Roll Play, THEN Role Play!

Before we dive in to this, beware: I'm a harsh kind of DM. I'm a hardcore Dwarf Fortress fanatic who takes the saying "Losing Is Fun" to heart. I believe in PVP, deadly campaigns, evil PCs, split parties, dungeon crawls, hex crawls, and wargaming. To begin with, I am very much outside of the mainstream when it comes to gaming philosophy. So take my words with a grain of salt, but please take the time to consider what I have to say.

There exists in the gaming hobby a philosophical saying which states, "Roleplay, not roll play!". It is a rebellion against the old-school, "Gygaxian" competitive format of play. It is championed by narrativists who believe story integrity should come first. It is sang by softies who can't have fun the hard way, who get deeply hurt any time they "lose", who think no character should die unless the group agrees on it. The saying is closely related to the sentiment in the Gamer's Manifesto of Whitewolf fame. ("Rules written on paper not stone tablets [...] when dice conflict with the story the story always wins [etc.]")

And yet, as far as I can tell, it is nothing more than an eloquent expression of the Stormwind Fallacy.

This is perfect, except that Superman is a piss-poor character.

Why, pray tell, do these things need to be mutually exclusive at all? Just as it is entirely possible to minmax a PC and still have a great time roleplaying them as a character, I posit it is entirely possible to follow the rules of the game to the letter and still have excellent roleplay- and even a coherent narrative! There is nothing about any game's system which is inherently anathema to roleplay.

An RPG system is (generally speaking) designed to facilitate roleplay. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be an RPG! Now, some admittedly do a better job of that than others, but that's beside the point: they all got into this for the roleplay.

Here's something that might surprise you: between the system and the roleplay, it's the system that is the most fragile. An RPG system cannot really exist in a functional sense without some degree of roleplay, it just becomes a boring process. Without fair play, the game system becomes a meaningless waste of time. Roleplay, on the other hand, can exist without any system at all. It is independent, and inherently as sturdy as the social bond between the role players at the table.

As an example, let's talk about some other games: Life, Magic the Gathering, and Checkers.

Did you know that the game of Life is a type of RPG? I didn't, at least not until I played it with a bunch of kids.

When you play Life with adults, it's a lot like silent D&D: you roll dice and move pieces and eventually the game is over. It's random, arbitrary, and pointless. A process with no purpose.

When you play Life with kids though, it's a completely different game. The kids make choices with details. They'll say things like, "I get the red car because it goes faster!!" and "my person has blond hair!" They make jokes about players who accidentally grab the same gender as their person for a spouse, then run with it anyways. They talk about the hows and whys of the things that happen to each other. They make decisions based on the kind of person they're playing, rather than based on what they think will win. They tell a story.

It's a ridiculous story, with some questionable commentary on modern values, but it is a story nonetheless. At the end of the game, it doesn't matter that the winner was mostly random, it doesn't even really matter who won. What they'll talk about later on, what they'll remember, is all the silly stuff they made up on the way. That's the game of Life. And they do it all without houserules, or homebrew cards, or fudging spinner results.

(Although the homebrew cards sounds like a fun project to try... Keep an eye out for that article. Give me a few years. It'll be a slow day item.)

MTG was originally designed as a convention game, and initially attracted primarily players of Dungeons & Dragons. While most people assume it was because D&D was also a fantasy themed convention game, but I think there's something a little more fundamental to it than that. Here's a question:

Would MTG be as popular today if the cards were nothing more than abstract game pieces with no thematic element, narrative, or artwork?

I highly doubt it.

If people didn't play MTG for the narrative component, there wouldn't be one. There wouldn't be books, or comics, or card art, or flavor text, or the Plane Shift supplements for 5e D&D. To a certain extent, the theme that you are roleplaying as a powerful planehopping sorcerer locked in mortal combat with other powerful magi, is the point of the game. Without it, it's just ink on cardboard and whiny man-children squabbling over petty minutiae.

The structure of the game inherently builds it's own narrative every time the game is played, even when the players don't notice or keep track of it. The composition of the decks involved describe the nature of the characters who are engaged in the wizard's duel.

Most players just leave it all as-is, but the narrative element is there automatically. Anyone could take advantage of it if they wished.

I don't know about you, but I roll with the kinds of people who DO take advantage of that narrative element. All it takes is for both players to attach the how and why descriptive element to game events. That's it. A little bit of first-person in-character banter never hurts either! Magic the Gathering can be as much of a roleplaying game as D&D- players can even roleplay the personalities of the creatures they summon if they wished!

And again, all of this works fine without having to sacrifice any of the integrity of the game's system or its components. (Although I have found that ignoring all the official card restriction rules makes for a better game as long as you aren't playing with jerks.)

I bet you see where I'm going with this now. I bet most of you probably even see how! But yes, even Checkers can function as an RPG system.

For anyone who hasn't noticed, Checkers is nothing more than an extremely simple, very abstract wargame. War is one of the most fundamental narrative devices in history.

The board represents a borderline. A large region over which there is conflict. The pieces represent military strength by mass. The players are the military leaders. Taking pieces also takes territory, pushing into enemy land.

Roleplaying this game takes a bit more effort. You need more than just how and why, you also need to fill in what. What lands are these? What types of soldiers make up the units? What is the conflict over? These kinds of questions are minor though, it only takes a second or two to make it all up.

Really, pretty much any kind of game, (with the possible exception of most sports, which tell the narrative of their reality) can be a roleplaying game.

The truth is that you don't even need a game system at all in order to roleplay.

Collaborative fiction can be created through a character based roleplaying process. It's commonplace on roleplaying forums, and individuals can do the same in person as well. I've run plenty of pure roleplays online, and I was a roleplayer long before I was a game designer.

Improvisational theater is another format in which roleplay can take center stage- this is basically what a kid's game of "Let's pretend" really is!

So I ask, if you aren't even going to actually use the game system in your roleplay, why have a game system at all? If you're just going to ignore it and create whatever story you want, why bother with the hassle of dice and character sheets and books? What's the point? What value is gained by including encumbrance rules that are ignored and lose conditions that never come into play? If all you care about is roleplay, and the game is an unnecessary thing tacked on to the side to be ignored whenever inconvenient, why bother with the game?

But there might be some out there, especially younger role players, who don't see how to roleplay without a system to guide them, or who don't understand how to tell a story when the dice seem to call the shots. So let's take a look at how things fun at my table. This is what actual roll play looks like when you don't sacrifice roleplay to do it.

1. The DM describes the SIS. Setting and situation explained.
2. Players ask for clarifying details to inform their decisions.
3. After the SIS is sufficiently understood, players describe the actions their characters attempt, with their desired results.
4. The DM determines the success/failure, then calls for rolls on anything uncertain.
5. The DM narrates the actual consequences of the attempted actions, possibly working with the players to construct the consequences.

For example:

1. DM: "You are all standing in a stone room. Exits to the North, East, and South. The room is empty aside from a stone table at the center of the room."
2. Player: "Are there doors on the exits? Do I remember how I got here?" DM: "Yes, theya re made of wood, no you do not."
3. Player: I go to the North door and check to see if it's locked."
4. *DM looks at the PC's passive perception score, compares it to the trap detection DC for the trapped door.*
5. DM: "Your character has found a spring-loaded trap mechanism. Describe to me how that looks." Player: "Guys! There's a bunch of clockwork stuff on the door hinges here! This door is trapped. Be careful, this place is dangerous!"

In the above method, there is an important distinction: The players consult the system FIRST, then use that system to inform the roleplay. Instead of giving your roleplay monologue and rolling the dice to see if you convinced the king to give support, you state your intention, roll the dice, and then deliver a monologue that matches the result you were given. In this philosophy, the game is a prompt. It is the foundation for a narrative that does not yet exist. It is schrodinger's story.

This method validates the game as a game. The system is understood, utilized, and followed- and the players still get to roleplay. It isn't a matter of one conflicting with the other, it's simply a matter of priorities.

To a certain extent, this is part of appropriate check calling. The DM should never call for a check to see the effect of roleplay. The DM should call a check and then ask the players to play out the consequences. Think of it as Matt Mercer's "how do you want to do this?" extended to every single check result.

Dungeon Mastering: Calling For Checks

The following is my guide to how to call for checks, saves, contests, and other types of die throws from your players. This is written from the perspective of check-based RPGs like D&D or Traveller. Non-traditional resolution mechanics are a different creature entirely.

Calling for Throws

Ideally, the DM decides when to call for a roll from the players. Players who call for rolls for themselves are trying to usurp authority over the nature of the setting. I cannot stress this enough: the person who controls the physics of the setting decides what is possible, what is impossible, and what the odds of success are. The players control their characters, you decide the consequences. You are the master of the game.

To determine whether a roll should be called for, consider the following question: Is the outcome uncertain? If a player describes doing something that is guaranteed to succeed or fail, there is no reason to call for a roll. Instead, the guaranteed results of their actions should be either described immediately, or the player's description of their actions simply left to stand as being true.

For example, most player characters can speak effortlessly. Unless something is interfering with their ability to speak, the DM can generally just allow the player's declaration of character speech to stand without interference. However, if a player says "I jump to the moon and karate chop it in half with my bare hands" the DM should then interrupt and describe how their character jumps only a few feet in the air and cannot reach the moon. When a player describes an action, but the DM isn't sure what the outcome should be, then a roll should be called. Once you have determined a roll is called for, simply consider what is being done, and decide on an appropriate roll type, modifier source, and set a DC.

A second way to guide your selection to call for a roll, is to consider how hard you think the task should be on a DC, compared to the statistics of the character doing the task. On a d20, if the character’s ability score matches the DC you would choose, that means they have a ~64% chance of succeeding. If their score exceeds it by 5 or more, then they have a 79+% chance of succeeding. It can speed play if you simply dictate success for rolls with a very low chance of failure- especially rolls where the player’s score exceeds the DC by 5 or more. In particular, characters with a total modifier exceeding a benchmark are guaranteed to pass any check at that benchmark- no check required. Likewise, if their maximum roll with modifiers is beneath a benchmark, they will automatically fail any check over that benchmark. An otherwise uncertain action is then certain for that character in particular.

Before a check is called, also consider what the ramifications of success and failure are. Don’t just call a check out of indecisiveness. If a failure would stall the game, or leave everyone stuck, then don’t bother inviting the opportunity. Narrate them out of it. If a check would produce ludicrous results on either a pass or a fail, again, don’t bother calling, simply narrate the only result that makes sense. The best checks lead to interesting choices, surprises, and adventure. The worst checks lead to empty rooms, blank faces, and confusion. Do not gate the progression of the adventure with a check.

Another problem frequently encountered in older editions was the issue of players attempting a check over and over again, or each party member taking a crack at it until they succeeded. This happened because people thought the check only described the effort the character put in on a single attempt. A check actually describes all factors applying to a situation, including the nature of the obstacle, the circumstances of coincidence, the time spent doing it, and character effectiveness. So, for instance, if a barbarian fails to kick down a door, that doesn’t just mean he didn’t put in enough effort- it also means the door was beyond his effort as well in the first place. Think of it as a sort of Schrodinger’s door: it wasn’t either weak or strong until the fighter kicked it; you used the dice to find out. In general, call checks once and let their results stand forever. If the thief can’t pick a lock, nobody in the party can. Furthermore, a party taking turns at a door could be considered as a group check or the help action, both of which already have rules to cover how they work in most check-based games. Even if the game you're running doesn't have group checks, a modified check mechanic is stupidly easy to houserule within moments. Instead of running multiple separate checks for the same task, run a single group check or add an advantage die to the original check for the help action.

The Point Of It

Because what is/isn't possible varies between DMs and settings, it should not be assumed that there will be any meaningful consistency from one game to another. One DM may decide running on water is possible with a very high DC in a wuxia style game, but then decide it is not possible in a medieval fantasy game. Two DMs running the same published setting might disagree on whether it is possible to swim across a particular river, or what the DCs for certain common tasks should be. This is to be expected, and is perfectly fine.

However, within this reasonable degree of variation, every DM should consider the experience of the players at the table first and foremost. Maintaining an internally consistent emulation of some form of "reality" is only valuable to the extent that it sustains the willing suspension of disbelief in the players. Slavishly emulating some dice-driven alternate reality for the benefit of the characters is a waste of time, because the characters cannot care- they are just numbers and paper. Player enjoyment should be considered overall in the long term.

While an individual success may be superficially enjoyable in the moment, it brings little enduring joy. Rather, when success is found where previously there was naught but failure, that is where meaningful enjoyment can be derived from the game. Overcoming legitimate obstacles is what drives engagement with the system. Furthermore, problems that can be overcome by the players' direct input and influence, rather than the random result of the die, provide meaningful depth and drive engagement with the scenario. If you fail to provide obstacles of meaningful difficulty and depth, your game will be flat and boring.

One final note on the subject of secrecy. Often, for the purposes of keeping players engaged with the game through suspense, and to sustain some degree of tension, it is necessary to keep certain information away from the players. For instance, a detailed map of the dungeon they are exploring would suck the fun out of exploring it, because everything has already been revealed, so such a thing should not be shown to the players.

Likewise, because the DM adjudicates the result of all rolls anyways, the DM should choose to keep their die rolls and DCs secret. The purpose of keeping mechanical statistics "behind the screen" is not to prevent metagaming, but rather, to keep the focus on the scenario, rather than the systems the DM is using to adjudicate it. Some DMs may employ a literal barrier of some sort, often a standing screen, to protect their notes and hidden die rolls from prying eyes.

This can lead to a certain degree of suspicion. If the DM has absolute authority over the setting, then the DM also has theoretical authority over all things. There is no reason why a DM couldn’t roll dice and decide the result without looking at them. However, one might ask: why roll dice at all if you're just going to ignore them? If you are going to call for a check, then actually run the check. Play it out, even if the results are not quite what you anticipated. Calling for rolls invites uncertainty into your game, and overcoming the gamble is as much a part of the challenge for the DM as it is for the players. In other words: playing fair is difficult but rewarding, and cheating is a waste of time.

My Table's Social Contract

The following is the social contract I have my table adhere by. Written up as a literal contract. Anyone who wants to join my table must agree to follow these tenets. This includes me, hence the section on Rule 0 and Rule Yes.

Rule 0.

The answer is no. DM veto. DM fiat. DM is director and god. Rule 0 is extremely powerful, and has equally extreme consequences. Used incorrectly, it can ruin jobs, friendships, and even marriages. It comes with the incredibly high responsibility of using it as rarely as possible- never, if possible. Remember: “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” and “Though a gentleman carries a sword, a true gentleman need never use it.” These people are your friends. Treat them like it.

The Rule of Yes.

Nothing grinds a game to a halt faster than a no ruling. Nothing frustrates more than being told a brilliant idea is no good. Nothing creates animosity between participants more than a closed door policy on new ideas or rule interpretations. A no ruling usually results in someone pulling out the source material looking for clarification. It slows things down, it's a distraction, and it’s no fun. Saying no is lazy. Learn to say yes, challenge yourself and your players to be more creative. You'll become a better DM, your adventures will appear more compelling, and players will come back each week craving more. Unless the idea is clearly absurd, say yes. If you don't care, say yes. If it makes sense, say yes. If you don't know, say yes. It will change your gaming life. Your players will love you for it.

The Rule of Cool.

The limits of the “willing suspension of disbelief” for a given idea are directly proportional to its coolness. Remember Bellisario's Maxim: "Don't look at this too closely..." also remember the gamer's version of the MST3K Mantra: "It's just a game; I should really just relax." Whenever a DM botches things in a weird or quirky way, assume "A Wizard Did It". The best way to use the RoC, is to watch player reactions. If a sudden shift happens where everyone's mood changes for the worse, or if people are suddenly disinterested or distracted, then something very uncool has happened, or something very cool has failed to happen. Simply claim Rule of Cool, and then correct the situation using Rule 0.

The Rule of Uncool.

Games are never worth anger. If it sucks, then FUCKING stop. And I cannot stress the cursing enough. Seriously, bad play is worse than no play at all. If people are mad, sad, bored, confused, frustrated, upset, arguing, leaving, distracted, or otherwise just not into the game and having fun, then for the love of yourself and your friends, stop the stupid game, and TALK IT OUT.

The Three Precious Rules.

Platinum: One should treat others as they would treat themselves.

Gold: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.

Silver: One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated.

Let's Talk About OD&D

Let's talk about the single most brutal game I've ever played. The original version of Dungeons & Dragons.

I've only ever played this game solo, and it's likely that is the reason for my impression of it. In the original games, anyone crawling Greyhawk castle alone was considered suicidal. I ran the game for myself to find out what it was actually like as part of my research on D&D's development through the editions when I was designing the SD&D system.

I used the little books, plus the greyhawk and blackmoor supplements as guidelines for designing a dungeons and dragons game, and I used the chainmail combat rules with the wilderness survival map, as per suggestions.

In addition, I read interviews with Gygax, Arneson, their players, and their coworkers. I read blogs about old school gaming and RPG history. I read the earliest modules written by the greats. I read the primer to old school gaming.

I discovered that D&D, in it's original form, was even more variable and diverse than any later incarnation. Dave and Gary ran unimaginably different games using essentially the same system- though the system was only similar by cosmetics. Even the actual rules of the game were in a constant state of flux for both authors. To create an authentic D&D experience, I couldn't try to run Gary's or Dave's D&D, I had to build and run MY D&D!

While I do feel my research lead to a fairly accurate approximation of the style of the game... nothing could have prepared me for my first actual delve into the ruinous towers of The Devil's Fork.

Begin playing the music now.

 

My character was a cleric of not especially great talent, but he made up for it by being quite wealthy. With the vision of starting a temple to one of the gods of law, he decides to deck himself out and kick down the devil's front door.

He was met by an ogre with a spear standing directly in the entryway. A wanderer who was on his way out for the errands, perhaps? It decided I was lunch.

12 terrifying minutes later, it was dead, and I was close to death. But on its body was a hoard of very lucky treasure! I cut my losses and scurried back to town to my niece. She was a beginning magic user, (and secretly chaotic) and a disappointment to my character's values. I got myself in order and hired a fighting man, a neutral mercenary, to join me in my endeavors. He didn't care about the church. He just wanted my money and would abandon if he got the chance.

We broke into the dungeon and cautiously made our way through it's dangerous, crumbling structure. Some passages would collapse on you, others out from under you. The ruin was once magically powered and ancient conveniences became modern hazards. The outer walls had long since fallen away, leaving sections of the towers open to the elements. You could climb the outside of the towers, but it was risky and less rewarding. Inside were countless monsters all drawn by some unknown force, feeding on one another in cruel barbarism.

We struggled for months. I kept hiring more mercenaries, paying my dues to the local lords, building my influence. I became ambitious. Sure, lots of fighting men had died, but I was too good for that!

Then the floor gave out on the 3rd story of the second tower. I landed on a square which was also weak and I fell another 10ft down to the first floor. There, a wall collapsed and finished me off.

The few mercenaries who made it back alive told of my pathetic death for nothing.

Now my niece inherited all of my wealth- and the small church I had built. She rededicated the church to her God, Orcus, chased off the faithful, and set to work capitalizing on her uncle's progress.

She hired servants to aid her in her goal:
Make the Devil's Fork her palace.

She was an enchantress who put enemies to sleep, robbing them, capturing them, and dragging them out. Those she could press into service became her loyal soldiers. Those she could not were butchered and fed to the loyal.

Where her uncle relied on luck, she relied on savagery.

She gained levels slowly, because she always worked with a large entourage of minions. But she made much more progress. Eventually though, her luck would too come to an end, but not in the Fork.

She had built a tower from the foundation of the church and was slowly building a small army of monsters. She would have made faster progress, but her efforts were constantly frustrated by an entity to the West known as the Ivorine Monolith. A 60ft tall solid pillar of ivory, the monolith was some sort of ancient being who somehow remained after the fall of the last great empires. It drew wildlife to itself from the wilderness, and subtly influenced their minds until they became its dedicated, brainwashed agents.

The Ivorine Monolith saw itself as the center of the world, and (correctly) identified the witch as a threat to its power. It also coveted a mysterious ancient artifact supposedly held at the top floor of the center tine of the Devil's Fork, guarded by a monster named Cinderglint.

I used the rules of Risk to position units on the overworld between delves, the count representing total hit dice, and the hexes acting as countries. When battles occurred, I'd play it out with Chainmail. (I deliberately avoided large battles; Chainmail is not the greatest wargame ever made.)

I was on my way to the Fork for one more crack at the top floor, only to find Ivorine forces gathered around its base. They were trying to stop me! This was the biggest battle yet, and it would prove to be my last. I positioned myself as artillery and became surrounded without support. Even powerful magic users only get so many spells.

I rolled up a new character. A fighting man of law under the rule of the Ivorine Monolith.

The Monolith was deathless, ageless, timeless immortal. It had no need for material wealth beyond its influence on mortals. As such, the brainwashed minions it gathered would pool their treasure, which it would then pay out to individuals based on service. I and others from that initial assault squad were paid to assault the town where the witch had come from.

We plundered her tower and returned to the Monolith with vast treasures, scattering her servants to the wilds.

Now it was time to deal with the Devil's Fork.

Weeks went by, but without the constant expenses of an enduring war or local lords, I was able to progress almost unimpeded, except for the treacherous nature of the ruin itself.

Everything about the Devil's Fork is designed to hamper progress. It is constantly pushing you down, driving you back, flushing you out. A stark contrast to the attractive meat grinder of Greyhawk, the Devil's Fork was like walking uphill into the spray of a fire hose.

Eventually my character was able to conduct a combination of actions that revealed the true nature of the towers: the whole dungeon is a giant combination lock! Actions in one tower alter the layout in the other two. To get to the top of any one, you have to climb to a level, activate the machinery, leave, go to a different tower, climb to a particular level, activate the machinery there, etc.

I managed to fight my way to the 10th floor of the shortest tower, the top floor, where I gained access to a custom artifact: a single rifle.

My character did not have the intelligence necessary to divine how to load, aim, and fire it. (To prevent myself from metagaming too much, I incorporated passive check DCs from 5e into this game- it was up to my characters to find secrets and avoid traps, not me. I also generated the presence of hazards and secret treasure at random within my character's passive effectiveness. Even I didn't know where all the stuff was in my dungeons.)

With the rifle in hand, I sought out a mage tower to learn its secrets. In the meantime, a new enemy had appeared on the global stage. Squads of monsters were pouring out from the east, emanating from a distant forest on the edge of the world, called the Dread Garden.

My fighting man died in the ensuing battles while searching for a tower inhabited by a lawful magic user.

There was no inheritance for his wealth. He was a brainwashed minion to a questionable entity. My next project was a team of 3. A dwarven fighting man, a human thief, and an elven magic user. (Picture surprisingly close to accurate.) These 3 adventurers had heard the legends of the mysterious treasure of the Devil's Tongue and had come to take it.

They hunted wandering monsters in the wilderness to amass wealth, earning both the respect and enmity of the Monolith. (It was grateful that we were reducing its enemies. Annoyed we were killing its primary power supply.)

With a great deal of wealth, we gathered our men and challenged all 3 towers at once, a separate party in each. It was easy to identify the mechanism of the towers now.

Still, these things take time. You can't just walk around on the fifth floor like you own the place when you're a level 2 thief!

I never did finish the campaign. I got to the 23rd floor of the center tine before I got tired of it.

And so came to a close the story of the roughest game of D&D I've ever played or ran.

I learned a lot from this game, but it reminded me of something deeply important:

It is possible, and far more rewarding, to earn your fun the hard way, rather than to have it served easy on a silver platter.

OD&D is the Dwarf Fortress philosophy of gaming brought to the roleplaying table.

Losing is Fun!

(In the time since I wrote this, someone made a video that gets to the point about hard fun. They're talking about videogames, but really, it applies to all games. Here's the video.)

(Oh, for anyone who's curious about that top floor, Cinderglint is a custom dragon, called a Mercury Dragon. It generates a permanent poisonous cloud, survivors of which are stricken with permanent insanity. The artifact was the last flying car in existence.)

A Good DM

TL;DR: This is a detailed explanation of everything that is wrong with the Oberoni Fallacy, which states that the existence of DM fiat justified all design as balanced, fair, and functional.

Otherwise known as the No True Scottsman Fallacy

Welcome to the wonderful world of game balance! It's a pretty complex topic, with a lot of subtleties and nuances. It can take years to develop a good enough understanding of a system to be able to spot an imbalance in its content at a glance. But that is not what we are talking about here today. 

This article deals exclusively with the mud-pit of balance. We're talking about the murky grey-areas, where flame wars are born on internet forums around the world. We are talking about those debates over balance that just never seem to go away, and have been around since Gygax and Arneson went around selling a box full of pamphlets as a full game. Maybe you've never encountered these kinds of issues. Maybe you have, but you're unsure how to identify them. This article will help you develop a stronger understanding of what actually counts as a balance argument, and by exclusion, what does not. Luckily, it's actually pretty simple to navigate the nuances if this confusing subject! You just need a guide, someone who can point you in the right direction! Well here I am, and here's your direction:

The phrase "Well, a good DM could handle it..." or any variation thereof is not a valid argument. It is a logical fallacy. Any time you see someone start pulling out different versions of that sentiment, you know you aren't really talking about balance any more. There's a lot of ways to say it.

• A good DM would never...
• A good DM could houserule it
• An experienced DM wouldn't have a problem with it
• I guess you just aren't that great of a DM
• A mature DM would know what to do
• It's the DM's responsibility to know and understand the full implications of...
• etc.

So why isn't this a valid argument to justify something as being balanced? Because there is no one clear definition of what constitutes a good DM! Ultimately, D&D is a collaborative social game, so the greatest DM is one who is most socially compatible with all of the people at their table. In the absence of that context, there is no such thing as a "good" DM.

Note also that being socially compatible with a bunch of people has absolutely nothing to do with the rules of the game or any particular issues of balance!

Sometimes people like to make themselves sound smart and disguise this fake-out by using words like "mature" or "experienced" in the place of "good". The problem is that, in this context, those words are just as ill-defined, they just have more syllables. What does "mature" mean in the context of being a dungeon master? Being old? Being experienced with running the game? Being an adult? None of these things have anything to do with whether or not you're any good at running the game, even though the argument implies that they do.

Let's hit some examples.

"Yeah, this class gives your character a pet dragon. A good DM can handle roleplaying a dragon on the party's side"

R: Well what about a bad DM? What about a mediocre DM? Obviously your standards are too high, considering we're even having a conversation about this.

"A good DM would never create an adventure where an at-will, unrestricted shapeshifting PC could derail the game entirely."

R: So your definition of a good DM is one who doesn't make adventures or run games, then? Because that's what it would take.

"A good DM could houserule around my race's warp factor speed and time dilation aura."

R: Oh really? What a shock. Any halfwit can houserule their way around any ridiculous nonsense. Solving problems, for the DM, can be as simple as breathing the words, "get out of my house". But if you know your content needs houserules in order to even be used, why are you presenting it as a finished work? If houserules are necessary, that means your creation is a problem to be solved, or it is incomplete.

"An experienced DM would have no problem dealing with a flying character."

R: What about a beginner DM who has no idea what he's doing? Why would you design something that can only be used by a master of the art, and then present it as perfectly normal?

"I guess you just aren't that great of a DM."

R: Seriously?! Go fuck yourself.

"A mature DM would know what to do when one of the PCs can read the minds of everyone within 100 miles simultaneously."

R: ...If only because he's more mature than the sort of person who would even invent such a thing! And just so you know, the mature thing for him to do would be to politely disallow it!

"So what if my race isn't balanced the same as the core material? It's the DM's responsibility to read and understand all of the material he allows into his game!"

R: Well why the fuck should the DM have to review every last thing down to the finest detail like some sort of strip-search bouncer just to run a stable game? Also, some game elements take months of playtesting to get a really good feel for how they work!

Ultimately, this is just a form of scapegoating. The designer, now caught with his drawers down about his busted homebrew, doesn't want to admit that his ideas aren't perfect. So he runs. He blames someone else. In a sense, he is trying to blame you for your inability to see how the existence of the DM validates everything he creates as being perfectly fine! He is saying it's your fault that you think his creation is broken! Some really creative people have even found a way to spin this on its head and sound completely different, without changing any of its substance. They do this by simply choosing another scapegoat! Typically, if blaming the DM doesn't work, they just turn around and blame the players! Example: 

"Well, a mature player would only use class features when they are dramatically appropriate, regardless of their power!"

You know what else a mature player would do? Read and understand a class well enough to choose one that is built correctly so they don't have to constantly metagame just to make it work. It's the same argument all over again, just a different victim.

If not balance, what are we talking about?

Now, remember how I said that, when you see arguments like that bouncing around, you aren't talking about balance any more? Well, once you've identified that, the next step is to figure out what you are talking about. There's really only two options here.

1. You are talking about the developer's ego. In this case, it is very likely that the content really is imbalanced. There's a chance it's fine, but generally designers stand their ground a heck of a lot better if their work can stand on its own merits. More likely, the content is busted, and the creator knows it but he won't admit it- not even to himself. At this point, you don't really have much left to discuss. Unless the person can come to grips with reality, the content is going nowhere, and you're just going to get into a fight with a crazy person.
2. You are talking about philosophy, and the discussion is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

If you find yourself about to use this argument, stop and think: Actually read the words of your critics, and try to imagine that they are right. Try to understand why they think they are right. Now, go over your own work and imagine what it would be like to actually play this content through their concerns. You may be surprised to discover that your work really is defective. However, there is a chance that you will discover that something about your work is just... weird. Something about it becomes imbalanced only under certain circumstances or situations outside of the game, like when certain types of players use it, or when it appears in certain types of games. You are now looking at a playstyle incompatibility.

Playstyle refers to the way people play the game. It may surprise you to discover that there really is no one way to play D&D. In fact, there are thousands of individual playstyle choices a DM and players can make which result in countless playstyle possibilities at any given table. Eventually, under one playstyle or another, everything is dysfunctional, one way or another. As such, a valid argument can be made for anything to be considered imbalanced. Each valid argument for imbalance not based on strict rules compatibility is a playstyle incompatibility.

Welcome to the grey area of the balance debate.

First and foremost, if you're going to engage in a gaming philosophy discussion, you need to understand that there are no wrong philosophies. There are some misguided attitudes, to be sure, but when it comes to what people enjoy at their own table, you can't really say someone is playing the game wrong. In general, regarding design balance, a creator's goal should be to create content which remains fairly balanced in most situations, for most players, under most playstyles. This can be extremely difficult, but a good point of reference is precedent, a subject I've already written on. Remember that, no matter how many playstyles exist, the vast majority of people are using the content from the core rules in their games. If your work is directly comparable to the precedent set by that material, you are very likely to create a well-balanced piece of homebrew regardless of playstyle.

When discussing the balance of a piece of homebrew, it is recommended to describe balance in terms of a spectrum, rather than absolutes. Objectively, everything can be broken or balanced, so saying it is one or the other in black-and-white terms is actually nonsense. (And, sadly, just about every gamer in existence is guilty of this mistake, including myself.) Rather, it is best to describe the balance of a thing in terms of how likely it is, by your understanding and beliefs, that something will become dysfunctional for someone. The more situations you can imagine it causing problems, the more playstyle incompatibilities it has, the more imbalanced it is. The more unusual or unlikely its dysfunctional cases may be, the more balanced it is.

So, back on the topic of "A Good DM". When you, or someone else, is using the good DM argument to defend a philosophical difference, that person is effectively saying that a "good DM" is someone who runs the game the way they themselves would run it, or would expect it to be run. They are putting their playstyle forward as the best playstyle, or the most normal playstyle. They might be right, but they rarely are, and it wouldn't even matter anyways. Even if their content is perfectly balanced by, as an example, OSR style play, and even if OSR became the most popular playstyle in the hobby, if their creation was ONLY functional in OSR and totally broken in every single other playstyle, that would mean it is incredibly imbalanced. No playstyle is any better or worse than any other, there is no "right" way to play, and to defend one as being so, or to deride another playstyle as inferior, is immature, rude, and ignorant.

I hope this article gave you a stronger understanding of the nature of balance, and how to go about discussing the issue in a mature and responsible way. Always start off giving a person the benefit of a doubt. Never assume someone is being intentionally malicious in their designs or words unless they act upon their apparent unpleasantness. No matter how passionate you are about a given subject, D&D is just a game, and we're all fellow gamers. 

Please respect one another. ♡

Precalculated Encumbrance Chart!

So! Let's spend a bit talking about everyone's favorite forgotten rule that never goes away: Encumbrance! Yay! I promise there's a treasure waiting at the bottom of the article.

Get your calculators and E-5 encumbrance registration forms out. Have at least two pieces of government issued ID ready.

First off, what is the purpose of encumbrance?

1. To limit the quantity of treasure that can be extracted from a dungeon in a single trip. If you want to extract more weight than your bodies can carry, you need to start hiring retainers, buying carts, renting donkeys, etc. It forces the characters to handle the dungeon crawl and adventuring as a business and gives them problems to solve and things to spend a portion of their treasure on.

2. To alter movement speed in tactical combat, which D&D is born from and thrives upon, based on a character's gear loadout. Platemail guy can't carry as much before stumbling over his own toes, but the unarmored schmuck is going into a fight unarmored. It gives players difficult choices when managing their gear loadout. What matters more? Mobility or gear?

3. It gives players a weight budget to interact with and manipulate their environment. Whatever remainder of your encumbrance limit you have is how much you can move around the game environment in your inventory.

4. It controls what kinds of animals can actually act as a mount for you. It is absolutely possible that a heavy character with a light burden is, all together, a heavy burden for a single horse. Got a halfling carrying a lot of stuff? That mastiff he wanted as a steed might not be running so swift. This, too, is why the special travel pace rule is important: If your move speed is reduced, so is your overland travel pace, and a party only moves as fast as its slowest character.

5. Travelling in the wilderness is hard. Aside from needing all that camping gear, fire starting stuff, food provisions, and clean drinking water, you also need room for combat gear and medical equipment- and room to spare for treasure on the return trip! How far you can go without getting killed is limited only by your level and your inventory. Planning a trip becomes as important as the journey itself.

Basically, it intentionally complicates the game to force players to make decisions by giving them problems to solve.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but I can already hear people complaining, "what does any of that have to do with telling a story?" and the answer is nothing at all. We aren't talking about RP right now, we're talking about the G that so many GAMERS forget about. Encumbrance is a GAME element. Roleplaying is a part of the game, but not the basis or central purpose for it. If it was, we'd all be playing Polaris and nobody would remember what D&D even is.

So here's the problem with encumbrance rules:

1. All they get used for is arbitrarily penalizing the player and limiting what they can do. With the modern trend focusing on player autonomy, this is the antithesis of egocentric-autonomy-fun.

2. Tracking encumbrance is time consuming and fiddly, so it often falls to the players to track their own. (Red flag that there's a problem, right there. If the DM is too lazy to make use of a system, why should it fall to the players to manage it?)

3. In 5e, encumbrance limits are so high, they are positively unrealistic. Most characters never need to worry about it. Since it's so inconsequential, it seems a waste of effort to track. Even in editions where the numbers made some kind of sense, a weight limit doesn't actually account for the logistics of how you are carrying all of this stuff. It's just abstractly levitating in your invisible inventory pocket like this is some JRPG.

4. Nobody wants to work hard at penalizing themselves so everyone lies about their encumbrance. People feel justified, because they intuitively know that the encumbrance system is just a little bonkers anyways and that the DM doesn't like managing the system himself, so they know they won't get audited.

So long as tracking it is a pain in the ass and there is no reward in it, encumbrance will always be neglected.

So there's two parts to the solution:

1. Give a benefit to tracking encumbrance. The benefit should not be arbitrary or forced. Giving a random bonus for player buy-in is like bribing your players to so something they don't like. The benefit should be directly derived from the process.

2. The process must be streamlined and simplified so that it does not slow, interrupt, or interfere with play.

I don't have a house rule that does that. (I'm working on it.) In the meantime, here's a chart that calculates the encumbrance limits for every STR/Size combination, because you'll need it if you plan to roll with me as your DM. Don't worry, I track it for you. I have a chart for that.

Treasure!

The Devolution of the Adventurers League

By this point, it's old news that the rules of the D&D AL changed significantly in season 8. That's not what I'm here to talk about today, although it is partially what has prompted me to write this. At this moment, we are mere days away from season 8. By the time this published, we'll be in the thick of it. You'll probably read this sometime after it ended. The AL is no stranger to change. Every season, the rules have changed and warped. This most recent change is just another step on the downward slope the program has been on since the beginning.

Before I go any farther, I should make something clear: I hate organized play programs.

Always have. Always will. An organized play program is nothing more than a cheesy marketing scheme disguised as good will. So when they announced the AL, my expectations of them were pretty abysmal. Nevertheless, as a reaction to the lack of community in my local area, I decided to look into it, just to see if it would surprise me. It did.

In fact, I was so impressed that I almost immediately joined in as a player and had a blast in the first season. At the time, I saw some problems with the program, but I figured that would get ironed out in the following seasons. I was wrong. Those minor problems were the first cracks of a deeper issue that continues to grow.

I'm going to talk about this in detail, season by season, covering how the rules and community have grown and changed over time since I started playing, to when I stopped, through to today.

Season 1: One Good Idea Tyranny of Dragons

So I went in to this expecting a new living campaign. It made sense: D&D Next had been designed through social media and big data. The technology now existed to make a living campaign actually work! I was almost excited to see it happen for real for the first time. Guess that will have to be up to someone else to experiment with. (Note to self: write article on how to build your own living campaign.)

Around this same time, while all of the corebooks and first adventures were being announced, someone leaked the production schedule to EN World. I thought it was a load of baloney because it sounded frankly stupid. "Alice's Adventure in Wonderland themed Underdark campaign?? Romeo and Juliet but with giants?! This is too lame to be true!" Again, I was wrong. The prediction was bang on the money and laid out the next several years of D&D adventure seasons. The warning signs were there.

But then it was announced. I was curious to see exactly how this was being organized, so I did exactly what had to be done: I hacked into the AL DM resource page and downloaded all the material without a lick of regard for the integrity of their program. What I read made my jaw drop.

Now, I've gushed about this in articles before, but this time I'm going into a touch more detail.

The downtime activities section of the 5e PHB is very poorly written. It fails to justify how days are counted in a rest-based system which (at the time) did not require sleep or days to coincide with rests. It failed to explain how downtime was distinguished from uptime. It failed to justify how to prevent players from starting a downtime day and having adventures anyways. It's kind of a mess. (Also, 365 game days to learn a new skill proficiency is obscene. The character will reach level 20, retire, raise a family, and die as a god before the year is up.)

But the Adventurers League staff? They read that shit cake and saw potential for greatness.

See, one of the problems with organized play is that it struggles with continuity. People come and go, the group is ever-changing. People take the same character across multiple tables, sometimes replaying the same adventures. It all makes the game feel very disjointed and asynchronous. The AL boys found a solution: downtime.

They invented the idea of using downtime days as an abstract currency that is awarded to players like xp or gp. Players were allowed to spend accumulated downtime days at the start or end of an adventure to represent what their character has been up to in the meantime. Did someone miss a week? That's ok, he was busy with a downtime activity, that's why he didn't join in the last adventure!

Downtime days cost currency to spend however, based on the lifestyle your character chose to live. As a consequence, downtime was nearly net-zero; it was a currency which allowed a means of exchange rather than an additional source of power acquisition. The downtime activities were so minimal in their effects, it was pretty hard to say any given one was game changing or game breaking, even if your character lived as a wretch.

This idea is brilliant. It achieves the following effects.

• Players can engage in non-adventure activity without missing out on adventure, holding the group back, or wasting precious real time.
• It justifies player absences and group volatility.
• It provides a narrative for a character's activities regardless whose table they're at week to week.
• It gives players something to spend their gold on, however minor.
• It gives players things in the game world to care about.
• It makes sense of, and makes practical application of, the downtime rules in the PHB, making the game as a whole feel more complete and functional.

As far as I'm concerned, currency based downtime IS the way downtime is handled. In my opinion, it is one of the smartest innovations in RPG design since the core mechanic. I don't first-person play out downtime with players at all any more. Why would anyone?

They also improved the concept of lifestyle by distinguishing between the lifestyle you maintain by expense, and the lifestyle you are living at. They set up starting lifestyle levels for characters based on background, then added a rule that allows you to change your actual lifestyle by sustaining a different one for a given number of downtime days. This makes it possible for adventures to call a reference to a character's actual lifestyle level to alter the way characters react to individual PCs. In theory, this should give benefits to characters who sustain lifestyles over a certain level. In practice, the adventure designers never got the memo. In order for something like that to work, it must be a standard element of almost every adventure in the program.

Along with making a usable downtime mechanic, they also introduced 2 new downtime activities, one for hiring people to cast spells for you, and one for gaining a level at specified intervals just in case you're behind a tier when everyone's about to advance to the next plateau. Both are great ideas. I incorporated both into my home games.

This is also where they introduced the idea of mechanically structured factions with rules for managing progression through ranks and explanation of benefits from gaining rank. I'll be honest, it's nothing special. When I read this section, I was kind of like "Meh. Hufflepuff or gryffindor. Whatever."

The things that stood out to me about the factions were the benefits. At rank 3 you were to gain access to new faction-specific downtime activities. What would these activities be? It's a surprise! They'd be different for each season, and none were released yet. I got a little hyped to see what the next seasons would hold. Additionally, at ranks 2 and 4 there was a mechanic about mentoring lower level characters. How does it work? What are the benefits? It's a secret! Gotta play to find out! I became further hyped. Finally, a 5th rank character became a leader in their faction, again with secret benefits, and again further hype because damn that just sounds cool!

I was impressed, so I decided to take a look at the adventures... and they looked pretty great! I actually wanted to give this a shot!

It was hard to get started in 2014. Red Deer did not have much for public tables. Most people were still clinging to 3.5e and Pathfinder. Some of them didn't even know D&D next had happened or that a new edition had been released. Nobody cared to become an AL DM; most people hadn't even heard of the AL yet. The people I talked to about it weren't interested in letting me run a table myself in their venues. So I set it up in my home. And I got my players from online, because nobody responded to my ads. Actually, as far as I know, there hasn't been an official table in Red Deer since I stopped playing. I convinced people to take turns as DM so we all got to play. It wasn't exactly what the AL prescribed as official. In fact, I didn't follow their ridiculous hours or play duration limits either. We played when we could for as long as we needed.

And it rocked.

Even with the anal-retentive chargen rules.

Season 2: Let's Hate Flight Elemental Evil

When PotA was released, it was marketed with a free companion PDF which contained several new races. One of them was the aarakocra. I was excited. Lots of people were. There has always been a movement of gamers who supported flying PCs, and we were looking forward to an example of a balanced flying race.

The first thing the AL did was publish a memo banning just the aarakocra from play. And I don't blame them! 50ft at level 1 is too dang fast no matter what mode of movement it is! The aarakocra is a broken mess, and a good example of WotC setting themselves up to fail. Now the anti-flight jerks have a single high-profile example to point out as evidence. Great. Way to go.

But here's the thing: as broken as the aarakocra can be, it feels like the adventures in this season were ready to deal with it. I played an aarakocra monk through all of this season (my group at the time had bigger balls than the AL staff) and I honestly found lots of significant challenges! I'm not really sure why it was banned, because none of the adventures I played seemed to suffer due to it.

That said, this season fell flat for me.

Look, I'm a grognard, so classic dungeons that defined the history of D&D hold a special place in my heart. The elemental cults though? Not so much! In fact, the very idea of fundamental elemental forces being alignment-polarized is kind of silly to me. So is the idea of intelligent people being elementally aligned.

Still, it wasn't terrible. There were real threats and challenges to be overcome and I had some fun. I just couldn't get into the mood of it.

Also, the factions pulled through: new downtime activities unique to each faction available to players of a certain rank. And even better, they're pretty cool downtime activities, too! I was very happy. New content to absorb into my own games is always desirable.

Season 3: Two Hands, No Brains Rage of Demons

I get that people are pretty big fans of the Forgotten Realms setting and everything related to Driz'zt. But I think the underdark is completely boring. I don't see it as mysterious, dangerous, or exciting. I see it as a cold and drab version of Journey to the Center of the Earth. I'm also not a fan of The Forgotten Realms, I think it is a generic kitchen-sink fantasy of overwhelming blandness. And finally, I don't like Driz'zt either, he is a textbook pretentious edge lord.

The demon princes walking the material plane, in my opinion, should be a near-apocalyptic event. This season completely failed to give any meaningful weight to their presence. It makes the demon princes seem disappointingly weak.

Worse than the demons though was the setting location. Hillsfar is the single worst place for a group of adventurers. Diversity and magic are banned, and the players are guaranteed to get into endless trouble. It is pure frustration and COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY. Hillsfar is just a shitty place to play, and my honest-to-goodness reaction to roleplaying in this city was a burning desire to become an arsonist and blow the whole shit hole sky-high. I wasn't allowed to do that of course, and I wouldn't let anyone else do it either. (The season would kind of be over if we did that.) Hillsfar is irredeemably unpleasant.

At this point I was becoming dissatisfied. Two seasons in a row dealing with stuff I just am not interested in. I was getting kind of ambivalent toward the AL, especially since keeping a table going was next to impossible sometimes. Some weeks went by without any players. I'm pretty sure people could tell I wasn't really into it any more. Not even the new faction activities could cheer me up about it.

One cool thing is that this season finally revealed what happens when you play a character from a different story origin: aside from allowing past session chargen rules to play forward, it changes the downtime activities you have access to at rank 3. That means all the downtime activities for past seasons can be brought forward into new seasons! Cool! The only problem? In a half-sentence buried in the text, they restrict previous season downtime activities to only function in the local area of that season. If you take a character into a future season, you lose all access to this stuff unless your DM let's you travel back to your season-home. For no reason. Lame. It basically means these are something you have to work to get, but only get to use for a limited time. Needless to say, I ignored the restriction.

Another nifty addition was the madness rules. Like downtime in the PHB, the rules regarding madness in the DMG were kind of an incomplete mass of vagary. The AL staff pulled another magic trick and implemented a system allowing players to accumulate madness from exposure to the horrors of the adventures ahead. It works really well and gives an (almost) lovecraftian element to this season. Honestly, I absorbed this into my own games as well, along with the madness-related downtime activities.

One minor tweak that caught my eye: First tier characters can be rebuilt at any time, and they changed it slightly. In the first two seasons, rebuilding only replaced character options, not gear, so you wouldn't get starting gear to match your new build if you, say, changed your class. That... didn't work too swell. In this season, they fixed it so starting gear is also changed by rebuilding. Still no guide on how to actually go about doing a rebuild, but I guess asking for complete rules on basic character management is too much to ask.

Something very revealing also happened during this season: the AL staff had to put out an amendment after the SCAG was released to allow players to use options from it. Again, they banned the flying race, and again doing so seems to have been rather unnecessary. What this shows though, is that the AL staff were not privy to the information in that book when they wrote the player guide for this season. The one hand didn't know what the other was doing. This would not be an isolated incident. Reactionary planning and rules changes like this become more common from here on out.

Season 4: D&D Horror Spooktacular Curse of Strahd

Three strikes and you're out! I have absolutely no interest in Innistrad or its vampiric overlord! In fact, the whole idea of a "horror" setting for D&D is just so ridiculous, it's pretty much a joke. The PCs are empowered superheroes! That's like putting Superman in a haunted house and expecting the audience to feel scared for him! The whole setting is just completely hokey, mired in an extremely anachronistic idea of the "spooky". Ravenloft is essentially The Hilarious House of Frightenstein, but with dice. There's a reason it's the only campaign setting I excluded from my unified cosmology for my home campaign setting.

This season's play documentation saw a significant change. The sections directed at the DM were separated out into a different document, making a player guide and a DM guide. Mostly this just makes it harder to navigate the play information, especially since they decided to move the faction downtime activities to the DM book, rather than the player book for the people who will be using them. Not that it really mattered, because...

(Drumroll please)

No faction downtime activities! Yay! I get that they were trying to give the impression that the players have been sucked into another dimension where their factions don't exist in a capacity to supply any support, but it's really a disappointment. This is one example of a trend I call season purging, which begins this season. Systematically, seasons released from this point forward make an effort to exclude, ignore, or eliminate content that has been generated by previous seasons. Another example is the reduction of certain storyline magic items from previous seasons to consumables. Instead of creating a non-adventure-specific way of recharging these items, they opted to eliminate them from play.

Let's talk about Jenny Greenteeth though! Jenny is a frankly awesome character from season one, who they randomly decided to bring back- IN STYLE. Here, she is presented as the only viable source of spellcasting services, introducing an interesting new potential mechanic: it may be possible to make multiple service providers have different costs, spell availability, or rules! A city might have 2 or 3 different styles of service providers! The potential is mind boggling! Sadly, this potential is never realized. One cool feature though is the idea of a service costing downtime days exclusively to represent the service draining energy from your soul directly. Very cool.

The cosmetic alterations to spells are bloody cool. I absorbed all of them into spells cast in the shadowfell for my home games. I also made an inverted version of it for spells cast in the feywild.

They introduced a new method of resurrection for Barovia where you can be brought back for free by the dark powers. There are 2 consequences. The first is a curse called a dark gift. The second is a story award that causes cats to hiss and milk to sour. The dark gifts are cool. They're all double edged swords that give you unique powers and detriments. You can remove the gift-curses with remove curse, but the story award remains. I stole this and expanded it. I applied the rules to resurrections happening in the shadowfell.

One weird rules tweak was to Faction Charity. The original version was a safety net for tier-1 characters in a party with all tier-1 characters who can't cast or afford resurrection. It stated that a tier-1 character who dies and has faction membership can be revived during downtime at the cost of all rewards from their last adventure. Simple. The new version is... weird. Firstly, it's weird because nobody can contact their faction in this season anyways. But more importantly, it's weird because it says a character revived in this way can continue to adventure and gain rewards from that adventure... so somehow this is supposed to happen during an adventure?? How does a downtime mechanic activate during uptime?? It's... rather spectacularly  badly written.

This is the first season to introduce an advancement limitation. Apparently, if a character plays certain "opening adventures" they become locked to the adventures in Barovia. There is no guide on what to do if a player brings a higher level character from faerun into a running campaign starting on any other session or adventure. It basically just means that you shouldn't run those 3 adventures, or you should skip the session a DM says they're going to run those adventures in. What I'm saying is that it's poorly worded. There is also no guidance on how to unlock a character if they get this restriction. Like the anti-inclusivity of Hillsfar, this seems fundamentally opposed to the principals of public play.

Likewise, the play guides harp on the idea that the adventures in this season need to be played in-order, and that characters should start with the introductory adventure. That DOES NOT WORK in public play! Like I said in the first season, people come and go constantly! Nobody is consistent or reliable! At a public play table, you will never have the same people at the table more than twice in a row. What this is basically saying, is that this season is a dick to everyone but hardcore players who show up every single week. It's also a dick to anyone who doesn't want to start a new character for the season and is over tier 1. And anyone else is fucked if they missed the opening session! In order for this to work, you need to have at least 1 extra DM on hand just to run the intro adventures for people who weren't around for the first one! For fuck's sake, I couldn't even find a God damned venue, let alone players or, heaven forbid, another dedicated DM!!

Look. I know you guys wanted to make this a campaign, but I have some bad news: to be inclusive and flexible enough for public play, the campaign has to exist exclusively on the player's side and be the cumulative product if their play experiences. You can't make restrictions like this or you will isolate and exclude players who play irregularly.

Back on the subject of factions, this season makes it impossible for players to use their faction downtime activities, gain renown, go on secret missions, etc. This is kind of a violation of all the hype they built into the factions starting back in season 1! It comes across as a stalling tactic to try and slow people from reaching rank 4. My guess is that they still didn't know what the mentorship program was supposed to look like. Very probably, the person who came up with that idea was no longer involved in AL management, as it seems like the admin were kind of flying by the seats of their pants at this point.

Another victim of season purging is madness. Even though this season's theme is PERFECT for the madness rules from RoD, they don't use those rules, including them in the player guide only as a record for characters who advanced from that season. Instead of adding resurrection to the list of circumstances which raise your madness level, they made an exclusive rule just for Barovian madness. Stupid, inefficient, and oddly a lot of extra work for no real gain.

The encounters program was scrapped, so the only thing that made my games even halfway valid as Adventurers League events was invalidated. Fuck that, I ran the games anyways. I had already lost any degree of tolerance for their BS. Encounters were AL legal adventures which lead into the hard back adventures as AL legal content. They replaced this with launch events- long run games run exclusively by hobby retailers. The veil was dropped. This is about selling books in stores. To hell with your penniless home games. This is, and always has been, a cheesy marketing scheme. They just got lucky with some good ideas in the first season.

Along with Encounters, they also scrapped Expeditions. These were standard adventures exclusively available to AL DMs. They instead replaced it with Premier Play. I bet you can guess from the name what the difference is: PREMIER PLAY COSTS MONEY. The DM has to pay out-of-pocket to download these adventures from the (newly established) DMs Guild. Again, the veil was dropped. This is about promoting people to spend money on their service.

This is not a game any more. This is money. This is why people should not try to make a living off of art or entertainment.

Finally, they dropped the epics program from AL. I hear they still run epic-style events, they just aren't AL related. I never was able to participate in any of these events, so I can't say if this was good or bad. I guess I'm just disappointed that I never got to join in on one.

Because the adventure formats had been changed, the DM rewards section had to be updated. This was also necessary because the new hardcover adventures were also beginning to take on new formats that didn't match the old scoring system. This is continued evidence that the AL team is not coordinated with the WotC product development team.

As if all of that wasn't enough cheese, they decided to go whole-hog about the skeezy used car salesman theme. They introduced a new activity called DM Quests. The idea is that DMs get extra rewards for being really great DMs. Sounds great right? The problem is that all of the actual quests are just ways of getting DMs to advertise the product for free. It's an incredibly lame attempt at manufacturing artificial buy-in. My immediate response was "fuck off".

I didn't finish this season. I wasn't interested any more. All the potential they had built into the first couple of seasons was being squandered. The organization was sloppy at best, absent at worst. Running a table was nearly impossible in my area. I was done with it.

Season 5: New Management Storm King's Thunder

Just because I stopped playing didn't mean I stopped watching. I decided to keep my eye on things for a little bit at least, just in case they did something to lure me back in, to regain my interest after 2 years of disappointment. I paid attention to the new season play content and read the adventures even though my home games had stopped.

This season's play documentation experienced yet another major format change. In fact, it had been completely reformatted and almost completely rewritten! The most noticeable change: the new format is fucking ugly. Some content is weirdly disorganized. Great.

In the required materials section, they finally specified that a DCI number is entirely optional. I had already figured this out when I had to call some guy in Calgary to figure out how to get my number. If you aren't running in a store, it doesn't matter. So I never got a number and neither did any of my players. They also finally included a guide on how to get a DCI number other than by talking to your coordinator. It would have been nice to include this info in the document TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS AGO. Then again, the WotC website was a barely functional broken mess in 2014, so it probably wouldn't have helped much anyways.

This season also introduces a prototypical version of the Core+1 rule, limiting players to the PHB and 1 other approved source. Interestingly, the character options from adventures and AL supplements from previous seasons were purged. I like the core+1 rule, as I said in my article about precedent. It's a highly pragmatic rule to implement.

They purged the rules about starting lifestyle based on background.

New characters for this season cannot purchase equipment from starting wealth, they must take the starting package.

All of the PHB downtime activities are valid. Catching up has been expanded with one more plateau for the transition to tier 4.

The restrictions on magic item trading were massively loosened, and trading a magic item can now be done as a downtime activity.

Spellcasting services are expanded with resurrection and true resurrection.

Faction charity returns to it's original (more logical) form as a a safety net. For some reason they redundantly restate the side effect of the resurrection spell now. I guess it's a reminder?

Between the two documents, all of the text has been vastly improved. Rules are clarified and bad writing is fixed. Still disorganized and arbitrarily split between 2 books, but an improvement is an improvement.

And here's the biggest purge yet: no faction downtime activities. It says that if a season has them, they are available in the DM pack. It is blank. In Barovia this was justified by the characters being trapped on a demiplane and cut off from their factions. Here, there is no reason. They just decided not to bring it back at all. Disappointment. The only reason I continued to keep my eye on this was to borrow more content from them for my own games.

It is now no longer valid to create a character using a previous season origin in a later season. All of that content, along with the madness rules, has been purged.

Other than that, nothing really new. No cool new rules. No cool new content. The whole thing has been stripped down to a skeleton, really.

I didn't play any of this, so I don't have much to say about it. A whole adventure season about giant politics just seems utterly silly to me.

Around this time my wife became very ill. I dropped my role as a D&D Wiki admin and put a hold on my hobbies. I stopped keeping track of AL. Life was serious.

Season 6: Yawn Tales from the Yawning Portal

Holy shit it's 2018!!! My wife is better and my job is stable again! Let's take a look at what I've missed out on!

Formatting cleaned up slightly. I really wish they'd merge these back into one book.

Holy kablooey, they made copying spells into a DT! Now wizards can trade spells in the AL! (I mean, the way the rules are written, they kind of always could, but now they can do it between adventures too) It ends with a weird comment about how copying spells has a chance of failure, but that isn't true in the PHB, and they give no rule by which such an action could fail. Weird.

Faction DTs are really gone for good it seems. Shame.

As for the subject matter, I'm sad I couldn't participate. Why couldn't THIS have been season 2?! Tales from the Yawning Portal is a wicked book full of modernized classics, and the adventures for this season look fun as shit. I might just buy some and run them as home games just for the fun of it. (Still pissed that they dropped the free-to-run model.)

Next season.

Season 7: Tomb of Annihilation

Ah, another season dedicated to a return to the classics! And again I missed out! Why did they wait until my life blew up to start doing cool stuff?

As for the season documentation, there's nothing really to say. No new rules. No new content. Just a few formatting a word fixes. Expanded +1 list. Etc.

There are separate documents covering the rules for the death curse, and that stuff is kinda cool, but also really adventure specific. I don't see any real personal use I can make of it in my own games.

Season 8: Participation Ribbon Waterdeep

OK, so the new season is coming out in... 6 days, as of this writing. I am hyped. The last 2 hardbacks were absolute hot-rods, as far as gaming goes. Dragon Heist looks like it's a whole new kind of awesome. I have mine preordered and I'm ready to rock. I kind of want to start an AL table again. There's just 2 problems.

1. The play programs don't include the hardbacks outside of store exclusive introduction events, and I'm not keen on spending change on small adventures. It's like they've added microtransactions to D&D!

2. They're changing the rules. Big time. As of this writing, the official rules aren't out yet, but things don't look good. To summarize, as I'm sure my readers are fully aware at this point, they're replacing adventure rewards with points that can be spent in abstract to obtain treasure types unlocked by play between adventures. The points earned are based on play duration within the recommended play times. It's a participation trophy with built-in artificial buy-in.

Frankly, it's too much bullshit for me to care to try it again. I'm just going to run my own home game, incorporating the elements of the old AL that I thought were cool, and taking advantage of the potential they squandered.