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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 ar
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D&D 5e: Organized Play and the Design of the System

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. Lo

On Changes to the Adventurers League in S8

Big Changes to the AL With the Season 8 changes to the Adventurers League about a month away as of writing, the various Facebook groups, Google+ groups (still a thing apparently), and twitter folk have been abuzz, both positive and negative, with regards to the fairly large change in structure in the AL. Going from the traditional XP and gold system to the Checkpoint and Treasure Point method introduced in Xanathar's Guide to everything was, unsurprisingly, met with surprise, and strong emotions. I think some of these changes are good, and others not so good, but before getting too far into that, I think it is useful to have as much information as possible, and with that in mind I dug through the surface layer of data available for the AL as it exists today, and compared it to the proposed system. For some consistency, the data is based on a 5 player party (not inclusive of DM), playing at the target AL Average Party Level (APL) for mods in each tier, each mod being 4 h