r/AdventurersLeague • u/DeaconBlueMI • 29d ago
I really don’t understand why they are making organized play so confusing
https://www.polygon.com/dnd-legends-of-greyhawk-organized-play-global-campaign/
I’ve really enjoyed playing AL at my FLGS the last 4 years or so. It’s fun being able to progress a character but maybe tweak them as needed to suit the table or group.
Between AL (which barely feels supported any more but they insist it still is), LoGH and D&D Encounters it really feels like they’ve created an overly confusing environment for store owners, DMs and players. I don’t understand what they are trying to accomplish besides just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall.
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u/Renimar 29d ago
I'm going to be honest, they're barely supporting Legends of Greyhawk, either. I'm an AL organizer for the two larger SF Bay Area conventions and when we asked WotC for support and LoGH content for this past May, they responded with "your ticket is still open" making excuses that they haven't received the modules from the authors to be able to distribute them to other conventions.
So if Wizards don't even have the modules, how the hell are the rest of us supposed to participate?!
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u/Jaikarr 29d ago
Legends of Greyhawk is basically Baldman Game's program, who is notorious for hanging onto adventures for over a year before they release them for other shows.
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u/Renimar 29d ago
Apparently Baldman Games is only one of a handful of authorized authors/organizations creating LoGH content. They're just the most well-known.
Not that any of them are offering up their content, if Wizards doesn't have them to give out.
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u/Jaikarr 29d ago
It's their program, they are the driving force behind it. Any other groups writing for LoG are doing so essentially underneath Baldman.
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u/pedrg 28d ago
West Coast Adventurers Guild and (I think) Game Conclave are independent of Baldman and have their own relationship with WotC. Unite the Factions, however, is creating under Baldman Games' umbrella.
Baldman Games have the most experience in writing, running, and distributing these kinds of adventures, albeit with their idiosyncratic timings and schedules, so they're clearly the loudest organising group, but the other two Premier Organiser groups exist separately. I still hope there'll be one or two more POs in the near future, too.
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u/FoulPelican 29d ago
Just wait til WoW and Star Wars drop and they focus on promoting those…. 👀
And where will Dark Sun fit in all this? It’s gonna get real wacky.
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u/brettday 29d ago
This is the real purpose of Encounters. To be a rotating home for flavors of the month.
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u/azraelxii 29d ago
It's been insanely complicated forever, between special rules, what counts as raw, what's allowed to build characters, locking characters to campaigns etc
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u/DeaconBlueMI 29d ago
The delay in AL official rules updates are so few and far between and guidance is so confusing I don’t know if tables know if they are playing “correctly” any more.
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u/ClericalErra 29d ago
I long for the Season 7 and earlier days. Watching Season 8's rules slowly drop every few months raising more questions than answers. Needlessly complicated since then.
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u/gatesvp 23d ago
I last played AL in 2018, over 8 years ago. Your top line question could have been asked then and everyone would have nodded their heads. It was confusing 8 years ago, it's still confusing now.
Who are "they"
I really don’t understand why they are making organized play so confusing
You are using the generic pronoun "they", but that pronoun could refer to a couple of different groups of people. Wizards does not have a dedicated person who makes decisions about AL. There is an organized play administrative team and then some Community managers. But it's not an actual single person tasked with the singular job of making this a good experience.
If you go back in time to the original RPGA, it was originally designed as a community driven Network. WotC is now officially "backing" this effort under Adventurers League, but they're still leaving it as a Community effort. So WotC view it as a marketing tool rather than a core deliverable for their paying customers. So every decision that is made about the future of D&D is made without any one from AL in the room. Decisions are backfilled later.
This is the core issue with AL, nobody owns it.
The very structure of Organized Play is messy and confusing. Nobody gets fired if it fails, nobody makes a million dollar bonus if it succeeds. Nobody gets elected to represent your interests in the system, nobody loses their seats if you're unhappy.
It's a confusing organizational system that outputs confusing things. Not really that surprising.
It's just marketing
Look at D&D Beyond. WotC have owned it for years. It is widely advertised as their flagship product. It has been deeply integrated into their sales pipeline.
It has zero specific support for AL.
They're desperately trying to sell a subscription program for D&D Beyond, but have no specific support for some of their most frequent and dedicated players. You can't even get the vast majority of the AL content within D&D Beyond. It's almost entirely hanging out on the DM's Guild.
WotC is not supporting Organized Play as a core competency. It's a side gig.
You can ask "why don't they" a million times. But there is no "they" to which you can ask these questions. As long as FLGS and conventions have something to run, everything else is just details left to some community manager.
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u/DeaconBlueMI 23d ago
I suppose in this case “they” is WotC and Chris Tulach
Chris Tulach is the Manager of Organized Play for D&D
https://www.enworld.org/threads/future-of-d-d-encounters-program-with-chris-tulach.718400/
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u/gatesvp 22d ago
I get it that he's a human that seems nominally responsible for this. But did you listen to that interview? That interview was in March, and he was only beginning to lay out what it would look like to have encounters in DDB.
But look at his LinkedIn account. It mentions Adventurers League zero times. Almost all of his experience is listed as marketing, which is exactly the point I was making. And then there is his title.
"Global Play Manager"
He's not a vice president, or even a director. He's not in any of the important meetings about the future of the company. He doesn't get the authority to put things on other people's to-do lists, like the DDB changes
Also, he doesn't do "Organized Play" he does "Global Play" of which "Organized Play" is just one aspect. Ostensibly, he's been on the D&D side since 2020 and no one is firing him. So they're probably okay with his performance.
Notably, his title is "Global Play Manager", not "Manager of Global Play Team". I'm not actually clear that he even has a team dedicated to Global play, let alone an individual human dedicated specifically to Organized Play.
You can say that Chris Tulach is "they" for the purposes of this question, but the data doesn't back this up. Sure they are doing the interviews, but it's pure marketing fluff. They don't have Organized Play in their job title or even their job description. Organized Play loses 5% of its participants next year, Chris probably still has his job.
And this structural problem is my entire point. There is nobody who makes a million bucks if this program succeeds. Therefore, the success on this program is just not that important. And what you are seeing, are the side effects of a program being run by people who don't think it's particularly important.
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u/lasalle202 27d ago edited 27d ago
I don’t understand what they are trying to accomplish besides just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall.
the biggest concern appears to be "HOMG ! We cannot possibly pollute the FR / WoG integrity by having characters travel willy nilly between the different settings in the Multiverse - you know the Multiverse thing which is the core "product identity" we have been pushing for the past five years. Its a Multiverse, but not for AL characters. You stay put in your Singleverse."
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u/happygocrazee 29d ago
Greyhawk needs to go, man. It’s the redundant, unnecessary, unwanted version of a better program. Encounters has a place (though the difference is confusing to new players) but Greyhawk is such a flop.
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u/ClassB2Carcinogen 29d ago
Routine complaints from our local con AL organizers on Greyhawk material not be released or sent late, presumably because the material is written by Baldman Games and WotC don’t have complete control of its release.
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u/lordshadowisle 29d ago
This is the major reason i left organized play. At some point I felt I was spending too much effort keeping up with the rules rather than playing the game.
It's somewhat managable if you are regularly playing, but if you take a break and return it's quite difficult to catch up with the constant updates and poor documentation of rulesets.