Gold and Mundane Treasure. Any entry of a treasure or award with a monetary value is ignored.
My question is: does this include the gold the NPCs in the AL adventures offer characters to take on a quest? If so, what's there (besides just the desire to do good) to motivate the character to take on the quest?
My question is: does this include the gold the NPCs in the AL adventures offer characters to take on a quest? If so, what's there (besides just the desire to do good) to motivate the character to take on the quest?
Yes and nothing (not even faction anymore).
Your character is getting treasure checkpoints so they must be cognizant of some reward, but treasure checkpoints don't make sense in-game.
Gold and Mundane Treasure. Any entry of a treasure or award with a monetary value is ignored.
My question is: does this include the gold the NPCs in the AL adventures offer characters to take on a quest? If so, what's there (besides just the desire to do good) to motivate the character to take on the quest?
Gets even better. Here is gold you need to pay for the prisoner release. Oh wait, cannot give that to you. You have to pay with the gold you have not earned yet, which means you cannot progress on adventure so you cannot get TP or AP, which means you cannot do anything.
Also some parts of rules say ignore treasure, other parts say only during session. Rules so badly written
To me the point is to not worry about the details.
Story wise the NPC offers the party a bag of gold to do a task. It no longer matters how much is *in* that bag, just that there is a bag of gold. If you don't take the task you don't progress the story and so get no Treasure Points or Story Points.
If you take the bag of unknown amount of gold, at the end of of the quest you get the appropriate Story Points for character progress and the bag had an appropriate amount of Treasure Points.
If you needed money to pay off the prisoners, if it's effectively a Quest Item, and the bag included enough gold to handle the task.
My only problem with the Treasure Points is handling material components for all your spells and having enough liquid gold to get basic unimportant items.
Getting gold from leveling and Treasure Points isn't problematic to me. Most of the time if you are paying gold out of pocket in an adventure, it's before you get the reward anyways. WotC wants players to be frugal, and I have little issue with that. I figure a rich adventurer has no real reason to stay an adventurer for long.
As I see it, the abilities you learn on leveling up are just as abstract as the new rules concerning gold. Why should it realistically take a Kobold Cleric until level 4 to get the healer feat when a Variant Human Rogue could start level 1 with it?
There are some things that are abstracted in D&D to begin with, and AL decided to continue as such with a number of their rule changes as of the beginning of this season.
Can I be the first (that I can find) to say that the timing of all this really stinks?
Two weeks after AL makes the change so that all mention of gaining gold in an adventure is ignored, they release the new adventure, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, where the end goal is to find (and presumably keep) 500,000 gp. At least, that is what today's cover article is implying.
Thanks for playing, here is your 4 TP (which you can convert into 200 gp).
Your character takes on the quest to earn the gold and other rewards. This is the character motivation. They need the gold.
However, on average over the time of their adventures they have expenses as well. They have to pay for food, lodging, unexpected expenses and other things during the time between adventures (when they don't specifically spend downtime on different activities). When you average out the earnings from adventuring less the cost of living then on average the characters earn a certain amount of gold for each level and this amount increases with level.
The revised system doesn't give the character the gold for a specific adventure ... this is replaced by the average net gold the character would receive for adventuring less living expenses.
I realize this is a rationaliztion of the revised system ... however, from a CHARACTER (not player) perspective, they are STILL motivated by the gold or other rewards they receive for an adventure. However, from a DDAL stand point, the character is rewarded the average income that is the net of their adventuring income less cost of living expenses.
--------------
However, if you want some disproportionate rewards you can still play White Plume Mountain from Tales of the Yawning Portal hardcover since it rewards 24TP and several unlocks from one adventure for turning in the three weapons.
how are we suppose to buy faction rewards then, they are only given as gold amounts. So amusing I reach the required faction level their is no feasible way to afford them.
How are spells casters supposed to even function in season 8? Like there are spells that that require gold to even use.. how can the spellcasters do that if they do not even get gold? It make's no sense to me at all.
How are spells casters supposed to even function in season 8? Like there are spells that that require gold to even use.. how can the spellcasters do that if they do not even get gold? It make's no sense to me at all.
How are spells casters supposed to even function in season 8? Like there are spells that that require gold to even use.. how can the spellcasters do that if they do not even get gold? It make's no sense to me at all.
Generally, they won't survive. So hopefully in Season 9 the powers that be will back track a little on the gold allowed. Like, max per level; as is going from level 2 to level 3 the max you can accumulate is 300 gold.. Or some such number.
But on that note, I just theory-crafted a bladesinger up to level 20 that never had to pay for a spell. He only used the two freebies per level. Which means his only expense is the occasional component.
[Contingency] - a statuette of yourself carved from ivory and decorated with gems worth at least 1,500 gp
[Find Familiar] - 10 gp worth of charcoal, incense, and herbs that must be consumed by fire in a brass brazier
[Forcecage] - ruby dust worth 1,500 gp
[Identify] - a pearl worth at least 100 gp
[Plane Shift] - a forked, metal rod worth at least 250 gp, attuned to a particular plane of existence
[True Seeing] - an ointment for the eyes that costs 25 gp; is made from mushroom powder, saffron, and fat; and is consumed by the spell
So 10 and 25 per casting of Find Familiar and True Seeing. Otherwise a one time charge for a few more spells. In the end, it will take a quite a bit of cash, but not breaking the bank.
Yet another reason to dump AL after you've met enough friends through it to go homebrew.
As always this is a personal choice.
Here are some of the reasons I play AL
1) I like being able to play every week and choose the night/nights that best fits my schedule. My local game store runs games Sunday, Thursday, Friday and every other Monday.
2) I have a job, wife and kids. If I can't make a session I can just pull my name off the signup list online freeing a spot for someone else.No one gets mad. My schedule doesn't interfere with anyone else's desire to play. I don't have to juggle scheduling with 3 to 8 other people and then have to decide whether the group plays or not depending on who can show up.
3) I can play my AL characters in any AL game anywhere. If I happen to be on a business trip, I can drop in a local game store and play if I have the time.
4) I get an opportunity to meet new people. Every AL game may have the same or different players and even if the players are the same the characters may be different. This lets you get comfortable with the people but also opens up the range of role playing opportunities since you aren't playing with the same party all the time.
5) It is still fun playing D&D. These days I don't typically have full days or weekends to play so a 4 hour session works perfectly and the AL modules (even the hardcovers) can allow your character to pop in and out. This hurts continuity in some sense but the set of AL modules you play can usually be strung together into a consistent story line if you really want to ... it is up to the player though to have it make sense. Not up to the DM.
I will say that if you can find a group of friends who can meet regularly and are interested in playing then that can be a better play experience. On the other hand, I've been playing a hard cover in AL at the local game store with about 4 players who have made most sessions and a number of people who have popped in and out. It has been great so far and bridges the gap between AL and a home group since there is more continuity. The main difference is that most local friend groups go through phases of interest, folks drop in and out and so campaigns often end at levels 8-13. On the other hand, AL runs all the way to level 20 with their existing content and I know several folks with level 20 characters from AL play. So if you want to play a character to high levels, your odds are probably better in AL than elsewhere (unless you know the folks you are playing with very well).
Finally, on season 8 rewards, so far ACP, TCP and gold have worked out ok for the characters I have.
General comments:
- ACP seems to be a bit too quick in my experience. It might be nice to have 3 adventures/level at the higher levels rather than 2 but the math is a lot less friendly and 4 adventures/level is probably too slow.
- TCP is ok and avoids the treasure distribution issues of the previous version. Yes ... it requires some suspension of disbelief or a bit of creative story telling to explain why there were several identical magic items acquired from a given adventure but from a play perspective I find it much better than the frustration of watching other characters take a magic item they couldn't use so they could trade it over a character that could actually use it very effectively.
- Gold. The basic idea of a certain amount of gold/level makes sense. Your character earns gold adventuring, your character spends gold on lifestyle, lodging, food, bribes :), etc. Over the course of a level you net a certain amount of gold for your adventures less your expenses. Income goes up faster than expenses so your net gold increases as you go up in levels. My character still does adventures to earn gold even though the module may not reward gold directly.
I don't find it a big deal except for two particular issues ...
1) Armor - half-plate and full-plate armor costs 750gp and 1500gp respectively. These are 15 or 30 treasure points if converted to gold. By the time you can afford either of these,. the magical versions are typically less treasure points so what is the point?
2) Spells.
a) Spell material component costs. These get expensive in some cases and the character in many cases doesn't have the money to purchase them. A good example is revivfy - 3rd level spell - available to a 5th level cleric - that costs 300gp in diamonds every time it is cast. A 5th level cleric will typically not have enough coins to revive a team mate which is probably one of their key class abilities.
b) Spell copying. Copying a spell costs 50gp/spell level. Copying spells from other wizards at the table is a common way to enhance your spell book. Alternatively, you purchase a spell scroll and copy that to your spell book. Either way, any significant number of spells is going to cost a lot in the long run.
The main issues with spell costs is that they have the greatest impact on just the one class. Wizards. So I would hope that AL will address this issue of gold for the next season. The gold constraint doesn't make wizards unplayable, far from it, but it does limit their versatility a bit. However, the component costs affect all casters .. and may limit spell choices or use for some cases.
I'll argue in favor of advancement points as that is much easier to track and calculate than XP especially if they would just out a web chart for advancement. You can create on in excel in a minute so just publish an official one.
Treasure points - I understand the reasoning but they definitely need to put more thought into it. I played through Princes of the Apocalypse, LMoP, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Storm Kings Thunder, and even Tomb of Annihilation and ended up with more magic items for every character played than would have been earned with the current TP system. I'm also not one to grab everything or grab for trade.
The TP should also be adjusted based on the world setting. The current TP system may be fine for Eberon, but the Realms is a high fantasy setting with lots of high level magic types and by extension lots and lots of magic items.
The TP tiers needs to be addressed. Why isn't there an official conversion between tiers for TP? The 1 TP = 50 GP regardless of TP tier. This shows they can't be bothered to do basic math, again.
Low-key the system for gold/items is very cumbersome.
While I fully understand the meta reason for limiting these things, in reality it just makes the game very stale. "You kill the giant spider protecting the chest and in it you find... well, gold that you can't use and this magic item you can't use"
Very easily any gold/item found in a session should be useable in that session, if you wish to make it part of your character then you must pay the appropriate TP to take it to the next session. With the introduction of TP, gold is worthless to the players (legitimately worthless) because each item has a gold and TP cost as an arbitrary barrier. In fact the suspension of belief is broken further when your character gains X gold without any story reason and can "bribe" their way past a guard with money they found between sessions.
I understand this is ranty, but coming from non-AL games to AL games was and amazing experience until the concept of items/gold came up. It goes from being the best role playing game to a generic MMO with stupid long grinds that incentivise min-maxing because buying things for character flair is simply not viable.
Other than being able to play if you can find a group on your own, what is the appeal of AL?
Not being able to keep any of the treasure or magic items you find, and instead getting fixed participation points, seemed antithetical to the motivation for playing D&D.
I'm curious to read the opinions of long time "traditional" D&D players who have jumped head first into AL.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Kinbard Kroft: 32nd Lvl Arch Mage (1E/2E)
Grunk: 15th Lvl Barbarian/3rd Lvl Wizard (5E)
CT: 4th Lvl Wild Magic Sorcerer (5E)
Ezekiel Millwood: 11th Lvl GOO Warlock (5E)
Leif Loadstone: 3rd Lvl Circle of the Moon Druid
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In the season 8 ALDMG, it states:
My question is: does this include the gold the NPCs in the AL adventures offer characters to take on a quest? If so, what's there (besides just the desire to do good) to motivate the character to take on the quest?
Father. Gamer. Biker. Geek.
Yes and nothing (not even faction anymore).
Your character is getting treasure checkpoints so they must be cognizant of some reward, but treasure checkpoints don't make sense in-game.
Gets even better. Here is gold you need to pay for the prisoner release. Oh wait, cannot give that to you. You have to pay with the gold you have not earned yet, which means you cannot progress on adventure so you cannot get TP or AP, which means you cannot do anything.
Also some parts of rules say ignore treasure, other parts say only during session. Rules so badly written
To me the point is to not worry about the details.
Story wise the NPC offers the party a bag of gold to do a task. It no longer matters how much is *in* that bag, just that there is a bag of gold.
If you don't take the task you don't progress the story and so get no Treasure Points or Story Points.
If you take the bag of unknown amount of gold, at the end of of the quest you get the appropriate Story Points for character progress and the bag had an appropriate amount of Treasure Points.
If you needed money to pay off the prisoners, if it's effectively a Quest Item, and the bag included enough gold to handle the task.
My only problem with the Treasure Points is handling material components for all your spells and having enough liquid gold to get basic unimportant items.
Getting gold from leveling and Treasure Points isn't problematic to me. Most of the time if you are paying gold out of pocket in an adventure, it's before you get the reward anyways. WotC wants players to be frugal, and I have little issue with that. I figure a rich adventurer has no real reason to stay an adventurer for long.
As I see it, the abilities you learn on leveling up are just as abstract as the new rules concerning gold. Why should it realistically take a Kobold Cleric until level 4 to get the healer feat when a Variant Human Rogue could start level 1 with it?
There are some things that are abstracted in D&D to begin with, and AL decided to continue as such with a number of their rule changes as of the beginning of this season.
Can I be the first (that I can find) to say that the timing of all this really stinks?
Two weeks after AL makes the change so that all mention of gaining gold in an adventure is ignored, they release the new adventure, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, where the end goal is to find (and presumably keep) 500,000 gp. At least, that is what today's cover article is implying.
Thanks for playing, here is your 4 TP (which you can convert into 200 gp).
One way to think of it is the following:
Your character takes on the quest to earn the gold and other rewards. This is the character motivation. They need the gold.
However, on average over the time of their adventures they have expenses as well. They have to pay for food, lodging, unexpected expenses and other things during the time between adventures (when they don't specifically spend downtime on different activities). When you average out the earnings from adventuring less the cost of living then on average the characters earn a certain amount of gold for each level and this amount increases with level.
The revised system doesn't give the character the gold for a specific adventure ... this is replaced by the average net gold the character would receive for adventuring less living expenses.
I realize this is a rationaliztion of the revised system ... however, from a CHARACTER (not player) perspective, they are STILL motivated by the gold or other rewards they receive for an adventure. However, from a DDAL stand point, the character is rewarded the average income that is the net of their adventuring income less cost of living expenses.
--------------
However, if you want some disproportionate rewards you can still play White Plume Mountain from Tales of the Yawning Portal hardcover since it rewards 24TP and several unlocks from one adventure for turning in the three weapons.
I can see that we can buy magic items with tresure tokens, but am Iable to buy magic items with gold as well if i manage to colect enofe
No, and no.
No, you can only purchase magical items with TCP, not gold. Only mundane can be bought with gold.
And no, you will never accumulate enough gold to even try.
how are we suppose to buy faction rewards then, they are only given as gold amounts. So amusing I reach the required faction level their is no feasible way to afford them.
Faction purchases are turned off for season 8
How are spells casters supposed to even function in season 8? Like there are spells that that require gold to even use.. how can the spellcasters do that if they do not even get gold? It make's no sense to me at all.
How are spells casters supposed to even function in season 8? Like there are spells that that require gold to even use.. how can the spellcasters do that if they do not even get gold? It make's no sense to me at all.
Generally, they won't survive. So hopefully in Season 9 the powers that be will back track a little on the gold allowed. Like, max per level; as is going from level 2 to level 3 the max you can accumulate is 300 gold.. Or some such number.
But on that note, I just theory-crafted a bladesinger up to level 20 that never had to pay for a spell. He only used the two freebies per level. Which means his only expense is the occasional component.
So 10 and 25 per casting of Find Familiar and True Seeing. Otherwise a one time charge for a few more spells. In the end, it will take a quite a bit of cash, but not breaking the bank.
Summary: Stinks, but possible to exist.
Yet another reason to dump AL after you've met enough friends through it to go homebrew.
As always this is a personal choice.
Here are some of the reasons I play AL
1) I like being able to play every week and choose the night/nights that best fits my schedule. My local game store runs games Sunday, Thursday, Friday and every other Monday.
2) I have a job, wife and kids. If I can't make a session I can just pull my name off the signup list online freeing a spot for someone else.No one gets mad. My schedule doesn't interfere with anyone else's desire to play. I don't have to juggle scheduling with 3 to 8 other people and then have to decide whether the group plays or not depending on who can show up.
3) I can play my AL characters in any AL game anywhere. If I happen to be on a business trip, I can drop in a local game store and play if I have the time.
4) I get an opportunity to meet new people. Every AL game may have the same or different players and even if the players are the same the characters may be different. This lets you get comfortable with the people but also opens up the range of role playing opportunities since you aren't playing with the same party all the time.
5) It is still fun playing D&D. These days I don't typically have full days or weekends to play so a 4 hour session works perfectly and the AL modules (even the hardcovers) can allow your character to pop in and out. This hurts continuity in some sense but the set of AL modules you play can usually be strung together into a consistent story line if you really want to ... it is up to the player though to have it make sense. Not up to the DM.
I will say that if you can find a group of friends who can meet regularly and are interested in playing then that can be a better play experience. On the other hand, I've been playing a hard cover in AL at the local game store with about 4 players who have made most sessions and a number of people who have popped in and out. It has been great so far and bridges the gap between AL and a home group since there is more continuity. The main difference is that most local friend groups go through phases of interest, folks drop in and out and so campaigns often end at levels 8-13. On the other hand, AL runs all the way to level 20 with their existing content and I know several folks with level 20 characters from AL play. So if you want to play a character to high levels, your odds are probably better in AL than elsewhere (unless you know the folks you are playing with very well).
Finally, on season 8 rewards, so far ACP, TCP and gold have worked out ok for the characters I have.
General comments:
- ACP seems to be a bit too quick in my experience. It might be nice to have 3 adventures/level at the higher levels rather than 2 but the math is a lot less friendly and 4 adventures/level is probably too slow.
- TCP is ok and avoids the treasure distribution issues of the previous version. Yes ... it requires some suspension of disbelief or a bit of creative story telling to explain why there were several identical magic items acquired from a given adventure but from a play perspective I find it much better than the frustration of watching other characters take a magic item they couldn't use so they could trade it over a character that could actually use it very effectively.
- Gold. The basic idea of a certain amount of gold/level makes sense. Your character earns gold adventuring, your character spends gold on lifestyle, lodging, food, bribes :), etc. Over the course of a level you net a certain amount of gold for your adventures less your expenses. Income goes up faster than expenses so your net gold increases as you go up in levels. My character still does adventures to earn gold even though the module may not reward gold directly.
I don't find it a big deal except for two particular issues ...
1) Armor - half-plate and full-plate armor costs 750gp and 1500gp respectively. These are 15 or 30 treasure points if converted to gold. By the time you can afford either of these,. the magical versions are typically less treasure points so what is the point?
2) Spells.
a) Spell material component costs. These get expensive in some cases and the character in many cases doesn't have the money to purchase them. A good example is revivfy - 3rd level spell - available to a 5th level cleric - that costs 300gp in diamonds every time it is cast. A 5th level cleric will typically not have enough coins to revive a team mate which is probably one of their key class abilities.
b) Spell copying. Copying a spell costs 50gp/spell level. Copying spells from other wizards at the table is a common way to enhance your spell book. Alternatively, you purchase a spell scroll and copy that to your spell book. Either way, any significant number of spells is going to cost a lot in the long run.
The main issues with spell costs is that they have the greatest impact on just the one class. Wizards. So I would hope that AL will address this issue of gold for the next season. The gold constraint doesn't make wizards unplayable, far from it, but it does limit their versatility a bit. However, the component costs affect all casters .. and may limit spell choices or use for some cases.
My real issue: AUTOMATIC nothing needed to unlock Staff of the Magi. Talk about a problematic item. I stopped Dm AL because that was auto unlocked
I'll argue in favor of advancement points as that is much easier to track and calculate than XP especially if they would just out a web chart for advancement. You can create on in excel in a minute so just publish an official one.
Treasure points - I understand the reasoning but they definitely need to put more thought into it. I played through Princes of the Apocalypse, LMoP, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Storm Kings Thunder, and even Tomb of Annihilation and ended up with more magic items for every character played than would have been earned with the current TP system. I'm also not one to grab everything or grab for trade.
The TP should also be adjusted based on the world setting. The current TP system may be fine for Eberon, but the Realms is a high fantasy setting with lots of high level magic types and by extension lots and lots of magic items.
The TP tiers needs to be addressed. Why isn't there an official conversion between tiers for TP? The 1 TP = 50 GP regardless of TP tier. This shows they can't be bothered to do basic math, again.
I'll echo everyone else on the GP issue.
Low-key the system for gold/items is very cumbersome.
While I fully understand the meta reason for limiting these things, in reality it just makes the game very stale.
"You kill the giant spider protecting the chest and in it you find... well, gold that you can't use and this magic item you can't use"
Very easily any gold/item found in a session should be useable in that session, if you wish to make it part of your character then you must pay the appropriate TP to take it to the next session.
With the introduction of TP, gold is worthless to the players (legitimately worthless) because each item has a gold and TP cost as an arbitrary barrier.
In fact the suspension of belief is broken further when your character gains X gold without any story reason and can "bribe" their way past a guard with money they found between sessions.
I understand this is ranty, but coming from non-AL games to AL games was and amazing experience until the concept of items/gold came up.
It goes from being the best role playing game to a generic MMO with stupid long grinds that incentivise min-maxing because buying things for character flair is simply not viable.
Other than being able to play if you can find a group on your own, what is the appeal of AL?
Not being able to keep any of the treasure or magic items you find, and instead getting fixed participation points, seemed antithetical to the motivation for playing D&D.
I'm curious to read the opinions of long time "traditional" D&D players who have jumped head first into AL.