ooh interesting, for years I heard about AL but never looked into this, thanks

Thanks for the answer. 

AL is great, glad to see it getting more attention and being rehoused here where everything else is! Discord is all well and good for community chats but it’s a terrible place to have to go to hunt down basic information quickly.

AL has long suffered from a problem of being hard to find and hard to understand, which sort of defeats the purpose of how it is also a great way for new players to get involved. 

I think an “organized play” tab on the right or at the very least a link from the sources tab is important. 

My bigger-picture two cents that probably no one will care about: organized play was at its best when Wizards put out one big adventure hardcover a year and the AL season was based on content related to that hardcover.  I love the Dungeoncraft program because it’s a great way for us to make our own AL adventures, but I miss the big seasons. There’s no reason we can’t have both.

Seems like wizards could consider putting out fewer books per year, with a higher focus on cohesion and quality of the one they do put out.

The inclusion of third party content here with some hype from wizards is a great and extremely low-cost way for them to have more stuff for people who want it, but having that one big flagship adventure with a thematically connected AL series of level 1-20 adventures seemed to pull the community together with more of a shared experience. 

Some really great books in recent years have kind of vanished in the relentless drive to put out more and more content, which no doubt comes from a corporate pressure to put out more quantity, sometimes at the expense of quality.

At the same time they’ve had to cut staff for different corporate pressures, mostly due to losses in other parts of the parent company. So with a leaner staff you’re really much better served to focus on quality, not quantity. Leave the quantity up to the masses of third party creators and take your cut by selling it here or on the guild, seems like a no brainer to me.

Anyway,  I have no say in such things and people with MBA’s do seem to know how to ruin everything for short term gain, so I’m sure this point of view will be ignored by anyone with actual power.  

I hope this means WotC is going to stop neglecting AL. Someone tell a marketing exec that AL nights in a local game store is still one of the best ways to get people into the hobby who don't know anyone who plays D&D.

Bring back commissioned Season Adventures! Tell the authors to write more adventures that are easy to run at a table and can easily fit within a tight 4 hour time slot. Big open ended adventures which are great for home games, but very difficult for AL DMs with tight time slots who need to finish the adventure in a single session.

Pay an intern to fix the errors in the previous season adventures! Just ask in the D&D AL Discord channel which adventures have errors and we'll point them out for you for FREE!

At the very least, highlight the "good" community AL adventures on DMsguild! There are so many CCC adventures that it's hard for an AL organizer or DM to sort through and find the gems. Earlier in this thread someone mentions "Premiere Organizers". If they are the replacement for season adventures, they should be featured in their own section on DMsguild. Meanwhile, you should also run a monthly "Featured" CCC adventure for the rest of the authors, you can make it a contest with the "prize" being featured on the site.

All you need is one single employee dedicated to AL with the support to update the website in a timely manner to do all of this. Give the responsibility to Ma'at Crook and give them the support they need to update the website easily. You have a passionate community willing to do a ton of free work, DO SOMETHING WITH IT.

There probably needs to be an option in the main navigation for Adventurers League. I was telling a friend this was on DDB, but he could not find it because it was now buried under new posts. Perhaps a new option under Sources?

Quote from Osgood >>

There probably needs to be an option in the main navigation for Adventurers League. I was telling a friend this was on DDB, but he could not find it because it was now buried under new posts. Perhaps a new option under Sources?

 An entry under the New Player Guide section wouldn't go amiss. AL is a great place for new players to come in and try out D&D and meet new people

I mentioned that to them on Facebook but I don't think they got it. :D

Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think it would be great to have pro designers make the AL “season” that lines up with the latest big books, and make the DC program much more open and flexible (seems to be moving in that direction, at least?)

Quote from CaptainRelyk >>

the Dungeoncraft system is not great tbh 

it restrains people’s creativity and forces them to connect to the current season

there are unfair deadlines. Want to create an adventure set in the feywild? Sorry, you have to create it and publish it before the deadline next month!  

Just so you know, you can set DCs in Chult right now. They have Forgotten Realms opened as an evergreen dungeoncraft. No deadlines, and no restrictions on areas within the realms OTHER that it can't be a place that one of the POs is controlling. (So no Moonshae Islands or Bandit Kingdoms.)

While you can't do spelljammer anymore or the Feywild, you could connect to current season and have it in the border kingdoms of the Feywild, or have a spelljamming vessel dock and have the players end up in a border town or Sigil.

One of the fun things I've done the DC program is find a way around restrictions, they tend to breed creativity.

Anyhow, sounds like you should look at the latest rules, they have everything you've asked for.

Quote from CaptainRelyk >>

 

I wanted to make a DC set in spelljammer but I didn’t have the time right now to do so. And frankly, I didn’t want to rush through it and create a horribly made adventure 

I really wanted to make a spelljammer adventure but now I can’t. It’s stupid and unfair as hell 

and there’s a difference between “breeding creativity” and having unfair as hell deadlines and constantly changing seasons that make DC almost impossible to make, much less ones that are well written 

You literally had a post in this conversation complaining about how not everyone wants to deal with space-clowns and beholders and such, and how you wanted to make an adventure in Chult.  Now you don't want to make an adventure in Chult, but want to make it in Spelljammer?  Are you actually interested in making a DC?  :)   

I say that as a joke, but honestly, you have all of the Forgotten Realms to write your adventure in, you can even make mention of Spelljamming... you just can't go off-planet. If you want an example of a Forgotten Realms adventure with spelljamming elements, look at the tier2 DDAL stuff from season 10. (Heck, I wrote one that had a spelljamming vessel in it in season 10, I had no idea that Spelljammer would be coming out in a few years.)

Now, as far as the "Crunch" -- we had over a year between when the option opened up, right when the book came out. They even extended the deadline because they had a delay at getting the updated docs for planescape out, so we had a long long time to do spelljammer adventures. I'll tell you from my own experience: players are looking for something OTHER than spelljammer right now, so ... It's a good time to switch anyhow.

And speaking as a serial procrastinator, you can certainly finish in a year. I finished my first one for this season December 2022, and I finished three more December 2023. (though my editing on the last three is bad, and I should feel bad about it.)

Just... trust me, give it a shot if you are actually interested. Clench your jaw a little, force yourself to look at it with as positive a light as you can, and you might find that you enjoy the process a bit more than you think you will.

AL is an organized play campaign, they've had seasons for quite some time. I mean, you remember "Season 1" and "Season 2" and so on.

They really encouraged us to PLAY the latest stuff, and we did. And they were tied to the books, and I don't remember it being much of a big deal.

Now that they've let the community create content, this is just a way to encourage us to create content in a similar fashion.

Looking at the closest analog, Pathfinder Society, they also have seasons. (When I had last checked, they didn't have a similar "PFS legal" program to the DungeonCraft program, but they might by now.)

You are free to write Planescape adventures, however. Just write it for the DM's Guild and publish it. AL is only a small subset of the overall DM's Guild titles, and you're free to use whatever you want for that, with a lot more open restrictions. (and they're pretty darned open, albeit you can't write for Greyhawk right now, for example). But you can mix Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, and Forgotten Realms all in one adventure if you wanted to, in that program.

However, "most of the DCs are made being rushed and poorly made." Hey, dude, we work hard on those. :)  I know I did rush my last few, but my first was something that took a lot of effort, I had help from lots of people, and I'm really proud of it. And I know that a lot of other DCs are also labors of love. We're not getting paid very much for the work, so you know that if we're doing it, it's because we really want to see our stuff played. (Look up "Lone Survivors" for the one I mentioned here, but you can search my handle and find the rest of mine.)

But... I dunno, we just kind of disagree about the fact that there "shouldn't be a deadline."  Having a deadline keeps things fresh, and I don't mind it. You do, and I can accept that you do. That's fine. :) I mean, I certainly hate the deadline when it comes rushing at me full steam ahead, but in an abstract sense, I don't mind them.

But I did want to make sure you knew about the Forgotten Realms being wide open and without deadline. That should provide you plenty of landscape to set at least one of the adventures you said you want to make, let me know when you do, I'll definitely check it out.

Maybe a visual guide would help, I couldn't find the toggle to indicate a character was AL to only see supported AL options, nor the AL log to keep the record of the sessions, items, and level up controls.

I didn't see any mention of those features in this article?

 Anyone know where I can find an up to date logsheet?

The player's guide says "You should use a character log to track rewards and note any other important information from play of an adventure. See “Adventurers League Resources & Links” on the D&D Beyond Adventurers League Forum for more information."  but the post in question says "D&D Session Log - available in May"

It's currently late June.

I can't even find the old one since the Yawning Portal site is down now.

EDIT: I found the old one. Last updated 2019. 🙃

I'm new to online D&D. Does D&D Beyond have it's own built-in system for video and chat, or does a secondary system need to be used? 

I've no personal experience but You may want to look into Roll20 and Discord. It's currently in Beta but at some point should be free to access Roll20 via Discord.

I’m looking for ALPHB version 14.1. Baffling that it would be posted on a third-party walled garden site before appearing here. 

Nope, not at all. POs existed long before the AL team stopped creating storylines. Baldman Games and GameHole Con were POs with their own dedicated corners of the Forgotten Realms waaayyy back during season 7 in 2018.

The PO program is more like a replacement for the orignal version of the CCC program, when it was still "Convention Created Content", and only a couple handfuls of organzations were able to create adventures, before it evolved into the "Community Created Content" program right around the same time the PO program kicked off.

The replacement for the AL team-created seasonal storylines is the DRW storyline, which is done by Baldman Games these days, but is kinda incidental to them being a PO. Baldman still makes their Moonshae Isles storylines too. 

Quote from Aureos >>

I’m looking for ALPHB version 14.1. Baffling that it would be posted on a third-party walled garden site before appearing here. 

 Heartily agreed. Weird that the forum post dedicated to collecting these rules and pdfs in one location is controlled by a WotC employee who doesn't bother updating the links when said rules and pdfs get updated. That post could be one stop shopping for all your AL needs, but nah, I gotta go crawling through discord posts and hope I find the latest docs instead.