The changes in the rules from AL Season 7 to Season 8, and events surrounding them, caused me to take five months off from playing in Adventurers League. By coincidence, that was also the beginning of the school year and thus I got busy again. But wow – I remember being angry and confused. At first, I was also in denial that the rules would stay the way they were; I, like many other people, believed the AL Admin Team would listen to the community feedback and make the changes less extreme. Thus, part of my wait was originally hoping that they would still change back at least some of the rules.
The funny thing was that I had already paid to go to a couple of conventions and play some D&D in person, but I ended up not playing in the sessions because I was afraid the rules were “in flux” and about to be amended. They weren’t. The AL Admin Team stuck to their guns and kept all of the changes, despite so many of us thinking them too extreme. Bottom line, I didn’t think it would feel like D&D without any treasure or loot from the adventures. But, looking back, I also hadn’t given it a chance yet. I didn’t fully understand the ACP/TCP system and the content catalog was full of strange-speak. I wish I would have just kept playing though. For my pre-season 8 characters the TCP system is working out fine (because they already have some magic items). It’s just my new characters that don’t have anything of value. The levels at Tier 1 are hard to get through, waiting to have enough treasure points to buy a magic item.
In the end, I missed the community and decided to go back to playing AL in February. Now that it’s been over a month back, I realized that even though it’s different – it’s still fun to play AL D&D. What does bother me are the players and DMs who call the treasure in the adventures “chocolate coins” and ruin my immersion (even more than it already has been). Technically the DMs are just supposed to not mention the treasure or explain away why we adventurers can’t keep it (such as it going back to our guilds or being donated or returned to whomever it was originally stolen from).
The main sadness for Season 8 is the less-incentivizing DM Rewards system. With DMs seeing less rewards for their time, less people are DMing. That means less sessions are available. To compensate for that, I have joined more online Discord communities to find more games. Unfortunately, most game postings fill up within ten minutes of the posting. That means, if I really want to play a lot of D&D, I have to watch all of the Discord groups like a shark. With a job during the day, that’s just not possible.
For now I am going to just remember the old saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” and keep on rolling my dice. I also keep checking the official AL Facebook group, which was not something I really worried about in Season 7. But the Admins post official rulings there without updating the actual rules documents. In an age with such great technology, I don't understand that. A simple Google Drive shared file or something similar could have constantly updated documentation. But whatever. I'll do what I have to, to try to be in compliance with the needlessly complicated Season 8 rules system.
