The Angry GM on D&D Encounters

[Raddu]

... When I say that the big thing I want to see change is how communication happens rather than the specific rules, and the answer I get is that the rules can't be changed except in specific windows, my faith that communication can or will be improved takes a marked downturn.

What would your ideal communication from the league look like?

 

[Pauper]

The FAQ needs sections on both organization (who is responsible for what, who can do what, how one goes about doing things) and gameplay (including common rules mistakes).

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-GM-on-D-amp-D-Encounters/page7#ixzz3nvCnSXhO

I'm not sure the admins want to get into the business of dealing with game rules (as opposed to the rules of the campaign, such as what books you can use to build your character).

Though I suspect they could find someone to do that, if they asked nicely. ; )

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

What would your ideal communication from the league look like?

I'm not entirely sure. I do know that it would be clear, concise, and rely heavily on FAQs and establishing a shared vocabulary.

I'm not sure the admins want to get into the business of dealing with game rules (as opposed to the rules of the campaign, such as what books you can use to build your character).

Though I suspect they could find someone to do that, if they asked nicely. ; )

They're in that business already. When they banned house rules and required that everything follow the written adventures, season guides, and PHB, with very limited DMG material, they got themselves into the business of making sure the rules are standard - the the game is played basically the same way in Melbourne, Buffalo, and Tacoma. That means defining what that way is, and communicating it to players and DMs.

 

[Inconnunom]

The past few days have been a good example about how the organization isn't being managed as well as it could/should be. A post on the facebook group talked about what DMs rolled on their blank cert only to have AL admins interject and say there is no rolling. The DMs point out the cert tells them to roll. AL tells them that AL makes the rules, not WotC. DMs frustrated because they have to go take back items they gave to players and tell them they get nothing until AL figures out what they are going to get instead. AL immediately posts an addendum to tell the DMs what items they get. Some exceptionally frustrated DMs express well written and poignant disapproval. Post gets locked and nobody can say anything about it anymore.

It really just underscores the lack of coordination between AL and WotC. AL is great because it provides a venue for new people to learn and get involved in D&D. And AL is terrible because their DM/player relations are abysmal. Across 6 or 7 stores, I have seen a score or so of players continue to play D&D except drop AL rules (about a quarter). Roughly another quarter of the players/DMs just fill out the log sheets to make stuff look legal for when they go to Cons. I say all these things as both a weekend DM and a weekday player who strictly sticks to the AL rules. I only say these things because I do care and while I don't have solutions, I hope things get better.

 

[Steve_MND]

It really just underscores the lack of coordination between AL and WotC.

Agreed. You simply can't have an organization like this being run by an absentee landlord, and not expect a lot of problems to crop up. You either need to have the people running the campaign have the ability to make decisions for the campaign, or else you need to have the people that make decisions for it be the ones running it. Right now, it is a sluggish combination of the two, and they are working at cross-purposes.

 

[Pauper]

They're in that business already. When they banned house rules and required that everything follow the written adventures, season guides, and PHB, with very limited DMG material, they got themselves into the business of making sure the rules are standard - the the game is played basically the same way in Melbourne, Buffalo, and Tacoma. That means defining what that way is, and communicating it to players and DMs.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret -- that whole 'consistent rules' thing? Nobody really wants that.

The reason I say so is that every role in the AL, from Local Coordinator all the way up to WotC staffer, has been referred to as not being the 'rules police' for Adventurers League. The only person in AL who has any responsibility for enforcing the AL rules, or the D&D rules for that matter, is the DM, though it's assumed that a store organizer/owner can refuse to seat a DM if the DM veers too far afield of what's considered 'standard rulings'. But even that determination is made by what the store owner/organizer considers 'standard' -- nobody in AL shows up to confirm that the organizer's 'standard' matches anything resembling an AL 'standard'. Heck, the only person who has the ability to check a log sheet to ensure that a character played at another table was following AL rules is the DM at the player's current table, and even then the current DM doesn't have the authority to undo what was done at the other table, only to disallow certain things from her own table if she chooses to do so.

Now when I say it this way, it sounds pretty bad, I admit. But look on the opposite side of the coin -- a system where rules enforcement was very high would look very different. Local Coordinators would be spending a lot more time visiting stores, and would primarly be looking to audit DMs and player logsheets, not helping organize play and connecting venues and DMs. Regional Coordinators would be glorified sales managers, passing along the latest rules announcements to their LCs for them to dutifully take into the field. Instead of writing and editing adventures, volunteer admins would be responding on various social media sites with rulings for increasingly corner-case scenarios, to ensure that every table resolves those corner-cases the same way. With all the additional time requirements associated with high rules-enforcement, you either vastly increase the volunteer administrative staff, making the system even more monolithic and difficult to change, or you burn out the existing staff, causing rapid and disruptive turnover and an absence of institutional memory, increasing the likelihood (heck, guaranteeing the likelihood) that the same problems end up causing the same issues and get re-solved over and over again in slightly different and frustrating ways.

Given this, I'm not convinced a hypothetical high-enforcement rules regime would actually improve the Organized Play campaign; any minor improvement created by stopping the vast minority of players who insist on trying to game the system is lost in the degradation of the campaign's ability to fulfill its basic function -- get adventures into the hands of stores so DMs can entertain players. That's not to say the current system couldn't stand a bit of improving, and I for one am curious to see if the 'big changes' coming for Season 4 or 5 have the desired impact. I'm just not expecting to see any massive influx of resources or any fundamental change in the structure of the campaign.

--
Pauper

 

[skerritthegreen]

I'm just not expecting to see any massive influx of resources or any fundamental change in the structure of the campaign.

I hope you will be pleasantly surprised.

 

[Steve_MND]

I'm going to let you in on a little secret -- that whole 'consistent rules' thing? Nobody really wants that.

I disagree. In fact, I disagree most emphatically.

The whole point behind Organized Play is the idea that you can participate in it wherever you are. You can grab your character from your home in New York, where you play AL with friends in your local game store, and then be able to sit down at another game store when you're on a two-day stopover in Chicago or something, or a convention you visit, or when you're out visiting the inlaws in Seattle.

And the only way that works is by having consistent rules. Not necessarily ad-hoc rulings mind you, which are always going to pop up and vary from DM to DM. But consistent rules are the heartbeat of any Organized Play campaign.

And your doomsday scenario of how a top-down approach might work I think is a bit draconic in your speculation. In fact, I would imagine we'd have a lot less muddling about and a far more streamlined of a situation than we have now. Right now, we have very few actual official rules (in the form of the various AL PDFs and the official errata sheet), but hundreds upon hundreds of potential unofficial rulings (in the form of Sage Advice tweets, forums threads, facebook posts, coordinator tweets, etc.), that a DM might or might not go with, depending on their own preferences. And that's assuming one can even find them all out there to begin with.

Having a top-down "let the people running the game make official rulings if they are needed" setup I think would help immensely. You'd have one singular spot where DMs need to review all the possible rulings that the campaign staff feel is necessary to ensure that consistent play experience, and leave the rest to the DMs to deal with at the table. I think that would make things easier, smoother and simpler. And it only needs to be as detailed and comprehensive as the staff feels it necessary to have.

And here's my dirty little secret as well -- the whole Regional Coordinators/Local Coordinators thing? Totally unneeded to actually run an Organized Play Campaign. Plenty of OP campaigns have been run in the past without them. They are needed (so to speak) here, because AL is a marketing campaign as much as a gaming campaign, so they functionally act in the same role as sales reps for the various stores. But they don't need to be there to help run the campaign, and they don't need to be involved in the dissemination or enforcing of the rules, either.

 

[Pauper]

I hope you will be pleasantly surprised.

You have piqued my interest, sir, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. : )

Seriously, though, this does make me more curious to see what is going to be announced.

--
Pauper

 

[skerritthegreen]

And here's my dirty little secret as well -- the whole Regional Coordinators/Local Coordinators thing? Totally unneeded to actually run an Organized Play Campaign. Plenty of OP campaigns have been run in the past without them. They are needed (so to speak) here, because AL is a marketing campaign as much as a gaming campaign, so they functionally act in the same role as sales reps for the various stores. But they don't need to be there to help run the campaign, and they don't need to be involved in the dissemination or enforcing of the rules, either.

I would say that you are nearly correct. They are not needed to run games/cons. They are however very helpful getting the word out, monitoring various social media outlets, helping to edit rules documents, and write various campaign handouts (like the pre-gens). They are however, also very important to the marketing which is why they exist and I don't think its intended to be a secret.