As a DM, how far off the hard cover storyline may I go? This would be a more in depth world, but deviates from the AL 'same experience' mantra for the same hard cover. For example, in Lost Mines of Phandelver:
Would using the doppelgängers to trick players be okay?
Would it be okay to write the doppelgängers in as those that had wronged the characters in the past based on their background?
Would it be okay to write the Spider send out other creatures to hunt down the party as they rise in power to force them to go to the mine?
Is it okay to have different NPCs points them in directions or offer rewards that should be offered by other NPCs because the story makes more sense or fits the players style better?
I would not do things like allow the characters to befriend and ride a dragon like a pet because they say that they 'knew' the dragon in their back story, but I assume it's okay to deviate from the word for word of the adventure.
My first impression is that if the DM runs the adventure with more colour, repositions story lines and secrets, and adjusts NPCs, that is fine. The DM has the right to set the story as is appropriate, keep the game rolling, and maximize the fun. Characters aren't more rewarded than AL allows and the story is richer.
The downside to this is if players move tables or disappear, the storyline can evaporate or be a dead end of time investment.
Keep in mind that you will be playing under the season 9 AL rules at this point.
The AL DMG says:
"Playing the Dungeon Master You have the most important role. You provide the narrative and bring the words on the pages of the adventure to life. While telling the story, it is also your responsibility to make everyone feel welcomed at the table creating a fun and fair environment. You’re Empowered. Make decisions about how the group interacts with the adventure; adjust or improvise but maintain the adventure’s spirit. You can’t implement new rules. Challenge Your Players. Gauge the experience level of your players, as well as what they seem to enjoy in a game and attempt to deliver what they’re after. Everyone should be able to shine. You can adjust the encounter by adding or removing thematically appropriate monsters. Keep the Adventure Moving. When the game gets bogged down, provide hints and clues to your players facing puzzles or engaging in combat and roleplay interactions that get frustrating. This gives players “little victories” for making good choices based on clues received. When playing within a given time constraint, such as at a convention, it is important to gauge the pacing of your game. It’s okay to make adjustments to the content when you get bogged down in order to promote a play experience that feels complete."
The key point is that you can adjust or improvise but you have to stick to the spirit of the adventure (how that is defined is somewhat up to the DM ... however, you can't just choose to do whatever you like within a setting ... you have to generally follow the plot and spirit of the adventure but if it works better for your group with certain NPCs in different areas or with somewhat different motivations that should be fine. On the other hand, if you take the entire adventure and convert it to an invasion of Phandelver by the drow where the villagers are being enslaved and the party has to try to save the village ... then all that's left are the names of the places and the spirit of the original adventure is lost. Basically small changes are likely fine, large ones that affect the entire story line of the module, likely aren't and it is up to the DM to decide the dividing line.
Deviating from the word for word adventure is fine, deviating from the "spirit of the adventure" is not.
As for moving to other tables, those characters can't play the same content. Their log sheet is marked with the chapter that you are playing in LMoP and that character can continue to play that chapter at your table as an on-going adventure but that character can't participate in that same chapter at any other table (even if they didn't complete it at yours) since it is already marked as played.
Here are some rules from the ALFAQ
"Can I Run Chapters as One-Off Adventures? Yes, but not individual encounters. This rule is designed to facilitate play."
If you are re-arranging things a bit then you need to stick within chapters - you can't pull encounters from one chapter to another.
"How Do Multiple Session Adventures Work? Whether due to time constraints, or adventure length, adventures take multiple sessions. Can Parts be Replayed? Characters can’t replay content but may continue content that they didn’t complete. That is, if a game runs exceedingly long and all players and the DM agree to meet the following weekend to pick up where they left off and finish the game. If this occurs, appropriate entries should be entered on logsheets to reflect this. Replaying a portion of an adventure you want to replay isn’t permitted."
So if you log chapter 1 of LMoP then you can continue it later but you can't play any part of chapter 1 with a different DM.
Also, keep in mind that in season 9, if a magic item drops, then all players at the table are permitted to take it. This could be an issue for an ongoing hardcover so you might want to see if the players want to voluntarily not use such a magic item. (For example, LMoP has gauntlets of ogre power - so it is possible that once it is found, then everyone could wind up with them).
Perfect. That's right in line with what I was thinking. I don't want the party going from Luskan to Neverwinter to Waterdeep and back to hunt down some dwarves relative that adds nothing to the story (mostly due to the time involved in preparing such places outside the sandbox), but introducing elements where the NPCs and villains already in the story act in certain ways seems entirely open. To me, the spirit of LMoP is an open adventure where players make choices inside a limited sandbox, the villains have limited time and communication lines to react, and the townsfolk can love or hate the adventurers. If they want to head into Neverwinter forest and explore based on a random mention of something, I'm all for that, too, but that has to be the party's choice.
Of course, I'm sure I'll get some feedback from some players about improvising, but if they want to do a verbatim adventure with no sandbox, I'm not the DM for them. I know some players that have done Mad Mage three times trying to perfect certain scenes or encounters.
As for magic items and Season 9 stuff, I'm clear on all of that. As for my opinion, the new rules fix a lot of problems. I have seen too many people wander in for their first time, realize the rules are so restrictive that the fun is drained from the game, and walk away after the first or second session. The main problem now is that those people are going to stick around and the whole place will be crowded. Good problem?
As far as I know you can play it as a sandbox with some exceptions ...
1) If the players decide to go somewhere that the module doesn't have content for ... you can't make it up. For example, if the Neverwinter Wood is on a map in the module but there is nothing there then you could potentially move an encounter from the same chapter to the new location but you can't create entirely new encounters (though some modules include random encounters for various areas ... ToA is a good example) which gives the DM a lot more leeway.
2) You are't supposed to cherry pick encounters. The goal of this is to avoid folks playing content only for the magic item drops or similar reasons. If you are going to play chapter 1 then you can play it "organically" so that the players run into whatever they run into based on their decisions but you can't say ... "We'll just play the 3rd encounter in chapter 1 since it drops something cool then move on to chapter 2" ... at least you're not supposed to do that. In practice, it is unlikely for anyone to notice and call you on it.
3) As the AL DMG says, you are supposed to stick to the "spirit of the adventure" which leaves room for a very large range of interpretation, especially in the hardcovers. I generally take it to mean, play the module in an organic way, feel free to move encounters around, maybe NPCs depending on the plot line ... but don't make wholesale changes to the plot so that the basic idea of the module is lost. It is still a sandbox but one in which the basic plot line and NPCs are already defined. Improvisation consists more of adjusting the location and order of the content to fit the party and their decisions (and also the creatures/numbers in an encounter to make it fun/balanced) but it doesn't allow for making up NPCs, encounters and a completely different plot line with only the location as the common element. That's my take on it anyway.
As for season 9 rules, they seem fine to me so far but now I have to convert all my characters :) ... at least they moved the Legendary Items into tier 4 only (I had a couple of characters in tier 3 with Staff of the Magi and Cloak of Invisibility which were really nice but significantly affected the play balance in tier 3).
It will be interesting to see how many folks level up on each adventure in tier 2+ and how many choose to play 2 adventures or more/level.
1) above, "If players decide..." I completely agree with this for several reasons:
If the players wind up in other regions, any prep you have done is out the window. In LMoP, I would think of trying to put them back on track by having a few new NPCs or enemies guide them onwards or moving the 'secrets' or encounters as you suggested above. LMoP isn't the best example because the goal is pretty clear. That said, if the characters had someone or an NPC die and needed to bring them back and had to go to Neverwinter, well, that's up to them. I think I would just gloss over it and fast forward scene, you are back in Phandalin.
I have seen DMs just 'wing it' and it winds up being a poorly prepared merry go round. In Ghost of Saltmarsh, we go to the Dwarves mine, but there isn't anything there. I think the DM tried to smash part of an adventure in there, but it winds up being half-baked; the monsters just have zero motivation for being there beyond eating hapless miners. After several sessions of this, the storyline is lost, every walk in a forest winds up having some monster encounter that does nothing for the story, and there is no thread tracking what enemies or NPCs are up to that could influence the party.
Players are going to be disappointed to spend two or three sessions in an area and then get nothing for it because the DM isn't at liberty to hand out magical items at whim.
2) Cherry picking - it's really hard to have much need to favour the players who are born to MIN/MAX. Even without magical items, they are pretty potent. Having season 9 access to every item that comes your way ensures that players can get their fill. We had a player do this (he had played MM before) and force us to go kill some Drow in Mad Mage and it was a terrible encounter. There was no reason to do it other than to fulfill one player's whims.
3) Agreed. So in the new Essentials adventure, there is a mention of a Lord of Neverwinter hunting down the kings relatives. It never gets mentioned again. Running it outside AL, this has huge potential as a secret. Inside AL, this doesn't work, but I see it as the potential to add an NPC to guide them back to their mission or move them to a point. If they are thinking of staying in Neverwinter, oops, you hooked up with NPC X, and it turns out a large war party is chasing him down, and then move the party back to an encounter in the book.
The character advancement will be interesting. Tier 2, eight hours a level, you can move pretty fast, but what if some players hold back to do more Tier 2 and someone uses downtime and moves straight through? Then you could have a level 11 with a level 5 player that just sits down one evening? Let me just balance that one out... Yep, mo rules mo problems...
The character advancement will be interesting. Tier 2, eight hours a level, you can move pretty fast, but what if some players hold back to do more Tier 2 and someone uses downtime and moves straight through? Then you could have a level 11 with a level 5 player that just sits down one evening? Let me just balance that one out... Yep, mo rules mo problems...
Advancement in a hardcover is one level every 8 hours of play. This can work ok but the DM has to be a bit focused on covering content at times. If the adventure gets too focused on side quests or doing other things then the time can go by without substantial progress being made in the module. In season 8, the DM could reduce the ACP if the party wasn't making progress towards goals but in season 9 I don't think the DM has the same liberty to slow down leveling.
Mixed tier parties are possible in hardcovers in AL but only if the characters have been playing the content all along. A level 11 for example couldn't just drop into a tier 2 hardcover chapter unless they were continuing the chapter from a previous session in which they were level 10. So hopefully, a level 5 and level 11 character in the same content won't happen very often if at all.
So far in my experience playing hardcovers in AL, we have often had a core group of 4-7 players that make most sessions with the other 0-3 spots filling up with tier appropriate drop ins. Most of the folks dropping in also choose to play a character of comparable level to the rest of the party (+/-1 level) since most players want to have a good time and are aware of the challenges of a wide spread in party levels. The core group tends to choose to level up together and the drop ins are usually easy to manage. I think we had one session with a level 10 when we level 5 and another session with a level 5 when we were level 9 and both sessions were fine.
I've played ToA and am now playing GSM and both are good and well run. The adventure hooks are pretty well laid out so the characters don't have a lot of motivation to run off and randomly explore ignoring the module content. However, if a player wants to cause trouble intentionally for the DM by pretending a character reason to ignore the plot line then that is more of a player issue and might be a good basis for a chat between the DM and the player. D&D, especially in AL, requires a little bit of cooperation between the players/characters and the DM to keep things on track.
I cant really provide much insight as to DMing but I can give an example of what happened with my dedicated AL group last year.
We were playing princes of the apocalypse and fought our way into the cult of stone, continued pushing down into the base and killed an umber hulk in a single round. Now none of our magic users had dispel magic or knock so we couldnt get passed magically sealed doors. So we bumbled along until we found a door we could open instead of resting and walked right into the boss. Well we all died. However keeping with the flavor of the cult of stone they wanted to show us their power. Well we got revived/escaped tried to stop one of the princes being awakened and also failed. A scroll of teleportation was all that saved us. Well half our party ended up in the fey wild and half in the city of brass. From here we ended up in the red wizards maze getting weapons to help us combat what we were to face. Now because we got sent ba k to the fey wild while the others went back to the city of brass and back to the Material plane, 5 years passed before we returned from the fey wild. Waterdeep the last major city. Neverwinter was just destroyed. The rest of the campaign involved elements from storm kings thunder and tomb of annihilation. This was our AL game. We all are a bunch of min-maxers that play our characters to the T we got our butts handed to us more often than not but the campaign was glorious. We had a random join us once he died superfast.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
As a DM, how far off the hard cover storyline may I go? This would be a more in depth world, but deviates from the AL 'same experience' mantra for the same hard cover. For example, in Lost Mines of Phandelver:
My first impression is that if the DM runs the adventure with more colour, repositions story lines and secrets, and adjusts NPCs, that is fine. The DM has the right to set the story as is appropriate, keep the game rolling, and maximize the fun. Characters aren't more rewarded than AL allows and the story is richer.
The downside to this is if players move tables or disappear, the storyline can evaporate or be a dead end of time investment.
Keep in mind that you will be playing under the season 9 AL rules at this point.
The AL DMG says:
"Playing the Dungeon Master
You have the most important role. You provide the narrative and bring the words on the pages of the adventure to life. While telling the story, it is also your responsibility to make everyone feel welcomed at the table creating a fun and fair environment.
You’re Empowered. Make decisions about how the group interacts with the adventure; adjust or improvise but maintain the adventure’s spirit. You can’t implement new rules.
Challenge Your Players. Gauge the experience level of your players, as well as what they seem to enjoy in a game and attempt to deliver what they’re after. Everyone should be able to shine. You can adjust the encounter by adding or removing thematically appropriate monsters.
Keep the Adventure Moving. When the game gets bogged down, provide hints and clues to your players facing puzzles or engaging in combat and roleplay interactions that get frustrating. This gives players “little victories” for making good choices based on clues received. When playing within a given time constraint, such as at a convention, it is important to gauge the pacing of your game. It’s okay to make adjustments to the content when you get bogged down in order to promote a play experience that feels complete."
The key point is that you can adjust or improvise but you have to stick to the spirit of the adventure (how that is defined is somewhat up to the DM ... however, you can't just choose to do whatever you like within a setting ... you have to generally follow the plot and spirit of the adventure but if it works better for your group with certain NPCs in different areas or with somewhat different motivations that should be fine. On the other hand, if you take the entire adventure and convert it to an invasion of Phandelver by the drow where the villagers are being enslaved and the party has to try to save the village ... then all that's left are the names of the places and the spirit of the original adventure is lost. Basically small changes are likely fine, large ones that affect the entire story line of the module, likely aren't and it is up to the DM to decide the dividing line.
Deviating from the word for word adventure is fine, deviating from the "spirit of the adventure" is not.
As for moving to other tables, those characters can't play the same content. Their log sheet is marked with the chapter that you are playing in LMoP and that character can continue to play that chapter at your table as an on-going adventure but that character can't participate in that same chapter at any other table (even if they didn't complete it at yours) since it is already marked as played.
Here are some rules from the ALFAQ
"Can I Run Chapters as One-Off Adventures?
Yes, but not individual encounters. This rule is designed to facilitate play."
If you are re-arranging things a bit then you need to stick within chapters - you can't pull encounters from one chapter to another.
"How Do Multiple Session Adventures Work?
Whether due to time constraints, or adventure length, adventures take multiple sessions.
Can Parts be Replayed?
Characters can’t replay content but may continue content that they didn’t complete. That is, if a game runs exceedingly long and all players and the DM agree to meet the following weekend to pick up where they left off and finish the game. If this occurs, appropriate entries should be entered on logsheets to reflect this. Replaying a portion of an adventure you want to replay isn’t permitted."
So if you log chapter 1 of LMoP then you can continue it later but you can't play any part of chapter 1 with a different DM.
Also, keep in mind that in season 9, if a magic item drops, then all players at the table are permitted to take it. This could be an issue for an ongoing hardcover so you might want to see if the players want to voluntarily not use such a magic item. (For example, LMoP has gauntlets of ogre power - so it is possible that once it is found, then everyone could wind up with them).
Perfect. That's right in line with what I was thinking. I don't want the party going from Luskan to Neverwinter to Waterdeep and back to hunt down some dwarves relative that adds nothing to the story (mostly due to the time involved in preparing such places outside the sandbox), but introducing elements where the NPCs and villains already in the story act in certain ways seems entirely open. To me, the spirit of LMoP is an open adventure where players make choices inside a limited sandbox, the villains have limited time and communication lines to react, and the townsfolk can love or hate the adventurers. If they want to head into Neverwinter forest and explore based on a random mention of something, I'm all for that, too, but that has to be the party's choice.
Of course, I'm sure I'll get some feedback from some players about improvising, but if they want to do a verbatim adventure with no sandbox, I'm not the DM for them. I know some players that have done Mad Mage three times trying to perfect certain scenes or encounters.
As for magic items and Season 9 stuff, I'm clear on all of that. As for my opinion, the new rules fix a lot of problems. I have seen too many people wander in for their first time, realize the rules are so restrictive that the fun is drained from the game, and walk away after the first or second session. The main problem now is that those people are going to stick around and the whole place will be crowded. Good problem?
As far as I know you can play it as a sandbox with some exceptions ...
1) If the players decide to go somewhere that the module doesn't have content for ... you can't make it up. For example, if the Neverwinter Wood is on a map in the module but there is nothing there then you could potentially move an encounter from the same chapter to the new location but you can't create entirely new encounters (though some modules include random encounters for various areas ... ToA is a good example) which gives the DM a lot more leeway.
2) You are't supposed to cherry pick encounters. The goal of this is to avoid folks playing content only for the magic item drops or similar reasons. If you are going to play chapter 1 then you can play it "organically" so that the players run into whatever they run into based on their decisions but you can't say ... "We'll just play the 3rd encounter in chapter 1 since it drops something cool then move on to chapter 2" ... at least you're not supposed to do that. In practice, it is unlikely for anyone to notice and call you on it.
3) As the AL DMG says, you are supposed to stick to the "spirit of the adventure" which leaves room for a very large range of interpretation, especially in the hardcovers. I generally take it to mean, play the module in an organic way, feel free to move encounters around, maybe NPCs depending on the plot line ... but don't make wholesale changes to the plot so that the basic idea of the module is lost. It is still a sandbox but one in which the basic plot line and NPCs are already defined. Improvisation consists more of adjusting the location and order of the content to fit the party and their decisions (and also the creatures/numbers in an encounter to make it fun/balanced) but it doesn't allow for making up NPCs, encounters and a completely different plot line with only the location as the common element. That's my take on it anyway.
As for season 9 rules, they seem fine to me so far but now I have to convert all my characters :) ... at least they moved the Legendary Items into tier 4 only (I had a couple of characters in tier 3 with Staff of the Magi and Cloak of Invisibility which were really nice but significantly affected the play balance in tier 3).
It will be interesting to see how many folks level up on each adventure in tier 2+ and how many choose to play 2 adventures or more/level.
I really appreciate the reply:
1) above, "If players decide..." I completely agree with this for several reasons:
2) Cherry picking - it's really hard to have much need to favour the players who are born to MIN/MAX. Even without magical items, they are pretty potent. Having season 9 access to every item that comes your way ensures that players can get their fill. We had a player do this (he had played MM before) and force us to go kill some Drow in Mad Mage and it was a terrible encounter. There was no reason to do it other than to fulfill one player's whims.
3) Agreed. So in the new Essentials adventure, there is a mention of a Lord of Neverwinter hunting down the kings relatives. It never gets mentioned again. Running it outside AL, this has huge potential as a secret. Inside AL, this doesn't work, but I see it as the potential to add an NPC to guide them back to their mission or move them to a point. If they are thinking of staying in Neverwinter, oops, you hooked up with NPC X, and it turns out a large war party is chasing him down, and then move the party back to an encounter in the book.
The character advancement will be interesting. Tier 2, eight hours a level, you can move pretty fast, but what if some players hold back to do more Tier 2 and someone uses downtime and moves straight through? Then you could have a level 11 with a level 5 player that just sits down one evening? Let me just balance that one out... Yep, mo rules mo problems...
Advancement in a hardcover is one level every 8 hours of play. This can work ok but the DM has to be a bit focused on covering content at times. If the adventure gets too focused on side quests or doing other things then the time can go by without substantial progress being made in the module. In season 8, the DM could reduce the ACP if the party wasn't making progress towards goals but in season 9 I don't think the DM has the same liberty to slow down leveling.
Mixed tier parties are possible in hardcovers in AL but only if the characters have been playing the content all along. A level 11 for example couldn't just drop into a tier 2 hardcover chapter unless they were continuing the chapter from a previous session in which they were level 10. So hopefully, a level 5 and level 11 character in the same content won't happen very often if at all.
So far in my experience playing hardcovers in AL, we have often had a core group of 4-7 players that make most sessions with the other 0-3 spots filling up with tier appropriate drop ins. Most of the folks dropping in also choose to play a character of comparable level to the rest of the party (+/-1 level) since most players want to have a good time and are aware of the challenges of a wide spread in party levels. The core group tends to choose to level up together and the drop ins are usually easy to manage. I think we had one session with a level 10 when we level 5 and another session with a level 5 when we were level 9 and both sessions were fine.
I've played ToA and am now playing GSM and both are good and well run. The adventure hooks are pretty well laid out so the characters don't have a lot of motivation to run off and randomly explore ignoring the module content. However, if a player wants to cause trouble intentionally for the DM by pretending a character reason to ignore the plot line then that is more of a player issue and might be a good basis for a chat between the DM and the player. D&D, especially in AL, requires a little bit of cooperation between the players/characters and the DM to keep things on track.
I cant really provide much insight as to DMing but I can give an example of what happened with my dedicated AL group last year.
We were playing princes of the apocalypse and fought our way into the cult of stone, continued pushing down into the base and killed an umber hulk in a single round. Now none of our magic users had dispel magic or knock so we couldnt get passed magically sealed doors. So we bumbled along until we found a door we could open instead of resting and walked right into the boss. Well we all died. However keeping with the flavor of the cult of stone they wanted to show us their power. Well we got revived/escaped tried to stop one of the princes being awakened and also failed. A scroll of teleportation was all that saved us. Well half our party ended up in the fey wild and half in the city of brass. From here we ended up in the red wizards maze getting weapons to help us combat what we were to face. Now because we got sent ba k to the fey wild while the others went back to the city of brass and back to the Material plane, 5 years passed before we returned from the fey wild. Waterdeep the last major city. Neverwinter was just destroyed. The rest of the campaign involved elements from storm kings thunder and tomb of annihilation. This was our AL game. We all are a bunch of min-maxers that play our characters to the T we got our butts handed to us more often than not but the campaign was glorious. We had a random join us once he died superfast.