AL Season 9

Adventurers League Season 9 began, not with a bang, but with a whimper (at least from my point of view). As usual, when the AL Admin team sets up the beginning of a new season of organized play, they change a bunch of the rules and that tends to upset the community. Having endured the Season 8 changes, I wasn’t that bothered by Season 9. I was actually looking forward to some of the “fixes” for the system. What was nice was that the admins placated the community by giving a free “level up” and potential free items from character unlocks during the conversion process.

I spent hours just converting my characters and then I was afraid to play them for a while, in case I had gotten something wrong. Also, it took the admins a while to get the updated content catalog document (the ALCC) out. As predicted, the ALCC changed some more variables. The biggest change from the ALCC was a retroactive reward system for White Plume Mountain. I actually still need to go back and check my characters to make sure I don’t have any fixes for that. And the White Plume Mountain changes should be considered a positive since they give us players access to the epic items from the adventure, but it meant people had to go back and remove previously rewarded items if they weren’t from a narrow list.

I was playing at home or on 2 main Discord servers (the TAL server and Daddywarbux’s server), but there are SO MANY freaking players on the servers now that it’s tough to get into games. Luckily, I am in the regular Saturday “morning” game DM’d by Daddywarbux (twitch.tv/daddywarrbux) so I do have that going on. But most game postings now fill up within 2-3 minutes. It’s crazy how popular the system is right now. I suppose that means Season 9 is working, despite the lack of a proper DM Quest system like before.

The saddest part for me though is that some of the fine people I played AL games with back in Season 7 and some of Season 8 have dropped from organized play and I either lost touch with them or I can’t convince them to come back. In the meantime though, I will continue gaming…