-arc? Then parcel out the adventures leading up to each "tentpole" so that players are the right level when they reach them.

 

[pukunui]

Thanks for the tips, [MENTION=6702445]jayoungr[/MENTION]!

I’m actually thinking Season 5 might be the best one to start with.

 

[MerricB]

The Tier 1 of Season 5 is *awesome*. Tier 2 & 3 are fine, but I love the Tier 1 story.

As for the Tier 4 of Season 5 - it would have loved having access to Volo's Guide to Monsters, but that came out very soon before the deadline. (My players still had a lot of fun, though).

Cheers!

 

[pukunui]

Thanks, [MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION]!

I was looking at a post on your blog and came up with another option: I could follow the story of the Moonsea seasons and run Season 1 all the way through, then move on to the Tier 2 mods from Season 2, then move on to the Tier 2 and/or 3 mods from Season 3 and maybe some Lost Tales as well.

Would that be doable?

So many options!

 

[MerricB]

I very much enjoy the arc of Season 1 (which has more stand-alone stories), but builds to the Cult of the Dragon attacking Phlan. After those 14 adventures, we move into a sequence of tales about what happens to the people who flee Phlan, which is a theme in Seasons 2 & 3. I regret that it was abandoned after that, though a few CCCs refer to it.

Cheers!

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Season 2 has one adventure with an optimal level of 1, five adventures with an optimal level of 2, four adventures with an optimal level of 3, three adventures with an optimal level of 6, and then three adventures with an optimal level of 8... Season 2's spread isn't too bad, and some of the adventures could be up- or downgraded to fill in the gaps. Season 3 seems a bit more sporadic, with nothing between 3rd level and 8th level and nothing between 8th and 12th.

How large is your home group, and how 'optimized' do they play? Most adventures have a section at the front to figure out how your group scales from 'very weak - weak - average - strong - very strong' based on the size or level of the group, and you use this to scale the adventure. In pickup play the DM is expected to adjust encounters (both using just the guidelines and their own judgement to add/remove enemies or obstacles). Also, my experience is that the majority of AL adventures are tuned for very softball combat encounters at the recommended level. This is going to be compounded in a home campaign, because your party will probably coordinate to have a mix of abilities (avoiding problems like 'no one is good in melee') and will know each other and be able to support each other better instead of sort of guessing on the fly. So even if the modules did line up with your party levels, you would still expect to do a lot of adjusting of encounters as you play.

(There really shouldn't be AL adventures with an optimal level at the edges of tiers (1, 4, 5, 9-10) because that takes away the room to adjust encounters; mathematically you'll never get a party with a higher average level than 4 in tier 1 or 10 in tier 2, and if you're doing pickup games getting a party at 4/10 requires you to have all players at that exact level, which is unusual. They make adventures like that sometimes for whatever reason, but you shouldn't expect the levels of modules to follow a progression.)

Are there any guidelines for using milestone advancement in AL adventures? I was going to use XP since it's nicely built-in, but I do actually prefer milestone leveling myself.

For people currently playing AL, they all effectively use milestones now. It takes 4 ACP to go up a level from 1 to 5, then 8 per level after that, you get 1 ACP for each hour the adventure is designed for or 1 ACP per hour advancing towards your goals when playing a hardcover. Some of the newer adventures have bonus objectives and other mods, but all of the older adventures run under what I said above now.

 

[pukunui]

[MENTION=6976536]OverlordOcelot[/MENTION]: I’ve got a pool of 6 players, although I generally only get 3-4 of them at any one session. In terms of optimising, I’d say they’re pretty average.

 

[jayoungr]

Another suggestion from my experiences preparing season 4: Look for redundancy. See if you can combine or link any duplicate elements, so that they look like part of a pattern rather than sheer repetitiveness.

And on the flip side, look for one-off elements that seem to come from nowhere. They aren't such a big deal in a stand-alone adventure, but they stick out more in a campaign. See if you can modify them to tie in with the rest of the story.

For example, season 4 has a lot of ghosts (redundancy), including one who is the ghost of a half-troll-half-dragon (one-off). I'm trying to figure out whether I can combine any of the ghosts or at least link them to each other. And I'm planning to change the half-troll-half-dragon ghost to a tiefling and tie him in with one of the local families. His rejection by his father then comes from the fact that he bears the marks of the family shame in consorting with demons.