Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 jerryb78 Aug 20, 2014 13:14:07	Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I figured I would start a thread to discuss the Adventurer's League events from Gencon.  I'll start by saying that I had a great time overall playing D&D at the con.  The new edition is great, the organizers did a fine job, and the DM's did well as always.   I will try to give my overall impression of each event without spoiling anything.  My apologies if I'm overly vague, but I know that a lot of people haven't had a chance to play these modules yet.  PM me if you were there and want to discuss anything in more detail.   DDEX1-1 Defiance in Phlan: I got to play in 4 out of 5 of these 1-hour delves.  There were many first-time 5E players in these games which was great to see.  I expected mustering for this sort of thing to be a total disaster but I couldn't have been more wrong.  It all went very smoothly.  The adventures themselves were for the most part nice little 1-hour samples of D&D.  If you're an experienced player they will probably leave you wanting a little more depth, but there was a good amount of variety in the content given the short timeframe.  Some of the DM's seemed frustrated by the 1 hour slot and I think that a lot of people would prefer if this type of event was set for 2 hours next time around.   DDEX1-2 - Secrets of Sokol Keep: I may be partial to this one because parts of it ran very close in theme to the character that I happened to be playing.  There was a lot of investigation and roleplaying involved in the early parts of it.  Combat only came into play much later on, which is definitely a change from my 4E RPGA experiences.  Our group enjoyed it a lot.  The location reference to the old gold box Pool of Radiance game made me happy.   DDEX1-3 - Shadow on the Moonsea: This one involves a good deal of investigation in order to figure out the mystery.  We put many but not all of the clues together.  I've heard feedback from a few different people that they never quite figured out what was going on until the very end of the module and even then they might've been a little bit fuzzy on it.  It was an ambitious story line to try and fit into a 4 hour slot and I give the writer credit for that.  I have a feeling that your experience might have varied wildly on this one based on the person running it and how good they were at giving you the necessary clues to figure out what was happening.  We ended up triggering an event that seemed pretty undesirable through what seemed like a pretty innocent action because we hadn't quite figured things out.  Still very enjoyable.   DDEP1 - Corruption in Krytpgarden: This event was described as an "epic" and that in fact is what it was.  I believe that there were about 600 players participating in this event.  The tables were split into three different adventure tracks which each contributed in different ways to the overall success of the group.  There was also a mechanic built in for communicating with the tables around you to discuss strategy, etc.  There were also a few special surprises during the final encounter which I won't even describe vaguely as to avoid ruining it for anyone else.   (but I'll note that I got to participate in it, which was great)   I loved this event.  It's probably the best organized play event that I've participated in.  It was a very ambitious idea to try some of these things during the very first con of a new edition and new organized play system.  There were a few minor things that could probably be tweaked in the future.  With the multiple tracks it was difficult to organize tables so that most of the players had a mission available for their faction.  The captains offered to move us to other tables but I was there with a group of people and we opted to play together rather than have more of us be able to perform our missions.  (our choice, they did what they could for us)  I'm not sure what the solution is here, but it's something to consider as part of the mustering process next time around.  Additionally, the idea for communicating between tables was a neat twist but I don't think that a lot of people put it to good use.  I don't know that I'd throw it out, but you might want to think about better ways to leverage it as part of the adventure.  Finally, I cannot speak to the accuracy of this information but our DM indicated that he only received the (fairly lengthy) module 2 days before the con and wasn't as prepared as he would've liked to be as a result.     Summary: I had a great time playing D&D at Gencon and I look forward to more Adventurer's League content down the road.
#2 31stBlackKnight Aug 20, 2014 17:56:22	We had a pretty good time playing Secrets of Sokol Keep, but the mustering left something to be desired.  After showing our tickets and saying we were there for Secrets of Sokol we were told to report to table 68 which was occupied with what we thought were players finishing up.  Then we heard that we couldn't use the characters we had created and had to use pregens. After waiting for our table to clear, we saw one of the players pulled food out and begin to eat.  When we approached one of the officials we were told that our game was on the other side of the room.  After looking for table 68 on that side and not finding it we approached another official and he told us that we were late and gave the impession that we had forfeited our spot.  Fortunately we did get a table and we were able to use our generated characters.
#3 jerryb78 Aug 20, 2014 19:49:01	Mustering has always been a challenge.  It always seemed worse to me in Sagamore.  We didn't stand around long waiting for Sokol or Moonsea and got sent directly to the correct table, so my experience this time was good.  I wish they would fit some more signs into the budget that say "SECRETS OF SOKOL KEEP MUSTER HERE".  (even whiteboards that could be reused from year to year)  I won't complain too much.   It's a tough gig.
#4 OrganicDoom Aug 21, 2014 8:19:37	Did the epic event yield any good loot? This epic was gen con only so spoilers should be ok.
#5 jerryb78 Aug 21, 2014 11:30:27	According to http://dndadventurersleague.org/tyranny-of-dragons-premier-adventures/ they're also running it at PAX, Dragon con, and Fan Expo Canada.  Yes, there was some good loot involved.  I only played 1/3 tracks (leader) so I don't know about the others, but we did receive two permanent magical items.  PM me if you'd like to know specifics.
#6 ScotMartin Aug 21, 2014 11:48:06	I had a chance to also play all of these at GenCon. My thoughts:   Defiance: Played 3 of these and they were all good. Had one oddity when we showed up on Sunday with our 3rd level characters and were told it was only meant for 1st-2nd level characters. Hadn't seen anything announced about that and one DM had already run us at 3rd without a word. Anyway, the current DM ran us at 3rd and it ended up being fine. Had fun all 3 times.   Secrets: Had a lot of fun in this one, especially with a fairly memorable NPC we encountered. The combats were a bit frustrating with one having very high-AC monsters and the other having a difficult environmental factor. With a little worse luck in the 2nd one, I think we could have had a permenantly dead character.  Having said that, we did make it through although I think that was in part to the DM believing the cleric could get back his 1st level healing spells with short rests (which we later learned was wrong). Might have been overwhelmed otherwise.   Shadow: I agree with the OP that the mystery element to this one was interesting to piece through. We got it though and worked our way through to the ending sequence. At that point though we hit some problems. My friend and I were 2nd level by this point, but the other 4 players were 1st. Two of them went from full to negative their max HP in single hits. Yeah, one was a crit, but still tough to see. It was a cool fight, just a little scary with the damage output possible at low levels. I think the module overall is really good, just be careful...   Corruption Epic: Huge disagreement with the OP on this one as it was easily our worst gaming experience at the convention. No one at our table had done a battle interactive and none of us had any idea what going on. That never changed throughout the adventure as the whole thing was frustrating and confusing. We had a judge moving between tables and they would occassionally interrupt to tell the DM "The blah blah has been handled by another group, so that will help".  I'd be "Great! What does that mean for us?" Judge or DM:"It'll mean something later". Sometimes the announcers up front would yell out "The red flag has been raised!!" Me: "Cool, what does that mean?" DM: "I don't know exactly, but other groups have succeeded at something". In our final, battle the DM was told by the adventure to tally up shots from a siege weapon, told the judge what he was doing, but the judge had no idea what he was talking about. Finally she came back later and said that the other tables were handling the siege weapon shots on their own so we didn't have to worry about it.  This was apparently a direct contradiction to what was written in the module.   The timing was bad too. The DM told us for a bit that we were ahead of the clock only to have the judge come by and give us a time warning causing the DM to rush us through our 2nd to last encounter.   So, as far as 600 tables cooperating together? From my point of view it was 600 separate games with people yelling about things happening that (generally) had no impact on us and just added a lot of noise and confusion. Colored flags? Monsters being defeated I'd never heard of? No idea what any of it meant and neither our DM or judge was giving helpful info. It finally turned out that a big monster going from table to table at the end was pushed away by certain story successes, but even that description was unclear and rushed. I was also distracted by the fact that we had 4 dead party members.   Which brings me to the module's difficulty level. It seemed to be off the charts. A single monster in one encounter was slinging 20+ point attacks. The DM was using average damage and that was what was listed. He had to hold back to keep from wiping a character off the board each turn. We got through the fight, but everyone was hurt and the cleric used up all their healing. No extended rest was available, so we had to endure the rest of the module at reduced capabilities. The remaining combats didn't have those sort of single death attacks, but were still overwhelming us drastically. We entered the last combat with many of us below half hit points to begin with, so some decent attack rolls by the DM caused us to drop quickly. He had to pull punches in every combat except the 1st (mini) combat, otherwise we would have all been wiped out repeatedly.   The whole thing was really awful and a big downer given how many great things I'd heard about big battle interactives in the past. If any organizers are reading this, I'd give the following advice: 1. At the beginning, discuss the colored flags and what they mean and why we should care. 2. Make the cross-adventure effects clear for both players and DMs so we can see the direct results of what they and we are doing. 3. Make sure the judges, DM and adventure are all on the same page and give out information when needed. It's annoying to have our DM interrupted in a battle to be told something that has no impact on our session whatsoever. 4. Make a large visible clock we can all reference easily so there's no confusion.   Anwyay, glad the OP enjoyed it, but I wanted to make it clear this was not a universal thing. One out of six people at our table said they had fun, but she admitted she had no clue what was going on with the flags or multi-table stuff, she just liked her character.   -Scot
#7 Zyph Aug 21, 2014 18:22:18	So Gencon was amazingly fun. It was my first time ever and definitely was a learning experience in some cases. Here's a few thoughts on the events and then some general ones on Gencon.   DDEX1-3 Shadow on the Moonsea:  This was the first event I played in that weekend. Interesting adventure that had an oppertunity for some neat investigative RP, but between time and the group composition it didn't feel like we fully got to explore it. Out of all the events this is the one that most felt like it REALLY could've benefited from being 5 or 6 hours long. It definitely felt like the module had the content to go that long (and the DM told us afterwords that was his thoughts on it as well). Was a nice setup for the big over arching campaign story. Our particular instance had a nice chance for some tactical planning in terms of a battle field, leading to a situation where early on we realized the power of tactics while towrads the end we were face to face with how dangerous enemies can be. I have a feeling I would've liked this one better had I played it later in the weekend after I gained some familiarity with the system, the adventurer league, and the style of convention gaming.   DDEX1-2 Secrets of Sokol Keep: Second event I played in and was pretty fun. We also got a bit of a surprise...my friend and I got seated at a table playtesting Dungeonscape (aka Project:Morningstar). I'll give some additional thoughts on the program later in the post. Thought this was a rather fun adventure with a nice mix of puzzles and RP. This one felt like it fit into the 4 hour time span much better than SotM did, which definitely was nice as it relates to playing at the con. Not overly combat heavy which was nice and a surprise considering what I largely heard about con games.    DDEX 1-1 Defiance of Phlan: So my friend and I kind of did this backwards by going with the Defiance adventure's last. By this point we were level 3 so we were definitely outclassing the rest of the groups we were in. It didn't change the fact that I came away VERY impressed by this. The notion of a one hour game had me very skepitcal, but all of them were pretty well done and none felt massively rushed. What was even more surprising was in some instances I actually felt there was more RPing going on in these adventurer's then the longer ones. I think that was a mix of being the second day into the con so people were a bit more comfortable with the setting and the characters, and partially based on people knowing it was only an hour so just jumping right in rather than feeling things out. Either way each of these were somewhat unique and provided some interesting scenarios. The "Harper" event specifically was pretty fun and fit well within the hour. Of the four we did my favorite was actually the event for the Emerald Enclave, which had NO combat but was more of a puzzle event of sorts. A lot of fun with a great DM who really made some of the NPC's come alive (nothing like a french accented elven food critic).    DDEP1 Corruption in Kryptgarden: I was impressed with this event. Was it a bit of a mess at times with people wondering what was going on? Sure. But given that the DM's were given the event literally the night before, and said event was 100 pages long with three routes without any way of knowing which one you'd be running, I can understand a little uncertainty on some of the side things like tables helping each other, etc. But the experience itself, knowing that everyone is running in the same "event" of sorts and hearing the various tables cheering or groaning and getting into things, was very fun. The little bit of interactive notion with certain successes/failures from various tables causing effects that impacted the event and other players was very neat. Could they improve on things? Sure. But I think that'll come with a little bit more experience with the system and being able to go into a con where there can be more focus on the adventures rather than splitting time between that and actually creating the game itself.   General thoughts:   1. Mustering. I thought they did pretty good with mustering all things considered. The SotM event I actually had a ticket for. Sokol Keep and all the four Defiance events I was in were all with generics, and that never seemed to be a big problem. There was a bit of a line at times for Defiance events, but it seemed most of the time everyone got through.    2. Theater of the Mind. I was really happy to see how easy it was to run theater of the mind in the new edition, and how many DM's embraced it. The only event where we used a grid was for the Harper event in Defiance of Phlan and for the last battle of Kryptgarden. Everything else was all theater of the mind, which was very fun and neat. You could definitely tell how much faster combat went using that as opposed to the grids.   3. Dungeonscape is VERY neat. Great for character creation, every object on a sheet able to be touched for the full rules, and search capability for rules and info. Very customizable in terms of the layout. And the DM potential options...being able to put together a "party" and view said parties character, alter things if needed, send individual notes, etc...look like they'll be excellent.   4. Looking forward to how things go next year, specifically as it relates to the location and the type of events. It made tons of sense to be on the convention floor this year to get eyes on the new product, however I must admit that the ballroom Paizo had for pathfinder was absolutely wonderful to behold. Away from all the noise of the convention by being upstairs, carpetted floors, big sprawling rooms, giant hanging projector screens for the big events instead of a little one slapped on a stage. Pathfinder definitely had a much bigger area as well and it'll be interesting to see how the two different things compare come next year. It'll also be interesting to see how they handle different tiers of play. I hope next year they do an Epic of sorts every night....make the most of the con experience.
#8 Neptune0923 Aug 21, 2014 19:21:31	Wow Scott, sounds like we were at separate tables!   My experience was great but the experience is always influenced by the DM. I played in the All-Access which, by definition meant we had a DM with experience and good reviews. While our DM was "slow" for the Defiance in Phlan and Sokol Keep adventures, he kept pace with the Kryptgarden game. We finished early and were able to "assist" other tables.  All the players at my table were engaged during the event and thrilled after the event.   You triggered some ideas for the next time they write a battle interactive or the next time someone runs this one at a convention.  There should be handouts explaining some things such as one that explains what the flags mean and another that describes the different objectives. Also, to give a massive event more cohesiveness, they could have had a person work a status map and laid out the 100 or so tables like squads in a larger battle, mapping them to particular locations. Every half hour or so a horn could blow and the DM could hand a designated "runner" with a card that described the status of the table and a person could quickly update a big color-coded map to show the progress and where there were tables were in trouble.   Edit: I should note that I've played in battle-interactives before and so I had an idea what would happen.    Now, about the convention and AL. I went to Gencon this year with a clear objective in mind. I wanted to learn 5e. Mission accomplished! So a big thumbs-up for that!  As for the sessions:   DDEX1-1 Defiance in Phlan: My table didn't get far in the AL. We spent a lot of time going over character creation and rules. That was fine. I thought it got dragged on longer than I would have liked but there were 6 players at the table and others needed help and DM advice. When a 4e game my buddy and I were going to play in got cancelled, we replaced it with a couple of extra 1-hour sessions. That worked out because there was one per faction and we got to do the one for our faction outside the all-access pass. It did give us more XP's than others at the table and we got to 2nd level before the others. That worked out OK for the table.    DDEX1-2 - Secrets of Sokol Keep:  This adventure had the attention of most of the table but not me. It's a matter of taste, but I wanted more combat and when we had chances for combat early in the adventure, one of our players found a way to avoid it. When we finally got to the point of having combat, we were out of time and I was upset. I should explain that I was upset because I wanted to practice the mechanics of combat and I didn't get as much of a chance as I had wanted. I found out that several others felt that way too and we discussed with our DM, who proved how good he was by shifting away from the all role-playing mode to the more roll-playing mode for the next adventure with great agility.   DDEX1-3 - Shadow on the Moonsea: DDEP1 Corruption in Kryptgarden:  I'm glad that our DM moved through the roleplaying aspects of this adventure with some pace because we got a lot done. The party ran into trouble but survived the challenge. As far as the quality of adventure, it seemed like the author could not find a good way to reveal information through investigation. A post-adventure knowledge dump was needed. Many adventures suffer from this problem and I wish that it became a writing guideline to include directions for DM's and/or events to use to help transfer the clues and information clearer in the alotted time. It's posible that the information was in things we found but our DM didn't make that connection. I should be clear that I don't think that we skipped any clues by moving quickly through the roleplaying. Or DM simply didn't linger on some trivial matters. He allowed those in SoSK.   DDEP1 Corruption in Kryptgarden:  See my comments above. I think these are great events and I can see these evolving.  The injection of factions makes this quite interesting. I can envision coming to Gencon next year and having a competion between factions being more pronounced. Could the events at Gencon change the future of the Forgotten Realms? Could a "champion" faction become stewards of a locale and gain some measure of power as a result? Could other large and medium size conventions have battle interactives also influence the political balance of power in the realms but on a smaller scale? That would be cool, I think.
#9 ScotMartin Aug 22, 2014 14:44:25	Well, glad to hear others had fun in the Epic. Hey, I fully support the idea. I too like the concept of a large group of parties all striving toward the same goal. For our table though, this particular event failed completely due to what seemed like large lapses in communication and organization. I hope some of mine and Neptune's suggestions are noted and maybe the next will be better.    And, to reiterate, we had a great time in our other adventures. The new system seems to be really well put together and I look forward to playing it thoroughly in the coming years.   -Scot
#10 VeroMaestro Aug 23, 2014 7:30:14	It is mostly reliant on the DM, I’m glad to hear that people had a good time because that was not my groups experience. We had a  DM who from time the moment they sat down said they were only running at gencon for a free book and should we try to do anything "out of the box" our characters would be put in time out. The DM was just terrible, they ignored multiple skill rolls that were high successes and when one of our players figured things out he was removed from the encounter by "being pushed from the room".    I would say overall for D&D events over the past few years it is about 60% good and 40% bad. I know that maybe my group (who enjoys RP and joking around) might not be everyone's cup of tea, but in this case, it was just a bad DM, bad enough that my group doesn't want to do any D&D events next year.
(Reply to #10) Skerrit	VeroMaestro wrote:
#12 Zyph Aug 23, 2014 13:39:51	VeroMaestro wrote:
#13 hive_mind Aug 23, 2014 20:38:16	I enjoyed all the events, for pretty much all the reasons that have already been posted.  I liked Corruption in Kryptgarden overall, but the post game organization left a lot to be desired.  It took them too long to get the results, and the sound system they used to make announcements and awards was totally insufficient for the space we were in.  I had to move up to the front because we couldn't understand a word they said in the back.   As a side note, some people REALLY wanted to get into the event.  There was a guy offering $300 for a ticket.   Magic item wise, my Barbarian ended up with an Amulet of Life (adventure reward) and a Potion of Vitality (from the random roll on the event card I turned in).  I also won some Tyranny of Dragons:Icons of the Realms minis from another roll.  All in all not to bad.
(Reply to #10) Alphastream	VeroMaestro wrote:
#15 Sartredes Aug 28, 2014 6:37:43	Overall I had a pretty good time in the AL adventures I played at the con.   DDEX1-1 Defiance in Phlan: I played in two of these. Both were fun little encounters. Nothing remarkable. On one I played on Sunday morning, I brought the now third level character I had been using at the con and was told the adventures were for first and second level characters. Is this really the case? There was nothing in the blurb that I recall about that. Anyhow I still used my third level character and we had a pretty good time. I was at a table with Teos for the Sunday game, so I got to tell him personally how much I enjoyed the epic.   DDEX1-2 - Secrets of Sokol Keep: This was the adventure I think I enjoyed the most. It felt well paced. The investigation portions provided information that I believe a resonable party could piece together and eventually learn the whole story. The combats were challenging, but didn't feel unfair. Our DM did a great job keeping the action moving and handling the eventual combats. We had some good role-play by everyone at the table which pushed it up a notch too.   DDEX1-3 - Shadow on the Moonsea: This was my least favorite adventure. I think some of this is on my DM. He liked to dictate to the players what our characters were doing or how they felt. There were a few pervish NPC's he seemed to throw in that I don't think sat well with most of the table. The adventure as we played it seemed to lack direction. I never felt there was sufficient info to let us know what we were supposed to be doing. We eventually pieced things together and muddled through, but at the end I was unsatisfied. I'm not sure if this was the because of the structure of the adventure or because our DM didn't do a great job of revealing information that would help us. I also had another player at my table who rubbed me the wrong way as they seemed disagreeable to most party decisions. I'm interested in running this one myself to see if I can make it more enjoyable.   DDEP1 - Corruption in Kryptgarden: This was my first battle interactive. I enjoyed it. Though I was at a table of various people who hadn't gamed together before, we simply gelled. We had four of the five factions at the table, so it was difficult to pick a path where each of us had a faction goal. Our first pick was closed by the time our table decided, so we did our second choice, which was to stop the supply caravan. The first act did not seem to be much of a challenge for us. We plowed through the enemies encountered and protected the Zhent agent in the caravan. My thief scored the amulet of health which nearly doubled his HP. That proved to be beneficial later on. The second and third acts were much more challenging and our DM was awesome in handling some of our more off the wall actions. Our DM informed us what the flags that were being announced meant storywise, but not the mechanical repercussions of them, which was nice.  In the end, I was one of the sixteen Zhentarim faction members that were up for the green dragon mask. I didn't win it, but I did walk away with a free starter set as a consolation prize. My only real gripe was that the announcements afterwards were hard to hear and it took a long while before the adventure XP, gold, etc... were posted.
#16 Jamroar Feb 16, 2015 5:40:34	DDEX1-3 - Shadow on the Moonsea: ====SPOILERS====   I think there is enough information in various places on the island to allow players to figure out what is going on. But many are very hard to find or access.   Verik can provide some information (sent by Cult of Dragon, Ixas is nearby on a ship preparing to attack, etc.) but, as written, one can only get this info after a series of high DC checks: a DC 20 Wisdom (Insight) check to know he is only acting insane another DC 20 Wisdom (Insight) check to realize his story about the undead and a dracolich is a lie a DC 20 Charisma (Intimidation) check to get him to talk   Ulberto's smokehouse has the captain's logs from both the merchant and pirate ships, so the DM can reveal a lot there if he/she chooses. But players have to first have an interest in searching his smokehouse (with little to indicate this might be fruitful), get through the smoky room (DC 10 Con after first minute, which might drive players out), and a DC 15 Investigation to find the logs under a paving stone covered by lumber.   Infernal Altar: The scroll on the altar in the cave in the woods is described as a contract between "Servants of the Queene" and "Folk" and details the pact the islanders made to have the pirates cast into the nine hells.   I would also suggest actually witnessing the appearance of the infernal pirate ship; could be a really fun description and be clearer what is happening. The way it is written, the players are getting close to the "Ghost ship" when they see red lights and hear the collision, but they don't get to actually see it. I'm not sure why this is sort of hidden visually from the players. Then when they board the "Ghost ship" they see the pirate ship smashed into it. Why not see the smashing happen?
(Reply to #15) MasterNamer	Sartredes wrote: