D&D 5E So what's next for D&D organized play?

[Feeroper]

I know they haven't formally announced anything, but I thought it'd be interesting to speculate.

I don't think Encounters is going to be coming to an end (I'm a long time Encounters DM), but I wonder with LFR having its end this year, at least with 4e, will WotC take control over LFR again like they used to? I know they were posting for jobs after the Winter Fantasy 2014 event, looking for regional managers for their public play stuff, and it got me thinking about Living Greyhawk. Personally, I loved LG in the way that it was organized and run. I loved the tying in game regions to real world regions, and I even loved Time Units. I know it could be restrictive and was an issue for a lot of people, but I loved it.

Personally I would love to see WotC return to a living campaign management system like they had with LG. They could keep LFR and import the ideas from the organization of LG and I'd dive right in. If they were to go a route like that though, I don't think it would be a straight up port of LG though, I cant imagine them bringing back the regional ties again, but I imagine it will be something akin to Pathfinder Society currently.

Encounters is a great program too and I expect it will stay, but I would like to see them also support a living campaign again like they used to. I think Encounters and a living campaign scratch different kinds of itches.

What do you guys think? Any ideas of what they might do, or what you would want to see them do?

 

[Plaguescarred]

Won't future Organized Play be in the Forgotten Realms ? @Jester Canuck posted on this info En World (presumably?) from PAX East's Tyranny of Dragons seminar;

Organized Play will be based in the FR.
Perkins says D&D5 is 97% done.

I hope they keep D&D Encounters and also kick a new Living Campaign as well, as these were fun and great way to get some D&D going and gets new players in.

 

[Feeroper]

Yeah Forgotten Realms is the standard base setting for Next and will be the setting they feature by default. It makes sense as FR is a well known brand for them. As a public play setting they have been using it for a while now in Encounters. I imagine if they do resurrect a Living Campaign under their control or change how its maintained again from the current incarnation of LFR, I expect that they will certainly keep the setting of FR. I'm more interested in how it will organized.

 

[Alphastream]

I like pondering your question of what we would like a new organized play program to be.

On one hand, I want it to be whatever is effective for D&D and for our hobby. I loved Living Greyhawk as a personal experience, but it could be insular and even turn away new players by making them feel inadequate compared to established players. Encounters has been really good at bringing in casual, new, and inactive players. However, it could be better at creating sales for the gaming stores.

On the other hand, I really miss the creativity and ability to delve deeply into the organized play experience, which is something LG allowed. In LG you could often do things like participate in online in-character forum threads, help grow an organization, push an actual agenda to influence your region, take part in special events that have a measurable impact on the plot, etc. I miss that and want that again.

I do really like the experiences that excite players, even when they are one-shots. Seeing new and casual gamers, even first-time gamers, standing at the table in excitement as they battle a dragon... that was excellent. I would like to further have that experience be compelling enough that new and casual players can't help but want to play more... and to tell the story of their character.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I'm hoping that we get somewhere between LFR and LG. Most of LFR's ideas were pretty good. Though I believe the ability to play infinitely, create characters at higher levels and the small number of adventures created a lack of investment in your character. Early in the campaign there were so few adventures that we ended up playing ever adventure 4 or 5 times a piece with 4 or 5 different characters.

I think part of what made LG work is the number of regions that existed and the investment in your home region's storylines while also having the ability to travel out of region for the truly dedicated in order to get more play experiences. Though, as was mentioned above, this often created an insular campaign where if you weren't one of the people who traveled regularly and showed up to play every week at your local gaming store that it could seem kind of daunting to even start playing.

Though, I'm virtually positive that there isn't going to be regions in the new campaign. It sounds like there are only 3 people in charge of the whole campaign from the way the volunteer positions were advertised(though there was mention of a "regional bible" in the writeup, so maybe there's just 2 or 3 regions).

Still, I found LFR to be a little TOO casual. Especially with Encounters fulfilling the role of the ultra casual campaign I can't help but feel that there should be room to make the new Living Campaign a little more "hardcore".

 

[MerricB]

I think there's been a big shift in how Encounters is seen, especially given how different the play experience is from D&D 4E to D&D Next. In 4E, you could actually do a single encounter and have an entertaining tactical battle. D&D Next? Not so much. Instead, the sessions are far more like regular D&D play. I think they've been experimenting a lot recently, with the recent Next adventures being much more free-form in their approach rather than the strict progression and ordering of early Encounters seasons.

As a result, Encounters doesn't feel so much as an outlier as to how D&D is played. It's a lot closer to a regular game now. The main difference is that you don't keep characters permanently - which is the chief draw of the Living campaigns.

I played a moderate amount of Living Greyhawk, but not so much of the Living Forgotten Realms. (By the time I got around to running stuff at my FLGS again, I ended up running my AD&D game after Encounters, mainly because I could handle the large numbers of people who'd turn up for it! Nine players is not uncommon at my AD&D table). I think that a well-run Living campaign would be a good thing. Record-tracking and timely (and plentiful) adventures are both major issues.

Cheers!

 

[pedr]

To be honest, the Sundering Encounters seasons are harder to run in public than LFR was (the only difference being expected session length). Encounters started as something which had individual sessions and while it was a little complicated if a player joined, say, for session 7, it was far easier than the confusion of the current adventures.

Now, I like the current adventures, but I had 14 players tonight, and 2 GMs ready to run. In previous seasons of Encounters - or even, at a push, in LFR - I could have asked one of the more experienced players to run a third table, but that really wouldn't work with this adventure. I also have new GMs running this season and last, and that's quite a challenge.

A few of the players are really enjoying the adventure, and I think one player wouldn't have been happy playing a different style (the constraints even in this adventure are limiting him a little compared to what he enjoys) but nearly half my players are new this season or last and have joined part-way through and I'm not entirely sure I've managed to help them understand what's going on!

I'd be interested to see if WotC could create adventures which aimed to be self-contained within a 3-hour session, which had optional or extension sections for groups able to play for longer, which tied together into mini-campaigns which together made a larger plotline. This could form the basis for the Encounters programme (perhaps with some flagship adventures) and tie the store-based weekly sessions into a larger campaign for players who want to play more often.

The reduction in the amount of time combat tends to take compared with 3e and 4e can help here. Has anyone tried converting an LG or LFR adventure to Next, and seen what sort of session it fits best into?

 

[Alphastream]

The reduction in the amount of time combat tends to take compared with 3e and 4e can help here. Has anyone tried converting an LG or LFR adventure to Next, and seen what sort of session it fits best into?

At Winter Fantasy this year two LG Core Special adventures were converted to Next. The adventures ran really well and a bit faster than the 3E versions. But, players also tend to spend more time on fun exploration and RP, so it isn't as stark a contrast (even with dungeon delves, which these were).

It can be hard to compare. There was that Gen Con LFR special that let PCs 'delve' around but really their job was to get through the maze and to the end. Players did get through far more rooms than usual because they knew it was a goal.

 

[Warunsun]

I think part of what made LG work is the number of regions that existed and the investment in your home region's storylines while also having the ability to travel out of region for the truly dedicated in order to get more play experiences. Though, as was mentioned above, this often created an insular campaign where if you weren't one of the people who traveled regularly and showed up to play every week at your local gaming store that it could seem kind of daunting to even start playing.

I think there is even more to it. Living Greyhawk was created through the efforts of the RPGA Network with a huge amount of volunteer support and a healthy club organization. Since Wizards of the Coast has chose to totally shutdown the RPGA Network your not going to get another campaign like it or even approaching it.

 

[Alphastream]

That's a bit unfair. Realistically, LG was more than a bit insane for Wizards. They had practically no control over what any region did. Regions could create almost no experience at all, or they might create sub-rules for how PCs could own property, throw online in-character parties, and let player in-character posts on forums drive region-changing events. That might be okay, until you couple that with what many new players would say: I can't make heads or tails of how to get started in this campaign, there is so much lore I'll never measure up to other PCs, I as a player can't get invited to these special events or if I do I am told I am doing it wrong, my region's admins seem to make special exceptions for people they know, etc. Administratively, it was a trainwreck. The Circle couldn't keep up with the work each region produced, couldn't accurately learn from what each region did, and couldn't provide the necessary help many regions wanted. From a corporate perspective, there was no way the company could shape the program properly to reflect new product offerings... there was too long a chain of people and too great a delay in communications from one end to the other.

That's really the LG problem. Everything wonderful about it for one player (usually an established player) was bad for someone else (usually a new player or Wizards). It is absolutely necessary that any new campaign try to learn from LG, but also that they change the experience in various ways to improve upon it and lessen the inequity and other issues.

It isn't as if this is a free ride for Wizards. In 2001, the RPGA reported in Polyhedron that it had a budget exceeding $1 million, though they had requested almost twice that budget for 2001). They also shared that the RPGA had never been profitable. Every membership costs about $85 to fulfill. Costs have likely increased, and a recent job posting states the annual budget for all organized play (including Magic) is $6 million. Wizards has to be responsible with that cost and what it does for them, for the community, and for the hobby. There have been many years during which strong voices within Wizards (and TSR) argued for an end to organized play. I'm sure some of that continues. Monte Cook may or may not have been one of them, though his comments here are just one of many threads of thought you hear from time to time arguing against organized play. Another common complaint is that 'giving away' adventures is bad for business. I'm all for organized play being challenged, but in some years it seems internal politics can cloud the benefits rather than sharpen a company's focus.

Will we ever have another program like LG? Nope, and we shouldn't. But, we can hopefully harness much of that magic and add new great things, such that we can have another organized play program that tens to hundreds of thousands will treasure.

When it comes to "shutdown the RPGA Network", I think a lot of that was because the term "RPGA" had a really negative connotation among gamers not already a part of it. I've had several experiences where I was running an RPGA game and someone came up looking for D&D. When they realized it was an RPGA game they left. They wouldn't even give it a chance. I think that perception is starting to change, in part because the name was dropped and became a more generic "organized play", which other companies also offer.

Edit: I don't want to softball this. There are great heroes at Wizards who have kept organized play alive when it could have been ended. And, overall, there is strong support for it right now. But, there have also been huge missteps. One of them was how WotC dropped all promotion of LFR, including having functioning links from the main web site to where players could learn about LFR and order/download adventures. The promotion early on was great, but really disappeared right around the time play and interest dropped. Coincidence? Hard to say, but I believe it was a big factor in LFR's decline. Hopefully WotC learns from these mistakes and from the excellent job Paizo has done constantly promoting its Pathfinder program (likely because they actually sell their organized play adventures).