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D&D Adventurers League Player & DM Pack |
This product is no longer available from DriveThruRPG.com |
Average Rating:3.6 / 5 |
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Dear Wizards of the coast,
Thank you for turning a system that anyone can pick up and easily understand into a mess. The exp, gold, downtime, and renown were so easy for most people to get that even brand new players could pick it up quickly. Why you ask was the old system so easy to use? Because experience points and getting gold is so ingrained into today’s culture. You see it in every game, movies, and tv shows. It’s in book and comics. This system is so old that even non-gaming people understand it. Now this easy to understand system is being replaced by a mess. This new system is nowhere near as intuitive as the old xp system. This is a system that places are strait up going to ignore season 8 changes and continue with season 7 system.
If I may offer my humble suggestion, even though you probably won’t read this. Give players the option of either system. Have this new system be optional for Adventures league. There are going to be places that like this and places that don’t. Wizards, originally you had it so that adventures couldn’t get gold from adventuring. This was right before a book about a heist to get GOLD was about to come out. This seemed like a troll move and very disrespectful to your players. Making such huge changes as optional would allow for a better playing experience for all members of the Adventure League Community.
Sincerely,
A well intentioned Adventure League Player
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A rules changes which invalidates past efforts for gamers and takes items from their characters that they were thought to have truly already earned.
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The Season 8 rule set breaks immersion of D&D and creates a system where players and dm's who don't know each other have to try and build a narative around how they all found the same item the BBEG was holding. Also the explination of how chests are now filled to the brim with gold they can't keep and how they need the WotC dmg to figure out how to unlock and trade items. If this is the direction AL is travelling in it's hard to see how it will continue as it makes it much harder for casual DM's and players to get into the system. If the season 8 content doesn't deliver and provide a fun experience they may have killed all the momentum D&D has gained in the last year via streaming outlets and such.
At least the XP to checkpoints fast tracks you to level 20 if you wish.
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Don't like the gold amount awarded, it should be more of a progression, not a huge jump at Tier 4. i.e. 100 - 500 - 2000 - 5000.
ACP is fine, TP is fine. allows everyone acces to Magic Items... the idea of having to keep track of unlocked magic items is not a simplification, and it is a lot more work for the player. Also having to keep track of the table the item is from for trading is a hassle. The idea of not being able to save TP from lower tiers in order to use them in higher tiers doesn't make sense imo, it forces you to spend them, which i dont' like, i want to the freedom to choose.
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Hi wizards. I host games five days out of every week. 50% of those games are AL. None of the 60 odd people in my play group are looking forward to the changes to how gold is accumulated. We are all very disappointed with how AL is going to look. Not receiving gold by roleplaying or discovery COMPLETELY breaks immersion. When a player sees a fire breathing dragon, they are reminded they are a part of a beautiful world, a shared story told by their friends and composed of imagination. When they pick up a gold piece and it vanishes, they are reminded they are in a game. And that nothing they do matters. The whole thing falls apart.
PLEASE reconsider these drastic, UNFRIENDLY changes before it is too late.
Thanks to years of devotion by fans, and media like stranger things, dungeons and dragons has a cultural presence that makes sitting down and playing feel familiar, even for new players.
These changes make the game UNRECOGNIZABLE.
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There are noble goals with the redesign of the rules of Adventurer's League Season 8.
However, the implementation is clumbsy and cost of the changes is perhaps too high.
First Advancement Points instead of traditional Experience Points: Moving to a simplier advancement system allows DMs and players to save bookeeping, and allows awarding advancement without direct combat much easier to implement. Furthermore, simplifying it do be a standard removes the strange occurances with small or large parties sometimes not following the leveling rate. The only downside to this is that it is completely new to AL. A player who has read through the Core 3 books will have no idea where this has come from.
Treasure Points: Again, a goal of making sure everyone gets a fair shake at treasure, and there wouldn't be huge imbalances between players. AND it prevents player friction over limited items. That said, the fact it completely breaks immersion in older modules and again adds a complexity to rules of checking a few other tables rather than simply picking up the item and figuring out who gets it.
Removal of Factions: Factions were underrepresented and felt tacked on. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater is probably not the best solution.
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At its core, I've always felt that DnD is a cooperative story between players and a DM; any time a group of players and their DM is enjoying themselves, it is good DnD. However, I feel this rule update for season 8 runs entirely contradictory to this fundamental concept. Instead of empowering DMs to handle more and different types of players, players were just pulled down and in some cases left feelling like the way they wanted to play wasn't a valid way to play DnD. I will not play in a system that doesn't allow isolated groups to play however they want.
The removal of many items, story effects, and faction interactions in this rule update also heavily hits many old characters. Drastically affecting old characters like this heavily undermines the integrity of a system supposed to be based on character portability. What is the point of being able to take your character anywhere, when its not even the same character anymore? As an example, I had a character with the Dark Gift making you blind, I had a lot of fun RPing the issues raised by his blindness and how the blindsight wasn't a perfect fix. That aspect of the character is completely ruined.
Additionally, the update to using the treasure point system seems far more complex than just keeping track of XP and Gold separately and resolving treasure at the end of the module. In fact, not getting treasure at the end of a module really waters down the feel of DnD; one of the core motivations of adventurers has always been wealth. Now most player characters will not accumulate gold in any meaningful way. Instead of adding great gold sinks like property, stylized gear, or widely available special pets/familiars/mounts, the amount of gold received was heavily nerfed. Furthermore, I have to question what the point of removing story effects like the Amber Temple is when insanely powerful magic items like Staff of the Magi are readily available?
I read somewhere that many of these changes are being pushed because community perception of AL is that it is heavily combat and treasure focussed. I don't see these new rules changing anything about that. The reason AL has been about combat is because the rules of DnD and the stories in AL are focussed on combat. These rule changes will not affect that. "Removal" of factions is probably detrimental here actually because its one less long-term story element for players to interact with. The reason AL has been about treasure is because treasure was easy to get. Again, magic items aren't harder to get under this system. In fact, its easier now to get better magic items because everyone who passes an item and unlocks it can purchase the item. Players just have less gold, which just feels bad and puts the focus on magic items instead of mundane.
All in all, it seems to me that whoever updated these rules was completely out of touch with AL and did not at all consider the root cause of problems. So while a handful of changes here are nice or necessary, most of the changes seem to miss the mark completely to me and I will be looking into options other than AL for this season.
edit: I was also very dissatisfied with the way this rules release was handled. We were told over and over that we were being listened to, but in the end every revison of the rules was worse and worse.
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I just spent 4 days straight playing with the new rules and I can definitely say that they are not a good change. Old players were often confused and new players were constantly confused. The admins have made comments about certain things that do not appear anywhere in any of these documents.
speaking of documents, there was a recent announcement that season 8 was supposed to cut down on the number of documents. It hasn't done that at all it seems.
In my first game of season 8 the new rules also instantly turned tons of smiles and laughs from playing into scowls from not receiving any tangible rewards at the end. These rules actively hindered fun at the table.
The worst thing about these documents, not even counting the rules within is the way information is spread around. To purchase a magic item you must consult three different sources. First you have to check your logsheet, the content catalog, or the ALFAQ to see what items are available for purchase. After that you have to check the Dungeon Masters Guide to find what table the item is on. After that you have to look in the ALPG to see how much items of that particular table cost and if they are even available at your tier. Oh and that second source, the DMG, yeah that book is practically useless to players otherwise. Its my opinion that no player should HAVE to open the DMG yet this season makes it a requirement to get magic items. What really makes it bad that the DMG is now required is the fact that it is a paid book. The complete irrelevance of the majority of the book makes the cost excessive for what players will actually get from it. All of this is done while not even allowing the DMG as an official resource. If it is now so fundamental to AL play the least that could have been done is to make the oathbreaker fully legal. Consolidating these documents to a point that you can find all of the relevant rules to something would be a good start, but that still doesnt address tons of problems that I have already seen come up.
I for one will no longer be buying any adventures for as long as these rules are in affect
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No one in either of my AL groups are happy with the changes to gold, experience points gone... fine, that is a change that makes things easier to track... treasure points and not getting to loot magic itmes or gold... no one was happy wiht this at all. I have played with one of those groups for over 20 years and AL with them the past 2 seasons after I talked them into it... yeah we are going back to homebrew...
I haven't got a chance to play yet in this season but i know that no gold reward makes adventuring not worth the risk reward if i am playing my character(s) correct to thier RP...
Big two thumbs down from this guy.
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At first I promised myself I wouldn't complain too much about the new rules until I tried them, but they are actually far worse than I had previously imagined. The final rollout of rules is so complex that it confused both veteran and new players.
Things I realized just in my first session:
- There are now 9 different kinds of currencies that players have to keep track of, none of which actually exist in the narrative of the game (DT, ACP, Renown, Secret Missions, Gold, Tier 1 TP, Tier 2 TP, Tier 3 TP, Tier 4 TP).
- New players have to spend $50 on a DMG if they want to use magic items.
- The Content Guide is a mess of copy-paste that contradicts itself and the season 8 rules.
- DM's have almost no incentive to run non-Season 8 content (I guess it works out, because non-season 8 content is largely unplayable now that the gold rewards have been updated but in-game costs for each module haven't).
Worst of all was the fact that the rules were rolled out with less than a week's notice, and the rules weren't even complete by the time the season started. This mismanagement has really hurt my confidence in AL to the point that I won't be playing anymore, and probably won't even come back if the rules are fixed.
I've cancelled my AL organization's preorders of the new hardcover, and we will just keep running pre-season 8 content with homebrew rules (basically season 7 rules but with checkpoints).
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This is horrible. The new rules completely destroy the foundation of D&D. I can't believe this was released, especially after all of the negative feedback from the community.
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Although I understand the underlining reasoning behind the changes, the inclusion of the Treasure Point system and the removal of gold from adventures is highly problematic in my opinion.
In particular, these changes break immersion, and are highly unintuitive. They discourage role playing and exploration (why open a chest when there is no reason to?). Furthermore, some classes and play styles (wizards, clerics, and heavy armor classes especially) are unfairly penalized by the comparative lack of gold. Likewise, the treasure point system encourages homogeny and powergaming by limiting your magic item choices, resulting in players only choosing the most “useful” items for their build.
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I don't know what to say, this just a hot mess.
- EXP change to AP good, less math, easy to calculate, and promise to make rollplaying more relevant in adventures for season 8, good.
- Everybody can get the magic item... Ok the fix for a problem that hase it place (even if i personaly saw it only once in 2 years of playing in adventure league).
- The lists of magic items you can get access to buy always? good...? At least now you can always grasp youre hand on those +1 weapons before tier 2 where resistances for non magical damage more relevant problem.
And then the bad stuf...
- TP. Everybody can get the magic item... by no one actualy getting it, you unlock it for buying it from random seller who acsepting the Treasure Points ethereal currency that spread out through the Forgotten Realms and cost 50GP per point. Yeay!
- Documents. To understand the new magic item trending and explain it for new player i ned to read, 3 3! separate documents, and after this i still need a DMG to count the cost even for the evergreen items list. WHAT?
- Gold, forget about Wizards this not a problem. Problem is 7 seasons of adventures that use only gold as the hook for the story. But no! We not going to adress this issue. DMs. DMs gonna fix this for us. They gonna work for free on rewriting new reasons for party to go on thoose adventures. And no they they cant use factions even if they strongly involved in the story itself.
Sorry for the sarcasm, i want find the middle ground. but this changes so rushed and laughable, i just can't. I see people leaving the AL, and other staying only becouse this is still easiest way to find a group, not becouse they like what's happening. This new rules need to have extended period of testing and QA. Right now no good change came without huge drawback. This new rules just destroing storybased play for me, they wiped out all that i like in D&D i'm gonna look on adventures for season 8, but if the promises of excited new storytelling is a lie, i'm going to leave to, sorry again.
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I love D&D and appreciate the D&D league. But recent treasure system changes (ignoring all goods and gold which characters can find during the adventure) shatters the immersion and narrative part of the game.
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First off I would like to say that I understand that WOTC was trying to provide these restrictions with the idea that they were helping stop some things that were happening in some stores or at some CONS.
I am in someways a min maxer but tend to not fully do so and ussually have a roleplaying reason to go along with the character allowing them to also take part in some of the social activities as well as a possible test or 2 in addition to combat.
I'm finding most modules are writen with investigation and combat rarely are there skill challenges.
Party skill challenges that allow every party member to feel involved and attempt to contribute can be a lot of fun.
Unfortunately WOTC has modified the rules in a way that they are unfair to players reward wise. in most environments I feel the offenders they are trying to get rid of are policed locally without issue. At CONS and Online is where I see this possibly being a larger issue and honestly I expect to run in to people who find that to be fun for them. I don't stop it from allowing me to roleplay my character. I just tell them you do you and I'll do me. Then we both have fun :)
Addressing things in the way they have been done will drive good GM's and Good players away.
Additionally I was not able to write this review from my mobile phone and had to do it from my computer.
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