I have never been a fan of the RPGA. One of the reasons is that my first introduction to the RPGa was very bad metagaming game play Yes I know they are a probably the minority. Anyway I was hanging ot my local gaming store that my friend owns(he needed a ride so I was pretty much stuck there so I just watching a RPGa game. Pretty much they did something I think they called 'mashing' the adventures. And went though two adventures in short order by skipping parts and such. Pretty much they did this it seemed to level up...and to get the rewards cards..or something I know they reported it. It really bothered my sense of fair play and it seemed like cheating...
Anyway mostly hust curious about it it.
The DM rewards are still around, so the person DMing the game will still get some points.
Its a shame though, the adventures are fun.
I don't care for it, but these are otherwise great people. They evidently had an ok to even good time doing it. They just did the combats and skipped everything else. I don't really know what to say about it, but it happens. It is really up to players and DMs if they want to do these kinds of things.
Campaign-wise, it is more incentive to get +2 anythings out of the H1 tier.
It is not representative of RPGA play. As you noted, you can get a fair number of metagamers in the RPGA. Then again, when answering adds in gaming stores I met a lot of home campaign players that were huge powergamers and metagamers. It is unfair to generalize.
Bottom line, find some people you want to play with and play with them most often. Also, be open to periodically playing with a breadth of player types. I find I learn a lot from seeing different player types. And, you can't judge books by their covers. The guys doing what I described are excellent players and DMs and I would hang with them anytime.
You may want to check out the D&D Encounters program. It is just 1-2 hours, so you can see if you like it. If you do, at the end the PC will transfer to the Living Forgotten Realms campaign. It is a good way to test the waters. You will find some great RP in the RPGA, but like anything good in life it takes some time to find what you want.
As for trying out the RPGA...maybe one day but right now I am too busy and I got enough home games. Though I have always been curious about the RPGA which is why I asked.
I've done it once or twice myself. We had only about 2 hours before the store closed, and the adventure we were planning on doing was one everyone at the table had played at least once (in my case, 3 times). I generally prefer to role-play, even when it's a mod I've done with a different character, but I have little problem with skipping the RP under some circumstances.
I can understand that situration.
It is probably borderline on rules violations; there is a clear rule that a DM cannot award xp or treasure from any encounter which was not played. However, it is within the DM's realm as to when/if he decides to call a combat, and I daresay almost all DMs have shortened the ending of an adventure at some time or another due to a player needing to leave really quickly. So this may just be taking the concept to an extreme.
That is not my idea of fun.
Keith
However we don't do the "meshing" bit mostly because the players would get fairly bored in short time and not want to be under that specific DM again. Most of the modules have at least 1 or 2 fans who like the story in the group and don't want the roleplaying and story detail (CORE1-2 is hugely popular for the storyline for example). Likewise most players aren't in a hurry to level because we all know higher level adventures will be tougher and potentially take more time, least with the faster 1-4 adventures there is plenty of time to mess about (I.E the 100th in an hour Family guy reference).
I mean I recognize the fact that the RPGA can't police this kind of thing well as there is no central database tracking everyone characters. But do people think they should be? I mean to me the RPGA trys to be two things at once. A social net work for people to get games and meet people with similar hobbys....great. The living world aspect...not so much.
I mean personaly I think it would be awesome if there was a way for the RPGA to include other RPGA that is not D&D. But that I think would be impossible as they are tied very directly to WotC.
Anyway just some thoughts.
I mean I recognize the fact that the RPGA can't police this kind of thing well as there is no central database tracking everyone characters. But do people think they should be?
They actually instituted one when LFR launched. It didn't work well, since it relied on accurate, timely reporting of the adventures by the DMs and event coordinators (which, honestly, does not happen nearly well enough for that sort of system to work). Due to this, those of us here on the boards were having to constantly tell players *not* to get worked up over their online character records being innaccurate, and that they needed to rely on their personal logs, rather than the online system.
The online character tracker has since been removed, and I don't think many players bemoan its loss.
Earlier campaigns, such as Living Greyhawk, had more overt "controls" in place to try to catch cheating, such as "adventure records" which the DMs had to sign. In theory, that provided a paper trail of a character's progress (and which could be audited if a DM noted irregularities). But, it certainly wasn't foolproof, and there were stories of people who cheated *that* system.
These days, the RPGA does operate more on the honor system. It seems to me that they've decided that they'd prefer making things easier for the honest gamers, than try to institute more controls to stop the cheaters, but which make record-keeping more onerous for everybody (people who didn't like all the paperwork used to deride Living Greyhawk as "Living Accounting"). And, frankly, people who are going to cheat are going to find ways to cheat, anyway.
I mean personaly I think it would be awesome if there was a way for the RPGA to include other RPGA that is not D&D. But that I think would be impossible as they are tied very directly to WotC.
Exactly. The RPGA used to feature a number of games for other game systems (even from other companies). This was particularly true before 2002; until then, RPGA was a paid-membership organization, and the membership fees helped support the system.
In 2002, WotC made RPGA membership free, and the RPGA's operating budget became entirely funded by WotC marketing. As such, WotC decided that they didn't wish to spend their own marketing dollars in supporting play of competitors' games, and eventually the RPGA stopped sanctioning play of those games.
Let's assume we're building a new system for tracking and the sky is the limit - if we can dream it up, WotC can make it happen.
Personally, I'd like to see something that would be a combination system between the attempts at central tracking that have been done before (DCI/WPN database tracking) and the once-upon-a-time feature of an Online Vault that was to be part of D&D Insider.
Here's how *I* would set something up:
1) Players would have the option of marking a character as being part of the LFR Campaign Setting at character creation (much like selecting that ruleset). Doing so would flag your character in some way/shape/form (a fancy LFR logo on the sheet or some such).
*This option would likely need some incentive. Being "Official/Certified" vs not should carry some weight. But it shouldn't be HUGE lest it becomes disadvantageous to not use - maybe an extra action point or something similar.
2) An LFR character would be stored into an Online Vault (free backup! Yay!) and this vault would be linked to your DCI account as well.
3) When you play, you would ask your GM for his DCI#, and for your session's sanctioning number (yes, this is the first potential hiccup, but let me have my "perfect world" until the end, please)
4) After you play an LFR session, YOU (the player) are responsible for inputting your "earnings" (Gold, XP, Items, etc), and you also have to enter both the GM and session #s.
5) Upon inputting all this information on your "LFR Certified" character - the tournament organizer and the GM (usually the same person, but I'm thinking about conventions here as well) will get an e-mail notice* that " has updated for from . Please login to verify these results".
*To avoid spamming con organizers and/or GMs - these notices would be like subscribing to a forum thread. You only get ONE notice for the first update until such time as you login to the DCI again and check PC results - you might get there and have 100 results, but you only need/got 1 e-mail.
6) The table GM *or* the organizer (senior GM) can then verify the results ("What? How did Bob get 1k gold in a level one mod?) or decline them.
7) If, after a set period of time (2 weeks?) no "certification" has been done by the GM - the results are assumed to be accurate (to keep players from getting "screwed" by a one-shot GM who doesn't care).
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It's not a perfect system - I can see where the potential for abuse exists (Oh, Wolfstar76 Never checks his results, just put whatever you want on there) to say nothing about out-of-adventure actions (selling a found item or scroll for gold) but I think it would be a really strong option - in a "sky's the limit" perfect world.
Ah, daydreams.
Exactly. The RPGA used to feature a number of games for other game systems (even from other companies). This was particularly true before 2002; until then, RPGA was a paid-membership organization, and the membership fees helped support the system.
In 2002, WotC made RPGA membership free, and the RPGA's operating budget became entirely funded by WotC marketing. As such, WotC decided that they didn't wish to spend their own marketing dollars in supporting play of competitors' games, and eventually the RPGA stopped sanctioning play of those games.
I was a member back then...I remember Polyhedron fondly and there was a discount on products you could buy.