The Crapification of Organized Play - Unavoidable?

[pemerton]

I'm going to show my age here and say that WotC ruined organized play when they started Living Greyhawk in 2000. Before that, you had tournament play with premade characters build for the module.

It was great. You got to play in highly themed parties that you wouldn't get in a home campaign (an afternoon of all pirates, all barbarians, all halflings or all whatever) and, with disposable characters, players focused on the role-playing aspects of the game instead of the character advancing aspects of the game. Just as importantly, because the characters were built with the module, you got to play an adventure that was actually about the PCs.

Plus, it was an advancement tournament, so once you got past the first round, the other advancing players were really, really, fun.

I have no view on or experience of LG, and will defer to Erik Mona's explanation.

I've also never played an "advancement" tournament. All the convention tournaments I played scored teams against teams based on everyone playing through all the rounds.

But I agree that that sort of play was fun (although I never played a good D&D tournament in that style - the good games I remember were mostly freeform or Chaosium). It's a long time since I've been to a convention (as in 15+ years), and I'm surprised to hear that it's fallen out of favour.

 

[qstor]

Organized play certainly has its negatives in my opinion. The necessary rigidity of it is the biggest problem for me. With that said, I still participate in organized play games at cons and such. This is largely due to it does provide a somewhat consistent play experience. If I sign up for a Con game through an organized play system I can be pretty sure there will be a GM there and I will get to play.

I agree but sometimes the quality of the GM's vary.

I wanted to respond to BoneMote by saying you said you've played? Have you ever GM'd, ran a convention or written a module? I've done all three several times for each mostly LG and PFS but I've DM'd LFR twice. Giving back to the organized play community helps you fix what mistakes you think its making. I'd recommend volunteering to change LFR or Pathfinder Society in your area to help improve it instead of just complaining. If no one acts to fix stuff then nothing will change about the quality of play. And remember the vast numbers of people in the organized play community are volunteers. So they're working for free! Instead of complaining about them try and stand in their shoes for once. If you don't like it, after writing a module or DMing a 100 mods then more power to you, when you complain! *gets off soapbox*

Mike

 

[qstor]

Huh, I guess I should go read up on organized play. Cause I'm not really seeing why someone would complain about that in particular as if it is so much different than a DM just running the same adventure at home.

I think one of the first times I played 3e, I had a DM that changed the rules as she went along. I said like three times during a session "no in 3e its this" and her reply was well its my game and its "blank" at the beginning of the session she said it was 3e. Mind you I don't have an issue with resaonable house rules but she didnt say that they were like a punch against a 1st level character from a patron in a bar doing 1d10 in damage.

So yeah for me the expereinces can be radical...

Mike

 

[Guillaume]

At least in PFS and LFR, the normal lethality level isn't all that high in general (although there are definitely exceptions). Its fairly rare for a character to die unless the player makes a mistake.

That may be the case, but before I went on hiatus on PFS for personal reasons, I played through years 0 through part of year 2. During that time I lost two character to death. That is more than what I get in my usual home games. Mind you I lost both of them to the same GM... That might be part of the "problem"