5e, Organized Play, and You - Part 1
Last year I wrote a short article going over some of the changes from the last season of the Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League (AL) program to Season 8, which has been up and going now for the last year or so. Some of the changes were pretty radical, and some less radical than the otherwise seemed.
Looking back now, it seems clear that the changes were not particularly well received, and likely hurt the AL player base numbers, though that can be hard to quantify.
It's been fairly obvious changes were coming to the program. Fifth Edition (5e) has been out for about 5 years now, and both players and designers have learned a lot about the system, and where changes and tweaks might make sense. We saw this with the publication of Xanathar's Guide to Everything (XGtE), which contained proposed Shared Campaign rules for an organized play system. Most of the Season 8 changes to the AL reflected those ideas, if modified a little.
Long Live the King
The 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been a real boon to the hobby, and its a great rules system. D&D is perhaps the most popular it has ever been, and a lot of that comes back to the design of the system itself. 5e learned the lessons of prior editions, both positive and negative, and distilled them into a highly polished, highly accessible, and highly fun game. In a series of tweets, D&D Lead Mike Mearls talked about how the game is focused on player fun, with balance a secondary concern that is left to the DM; it worked.Wizards of the Coast came to a very important set of realizations when designing 5e, which are reflected in its design:
- Most games take place in the ranges of levels 1 to ~11
- Higher level play balance is far more dependent on the DM and the group composition than on the underlying rules.
The game is designed with this in mind, as can be seen from the advancement curves per level. Levels 1 through 3 advance quite quickly, then advancement slows for levels 3-10. Following 10, advancement rates actually speed back up a bit until max level is reached. This can be seen, graphically, if you look at the average number of encounters the system is designed for players to have before advancing at each level.
The King has Laws...
When you look at organized play, one can see there this can pose a problem. Whereas core D&D 5e focuses on the lower 1/2 of the levels, and lets balance drift from group to group (the correct design decision from my perspective), the Adventurers League (AL) doesn't have that luxury. Organized Play sets out to present a uniform experience at every table played at, at least, as much of one as possible, and those inherently good system design decisions pose a challenge for something that relies on a degree of standardization.
Further complicating that challenge is the AL's relationship to WotC. D&D, as a business, still relies on its customer base buying each new product as its released. Thus, it makes business sense to tie each AL "Season" into the release of the new story-lines. It would be crazy not to, really, from a product perspective. These adventures, though, are not written with AL in mind (and often, don't necessarily seem to be written with 5e's design basis in mind), making integration and balance for Organized Play even more difficult. A lot of the prior season's balance and gold issues came from the hardcover books.
The AL has tried to address these issues over the years in several different ways. Most recently, a modified version of the the previously mentioned Shared Campaign rules from XGtE were implemented to promote broader play styles, and to balance and standardize player power levels. Gold and magic items were a bit out of hand in Seasons 1 through 7, so an effort to reign that in seemed reasonable.
...But the Legal Code is Byzantine
The effect was a mixed bag. While the format changes to AL mods and advancement tied to objectives and time played did bring about rewards for a less combat focus play style, the magic item "unlocks," where magic items are no longer found, but blueprinted and later unlocked with accumulated Treasure Points, has caused some confusion. At current time, it is not uncommon to require 4 different documents to be open to properly assign magic items. This is less than ideal.
Additionally, at the various cons I run AL at, and the various places around the world I have been lucky enough to play and run at, the response to the gold change was even more negatively received than I expected. The reduction in amount soured some, but it seems to be the removal of gold during the mod's that irk many players, particularly new ones that are already struggling to get a handle on the swath of documentation needed to play AL.
In essence, the issue there boils down to verisimilitude. Experience Points (XP) were already an abstract item, so changing XP to Advancement Checkpoints was going from one abstraction to another. Magic Items became a little abstracted with the unlocking and later purchase, but they still eventually would enter into the actual game as an object dictated by the players' actions (playing the mods that unlocked them). Gold, on the other hand, was concrete. If you found 5g in the mod, your character found 5g, that was that. By tying gold to a fixed amount per level, and restricting its issuance to level up, it has largely been abstracted in a setting where it is not an abstract item. This is also not good.
"Please File Form 1099-DKP"
The above stolen from Sly Flourish, but I found it too hilarious to pass up. One of his (and others) chief complaints, or sources of confusion, maybe more accurately, was the increasing complexity of a system that that should be designed to facilitate new player engagement. This looks to continue with the release of Season 9 of the AL this fall.
In Dragon Mag, new changes to the AL for season 9 have been detailed. The focus of these changes is to bring focus onto creating new characters to play in each story line season. The business driver there is obvious, and sound. In essence, older characters can still play, but they can't gain the specific magic items unlocks and story rewards of new seasons. This is relatively minor, but, as my wife pointed out, for her, being able to play AL quite infrequently, she will never be able to get the most out of higher level content, as she will never be able to advance from 1 to X in a single season. Its a valid complaint, and she's far from the only one who will run into this. DM's, in particular those who almost always run but don't get to play as often, may be burned by this change.
In addition, a new race will be available for Season 9 characters to further entice new character creation. I don't mind the concept of this, or the idea of driving players to new content. Certain racial variants for tieflings and aasimar will allow changes to characters once they hit level 5. Taken together with the other changes and existing rules for the AL, I can't help but wonder if this will add to an already complicated paperwork and administrative burden on players. It will be interesting to see if the benefits outweigh the cons, but given the general response of the player base to Season 8, I imagine it will not. Time will tell.
Legal Reform
I am a huge proponent of the Adventurers League, and have been running games and playing in Organized Play of one form or another for almost the whole time I've been playing D&D. I think it is a great thing to have, particularly for attracting new people to the game (at least, it should be). I do think, however, that it can be improved significantly from where it stands today.
To that end, as the title to this implies, and rather than present only problems with not solution, I am also working on a Part 2 to this musing with some suggested changes, and general philosophical discussion, on Organized Play for 5e.
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