A Few Thoughts on the Player's Guide

Just finished reading the Adventurer's League Players Guide and here are some of the highlights of AL organized play.

Character creation is almost exactly as it appears in the Basic Rules, with a few exceptions.

• You can't roll your own stats. 
• You can't be of Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil alignments, though can be Lawful Evil if you belong to 2 particular Factions. 
• Picking a Faction itself, is optional. 
• You can pick an "origin story" from the yet to be released "Tyranny of Dragons." I assume this means from the soon-to-be released Hoard of the Dragon Queen. 
• You take max points at first level, and the suggested average at each level after 1st. So you don't roll for hit points either.  
• So unless you want to roll for background traits, there are no random elements in character creation. 

Magic items can be acquired through organized play, except you can only trade them to another player if you receive a physical certificate.  This means that to get a certificate you'll need to be playing in an Adventurer's League sanctioned game at an in-store event (FLGS) or at a convention.  To bad for online play, but hopefully not a deal breaker for most people. 

When you receive a magic item during play, all you need to do is record it on your Adventure Log. 

Tyranny of Dragons is the first season which lasts until March of 2015.  The Player's Guide lists all the adventures that are sanctioned for the season:

• Hoard of the Dragon Queen
• Rise of Tiamat
• Corruption in Kryptgarden (Epic)
• and 14 short adventures for their Expeditions line

Aside from those, the Starter Set adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver is also sanctioned for Adventure League play, though it isn't officially tied into the Tyranny of Dragons season.  This means you can play through the Starter Set adventure with an online group and if all the characters are created with Adventurer's League guidelines and you keep a Adventure Log,  you can level your character to 4th or 5th level, and still be able to take this character to a convention to play an Expedition adventure that requires 4th level characters.  

The recording and reporting system is much less rigorous than PFS (Pathfinder Society), but it appears to me to be more inline with how people actually use organized play.  In PFS, Game Masters have to sign scenario reporting sheets for each and every scenario and for each player and players must buy the magic items they find and all this activity is logged and certified through signatures. But PFS still doesn't ask for any of this to be reported to their central system online.  PFS  pretty much just tracks XP and whether that character has played that particular scenario. 

Adventurer's League seems to rely a bit more on the honor system.  If a player finds a +1 sword during the adventure, and s/he is allowed to keep it, then all s/he has to do is write it down on their log and survive the rest of the adventure.  As long as it is on the Adventure Log that states what adventure it came from, the next DM shouldn't be able to question it. 

Here are a few questions I think still need answered: 

• I'm still not clear what the best way to decide what portion of an episode your going to play if your running Encounters or Tyranny of Dragons and you have a bigger number of players that were not in the previous session, than you do that did. PFS scenarios clearly differentiate when a story begins and ends and typically this is all done in one session.  The way Encounters is set up, it could take up to six sessions (maybe more) to complete a story arc.  I'd like to see some advice on this and I'll post about if I come across any.   The reason this seems important to me is that organized play, in my experience, has players coming and going all the time.  I wouldn't want to count on having the same 5-6 players at each session.  In a way, this sort of defeats the purpose of an organized play system, where it should be easy to move in and out of game, with strangers. 
• If I DM Expeditions at a FLGs will I then be able to run that game online? (Probably not legally, but is it actually illegal)
• What is the benefit of having having an Mentor or Apprentice? This is a stated benefit of getting to level two of your faction, but no info is given about this. 

So far, it seems that Adventurer's League, if we play it as written, will not give online players the chance to experience all there is to experience with each season.   It also appears that, given the nature of how the Tyranny of Dragons modules are laid out, it will be difficult to determine whether a player has played the part of the module a DM is about to run.  

But the organizers should get credit for creating a more or less free-form campaign.  DMs have a lot of leeway to create a good experience for their players, and it seems this is ultimately what they were trying to achieve.  The modules, are more-or-less, vehicles to deliver a story, treasure, experience, renown points, and magic items. And no matter how you play, your character will remain portable to take from one game to another.