Organized Play & You: Part Duex

Organized Play & You: Part Duex

When I worked on my post musing about Organized Play (OP) in 5e and the Adventurers League (AL), I quickly came to the conclusion that it was going to need to be a two-parter. There was simply enough to discuss just on the recent changes during the last year to the program that it made sense to break off the discussion of OP as a concept, and ways to help right the AL ship, a second article, so here we are.

The idea for this came about from the Season 8 Changes to the AL, which were well intention-ed, radical, and not particularly effective in accomplishing their goals. Don't get me wrong, I love the AL, play in it regularly, run games in it at cons and stores all over the world, but it could be better. With that said, here are some suggestions on design topics for organized play, both in general, and in relation to the 5e Adventurers League

Defining Scope

Different OP methods and formats may differ quite significantly in what they are trying to accomplish, and in what ways they do so. Some OP, such as D&D's AL, is geared more towards new player on boarding. Pathfinder Society (PFS) has that element to a lesser extent, but also focuses on longer term story arcs. Living World style and West Marches style games create a shared universe for players, with tangible impacts from the PC's felt by others. There are other styles as well, and they all have a place. Focus should be a goal, however, and determining what an OP system wants to accomplish is important; to broad a set of goals will likely mean none of them get accomplished satisfactorily.

Some questions that need to be answered include:

• What setting/settings are used?
• What level range does the OP system encompass?
• How do players join?
• Are players playing with the same theme, or in the same shared spaces?
• What does the game system the OP is being made for best support?
• What adventures can be played?
• Who is the OP targeting?

There are more questions than these, of course, but answering them helps to bring the scope of an OP system into focus. The last question, in particular, is crucial, as understanding the target audience/customer of the system will influence almost all other decisions made for it.

Adventure Design and Limits

Adventures make up the core of an Organized Play system, in the sense that they form the core content of what participants in that system can play. Therefore, a good OP system needs to have a clearly defined scope of what can and can't go into adventures that can be played under that system. The tendency in many systems has been to focus on what the player's characters can and cannot do, but I think you get a lot more mileage out of codifying the adventures.

To its credit, AL does have a both a pretty good guidelines document for both adventure templates (at least with regards to consistency) and content. Its important to give authors who may be working in an OP system clear guidelines to what they can and cannot include. This provides the rules for what any "official" adventures should look like, should the OP system have them, as well as provide a means for those writing adventures outside the system to align to it, should they wish. Overall, it should be both clear and easy for authors to write adventures that want their adventures to be compatible.

This will also be influenced on the type of TTRPG the OP system is serving. Some games support certain formats better than others (i.e. one shots vs campaigns, hardcover adventures vs modules, et al.), and trying to make one system that covers everything well often ends up diluting the finished product.

Masters, of the Dungeon Variety

Getting people to play in an OP system is, obviously, a major goal, and a major challenge. If games are to be played, both players interested in making use of it, and people willing to run games in it, are needed. The Dungeon Master (DM), Game Master, etc, is going to bear the brunt of the work in ensuring there is an enjoyable experience for players. He has to have a decent understanding of the system rules, the setting, the adventure to be played, and myriad of other items to make sure his players .

OP rules add yet another layer of rules for the DM to learn and understand. To make it attractive for DM's to do so, the rules for them must be clear, concise, and efficient. If the rules become so extensive that they detract from the DM's fun, then it won't matter how many players are interested, as there will be no one to run the game for them.

DM's should be given clear direction into what can and cannot be done in an OP system's games, what the players can and cannot do (although they need to know that as well), and how both player and DM rewards are structured. DM's being the workhorse already, a good incentive system should see them earning rewards at least equal to those of the players. My preference would be slightly better than players; not drastically so, but enough to serve as a strong incentive.

In my experience, there are almost never DM's to match player demand. Many DM's do so out of a love for the game, meeting new players via groups, narrating the character's story, and many other reasons, but giving them even a small extra carrot as a reward for filling the role of the player with the most difficult time at the game is good practice. This also helps them keep up to date with their own characters for when they actually do get to play.

Players Make the (D&D) World Go Round

I have left the section on players here for last, but that by no means indicates they are unimportant to the design of an Organized Play system. It's tough to peg any one aspect in this post as the "most important," but without players there is quite literally no game to be played. They need a reason to want to come to games set in an OP system, and to continue to play games in it.

One lingering (and now, growing) criticism with the AL is the administrative aspect of the the character rewards management. This is a valid concern, and is reflected in a lot of feedback seen in discussion between members of the AL DM community. OP player rewards and tracking should be as simple and concise as possible. Most TTRPG's have a decent amount of paperwork built into them in the form of character sheets.

As we have seen is certain seasons of the AL, there are sometimes extra effects to track that are related to the current setting of the adventures being played. Those are okay to do, as long as they don't stack or overlap, and I've no issue with the idea of seasonal content, as long as it doesn't impede any of the tenets laid out above.

All OP will involve some amount of extra work, unless it is the only method of playing a particular game, but keeping said extra work to a minimum is paramount to attract and keep new players.

What's a g(AL) to Do?

These days D&D 5e is my primary system, and I both run and play quite a lot of Adventurers League with The Role Initiative, everywhere from home, schools, and conventions large and small. The AL has made significant changes in the last two seasons, and while the changes actually shake out to be not all that different, mechanically, from the way things were before, they were nonetheless not well received.

DM's expressed annoyance at having to learn (and, often, be prepared to teach) another new set of rules to players entering the AL, while learning a brand new adventure format. Players were annoyed at the complexity the 'simplification' of the AL had led too, and just about everyone was annoyed by the general lower quality of the mods (they are averaging a full star lower than other seasons).

Most of the changes were made with laudable intent, and can still be worked into a more successful, or at least more well received, OP system.

Advancement

Advancement Check Points were swapped for XP to better allow DM's the ability to reward groups that effectively completed missions without using combat. In that sense, it was a very positive and effective change. One issue that appears to be causing confusion is the nature of how they are accumulated.

XP was a straightforward cumulative increase that clearly delineated when new levels are reached. I would recommend developing an easy level/ACP chart, and making them cumulative as well; i.e. Level 3 is reached at 8 Advancement Checkpoints, not the second time a character accumulates 4.

Gold

The amount of gold in the AL has been drastically reduced compared to previous seasons. This was speculated (and reliably) to be due to certain folks at the AL and WotC encountering healing potion bandoleers for the first time at a major convention. What this basically refers to is that characters were so rich, with nothing to spend money on, that they could bring hundreds of healing potions to adventures, negating any (healing) need for rests or spells.

While the lack of comparative gold was complained about, what turned out to be more problematic was the tying of gold to leveling up, and its complete absence in adventures. This led to immersion being broken, and a good deal of confusion among players, particularly new ones. XP becoming ACP was an abstraction becoming a new abstraction, and so if fairly easy to rationalize. Gold, on the other hand, is concrete within the game world, and that becoming an abstraction turned out to be a much larger issue than I initially anticipated.

Going forward, the easy solution here is to slightly increase gold and to award it with ACP, not at level up.

Items and Treasure

The AL did have a very real magic item saturation problem, caused both by every adventure awarding a magic item (not particularly in line with the 5e design basis laid out in the Dungeon Masters Guide) and hardcovers not being written for AL, Storm King's Thunder causing the most issues with its veritable bonanza of powerful items.

The solution was to "unlock" magic items for later purchase by Treasure Checkpoints. As it turns out, this mainly prevents early accumulation of magic items, though total numbers are actually very similar to previous seasons. Adding a layer of both bookkeeping and confusion, TP's are also tiered, restricting their use.

As the cherry on top of a well intention-ed but poorly implemented solution, the cost of items, where they were found by a player, which ones were valid, and what magic item table each is own can often require four different books/documents to be open to assign. As joked about by SlyFlourish, this basically feels like doing your taxes, filling out form 1099-DKP.

To correct this, I would propose something along the lines of getting rid of TP completely, and simply allowing a character to assign an item they have seen to their characters at specific level ups. In addition, I would restrict the number of magic items a character can bring to an adventure, based on Tier. This, combined with the built in limitations of magic item Atunement in 5e, would both simplify dealing with them and prevent legacy item-rich characters from being the star of every module.

DM Rewards

This section will be short, as I feel its both a simple fix, and one I don't have the space for in this article: Scrap them and start again. DM's are almost always the limiting factor on how many people can play at a location or event, and an OP system should drive as many people into that role as it can (which, incidentally, also can help with more people buying more of the system's books).

DM rewards should be such that they at least equal to, but preferably better than, player rewards. Behavioral incentives are important.

Formatting

Season 8 of the Adventurers League also introduced a new format to its adventures. Sections were more condensed, box text was removed (probably a mistake), and a focus on being able to approach any encounter from any of the three "pillars" of D&D (combat, roleplay, and exploration) was added to each encounter. The latter part is a great idea, but the actual format itself still needs work.

Perhaps it was just struggling to work with the new format, and, being honest, AL adventures have always had a reputation for poor editing, but the Season 8 adventures are quite widely panned. Given the quality of some of their authors' other works, it would probably be a good idea to work with the authors to get feedback that will help them moving forward.

This has been indicated to be in process already, so my only other suggestion would be to dedicate more resources to editing, as this is the longest standing criticism of the AL.

Part Tres? 

Hopefully you found the topic of AL, and the previous article on some of the challenges of making one for 5e, interesting. Overall, I feel AL is an important and positive aspect of 5e, but one that could do with a good deal of improvement, perhaps event a full reset.

While at the start of this post I mentioned having to break it into two parts, it turns out even that was insufficient. Following this, stay tuned for a post on an open Organized Play system to be able to be used by multiple systems, settings, and in parallel or in place of others.

Happy Gaming,