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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6717679" data-attributes="member: 17607">I had to chuckle a bit here because reading the 'official' response from Kalani might suggest that Angry is just ranting about a program he doesn't really understand. The irony is that Angry is writing his rant from the perspective of someone running the program in a store (or what Adventurers League refers to as a 'store organizer'). His observations are likely to be exactly the same as any thoughtful DM who finds out about Adventurers League and convinces his local store owner to let him try running it to bring in more business.(As an aside, it also points out why I've never been eager to get involved in the official structure of the Adventurers League -- when you join an organization, that organization becomes part of your 'tribe', and your perspective shifts. You may think you're still as critical and objective as you were before you joined, but, like Kalani, you tend to begin responding to criticism not based on the actual content of the criticism, but rather based on the degree you feel that criticism hurts your 'tribe'. You might even find yourself willing to misrepresent your critic's points to deflect what you feel is hurtful criticism, but is really just a good sharp whack with the truth-stick. Cases in point follow.)Angry doesn't say that every Encounters season ends on a cliffhanger -- he says:"You might wonder what happens when you finish chapter three of the Out of the Abyss adventure. Well, it ends on a cliffhanger."And it absolutely does. Kalani herself even says so:Interestingly, Kalani doesn't restrict herself to just talking about Out of the Abyss, implying that every DDEN PDF ends with a cliffhanger, which just makes Angry's point for him:"But what does the Organized Play Guide suggest you do in your store when you finish the Encounters season? It very strongly suggests your GM buy the full version of Out of the Abyss to continue the fun.That’s right. The first three chapters are free. Then it’ll cost your GM or your store $50. Or else you get to say to the players 'Sorry, guys, you don’t get to know how it comes out unless we can pool our cash and buy the book.'"That seems to suggest that Encounters are intended for new and/or inexperienced D&D players, or at least players inexperienced with the Organized Play program. Strangely, this isn't in conflict with the mission of Encounters as Angry finds it:"Now, I support the mission of the Encounters program. Give new and inexperienced players a chance to see D&D. Give them a regular play experience that allows them to transition to other games or just have some weekly fun for two hours. But that requires a pretty specific type of product."Angry's point is that the product he's given doesn't fit the mission he's been given. It's as if Angry's colonel wanted Angry's squad to take an enemy machine-gun nest, but authorized only a toaster oven as equipment, because a toaster oven is what the colonel has access to.Kalani's next point isn't wrong:But how is an isolated store organizer supposed to know that? What should be happening is that the local coordinator, in a routine canvas of the stores in her local area, should happen upon this organizer with a problem -- we've got a core group of players who like playing the game, but are frustrated at having to re-start from level 1 every new season. The local coordinator should then respond, "Hey, sounds like you've got a perfect group to start D&D Expeditions! Here's how to coordinate with your store owner to get access to the Expeditions adventures; you can run a table of that right alongside your regular Encounters game for the casual and drop-in players you get on Wednesday night if you want!"I'd be willing to bet, though, that Angry has no idea who his local coordinator is. I know I sure don't. I realize that AL doesn't want to burn out coordinators by requiring them to do more work than they're willing to sign up for, but this seems like a pretty fundamental function for AL to work. It shouldn't be something that's left to store organizers to figure out on their own, especially when WotC maintains a <a href="http://locator.wizards.com/#brand=dnd" target="_blank">nice searchable public database</a> of all the stores who report running D&D Encounters on their website. A local coordinator should, at least twice a month, visit a store in her region that's running Encounters just to 'check in'. Is the store ready to incorporate Expeditions? Do folks at the store plan to visit a convention and want to know how their characters port over for those games? Are folks hoping to get some Adventurers League running at their own local convention and need a little help getting pointed toward useful resources? Do they just need an extra DM for the night to incorporate a larger-than-normal turnout?True story: I went to a game store in Milwaukee some months ago to get in some AL play. There were about a dozen people waiting to play, but no DMs showed up. If the LC had walked in the door and offered to take the half-dozen people who hadn't played before and run them through a couple of scenarios from one of the DDEX x-1 adventures, she'd have been the most popular person in the store.Of course, the other advantage of not being inside the organization is that I can take whatever tone I choose -- Angry can go hyperbolic (though in this case, he's not nearly as hyperbolic as claimed; he spends pretty much the entire first half of the rant qualifying that he's a fan of WotC and D&D -- heck, he wouldn't be trying to organize AL if he wasn't!) and he doesn't have to worry about tarnishing the reputation of the organization he's representing, because he's only representing himself. Folks inside the AL need to take more care -- exaggerating or outright misrepresenting criticism suggests that not just the person responding but the whole organization takes criticism badly, or at least won't take it seriously.And as to the criticism that WotC's direction with Encounters is cheap and/or lazy? The very fact that we're having this conversation on an ENWorld AL forum and not on WotC's own forums speaks to that point as well. It may not be entirely WotC's fault that Encounters is a program that looks like it's trying to get by on the cheap, especially when compared to the usually high-quality adventures offered by the other arms of the Adventurers League program, but at the very least they should own the criticism and either explain why things appear that way, or do something to change the underlying reality of an increasingly common perception.--Pauper</blockquote>

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