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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tia Nadiezja" data-source="post: 6742906" data-attributes="member: 6778763">The problem with the story origin mechanic isn't in its goal. Its goal makes a ton of sense. It's in its execution so far, because its execution so far does nothing really to achieve its goal - it simply creates a situation which is more favorable to people holding significant system mastery (in this case, mastery of the AL rules rather than of D&D mechanics - meta-system mastery) than the base game already is. I really don't think that's a thing that we want out of our rules.Right now, there are three story origins. Tyranny of Dragons allows a few minor background things. Elemental Evil has backgrounds, races, and a rather large list of very useful, very cool spells. Rage of Demons is back down to backgrounds, with a side order of gods for Clerics and characters with the Acolyte background.Playing an in-season background is a ton of fun, but it doesn't offer a significant mechanical advantage. It flavors your character in a way that's really cool for the current season. But the hypothetical power gamer doesn't care about that - they care about power and versatility, and that means that, regardless of which adventure the store is playing, they're going to pick Elemental Evil because it's got the awesome spells and nifty race options.I'm not talking about Aarakockra. I also can't spell that word. Whether or not flying races are balanced is an argument to have another time; I absolutely sympathize with the choice to ban them entirely. Further, them being banned, I'm delighted that there are no apparently plans to release a cert for them. It doesn't matter if I'm a travelling player or a local; I can't play an aarakockra, and that's good. The con issue shows up when we talk about the Death domain, which is (pardon my pun) absolutely killer to see someone else play when you've got a great character concept for it but you're banned from using that because you work as, say, a caregiver for disabled adults and convention travel is so far outside your budget that GenCon might as well be happening on Mars.But that's a different point. Back to story origins.So... story origins mean that you can't cast the cool spells in the EE player's guide while using a background from Rage of Demons. That's where you lose me - not because I don't understand the need to keep options that could interact badly isolated, but because two things have gone wrong here at once that make the choice look ridiculous to me.1. Spells and backgrounds - and races and backgrounds - don't interact. It is not possible for a negative rules interaction to form between RoD origin mechanics and EE origin mechanics, because those mechanics never touch each other in-game. A background that could possibly make Investure of Flame broken would be a bad background and need to be banned from the game not due to that specific interaction but because it was a terrible idea to begin with.2. Resources were removed without being replaced by anything at all commensurate.. Until these last few days, the EE Player's Guide was by far the meatiest post-Core block of stuff we've seen. It's great! I love that it's free! I actively want to spend more money on D&D because they gave it to me! I bought the spellbook cards! But then the next season starts and I want to make a character who has a background that interacts with what's going on in the season because having your character be directly linked to the story is great and is part of how home games work and the work that the AL folks did to replicate that aspect of home play in AL is awesome... but now I have to pick between this solely story-based thing and being able to cast those cool spells. My spellbook cards are crying, folks. There are literal tears forming on the outside of the box, because that's messed up, and it favors rules-mastery (and, though I am loathe to use the term, power-games) over people who want to be involved in the story.That's the problem with how the story origin system works right now. I love the basic idea - keeping a subset of things that we know won't break the game when used together legal for a given character is a great idea. But at some point during planning for a season, someone needs to have sat down and said to themselves, "What is the broadest set of rules options we can allow these new characters without there being literally any chance whatsoever that the rules from different sources will have unexpected and dire interactions?" Ripping out cool spells and races and replacing them with a short list of backgrounds ain't that - and someone, between AL's staff and WotC, really ought to have seen that when the call was being made. The origin system was created before the release schedule was known; it needs to have adapted by now to the release schedule.Now I'm going to talk about the SCAG.The impression I had about it not being allowed in RoD comes directly from conversations with AL staff. It comes from talk on Facebook involving our regional coordinator, and it comes from talks on the WotC forums involving Skerritt and Kalani. I wasn't talking out my donkey when I talked about it; I went to great lengths both to gather information and to express my concerns.This is also where I first got on the "the focus on conventions is not good for AL" kick I'm still on.Basically, it was said on Facebook that the SCAG would almost certainly not be allowed for season 3 - that the earliest it might show up is Season 4. I then said that there was a problem with that - the book's advertising copy explicitly called out that it was intended for use with Rage of Demons adventures at the time, and a new player who picked the book up then walked into an AL game, with the Rage of Demons posters all over the store and Rage of Demons adventure open on the table and people raging about demons and demons raging everywhere, would then have to be told, "I'm sorry. The book you bought that the advertising copy for said is intended for use in the Rage of Demons campaign is not actually allowed in the Rage of Demons campaign. Play with this short list of wonderfully-flavorful backgrounds instead!"That's a frustrating experience for the new player. It's one that could have been avoided by either immediately legalizing the book on release (I know the list of reasons this is unlikely to happen) or by making the RoD campaign's start date match the release date of the SCAG, through some combination of pushing back RoD's start and moving up SCAG's release. I know that wouldn't have been easy - especially the second - but it was a thing that could have been done.It was then pointed out to me that RoD had to start when it did so that the launch event could happen at GenCon, and that the release date of both the adventure and the Guide couldn't be moved for the AL players because AL players are a tiny subset of the total population of the game's players. And at that, I just flipped my lid a little, and got something pretty much permanently stuck in my craw about the emphasis on convention play. Why?Because if the books couldn't be moved for the small subset of players who are involved in AL, why in the world would the start date of the season - and, thus, the legality of a book whose advertising copy specifically called out Rage of Demons - be set based on the tiny subset of that tiny subset who attended, not conventions in general, but one single convention located a very, very long way from pretty much all the major population centers in the Midwest?I honestly still have not gotten a good answer to that.</blockquote>

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