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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6724497" data-attributes="member: 17607">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</blockquote>

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