Crisis of the 12

The Bake continues it's Digital D&D Adventuring

This week Fiddenmar was murdered

DM James and Cameron seemed to understand what was going on--but I was exhausted after a long day at work.

And spent most of the night staring at the worlds greatest dice bag

Actual Play Elemental Evil--D&D Encounter S20 S2

Elemental Evil--D&D Encounters S20 S2

Another week of D&D Encounters at Comic Quest. This week, because of truck issues, Andy & I carpooled down with Brian & I shot this time lapse photography of the trip mostly to make East Coast Gamers jealous.

This week was First Week of Season 20 of D&D Encounters! We are playing Princes of the Apocolypse which is part of the Elemental Evil story line.

Energy at the shop is off the charts! People are totally stoked to be there:

And there are lots of people showing up--this session has ~5 tables running [two are outside! welcome to CA]. Two tables of Princes of the Apocalypse, Two tables of Rise of Tiamet, and one table of Adventure League--this week they ran the Defiance in Phlan.

Inside, Jack was in strong form with his Svirfneblin Bard

Chase had a Elf Ranger

Rockhide & Chalula were also at our table & were completely awesome

Greg had a Half-Orc BARDaraian--it was a barbarian with an entertainer background that he tried to pass off as a Bard.

I had a Svirfneblin Sage--Brian is playing at Spencer's Rise of Tiamet table.

The shop was packed!

Jack continues to use the worlds ugliest dice--and a very hideous mini as well

Chase has an amazing dice rolling box--of course, he Storked his Survivor roll off against Greg!

Jack and I had a great Japanese Tourist trip and enjoyed the ride home in Chase's car

Post Prerelease Planning

Tuesday morning is here again & that means 8th Graders playing Kitchen table Magic. Jack was ready for school.

I had my coffee ready

My Dice

And my cards

The boys posted up--Jack is still working to break the meta on the post Dragons of Tarkir world. Andrew has the story down better than anyone else these days.

Derek played a few massive monster games against Andrew that were fun to watch.

 Preston crushed me with his Deck--my Abzan team just could not close.

Even with the Emo King on my side
  

Always sad when Garruk ends up in the yard.

It was another fun week full of great Magic Fun--we are in the planning stages for Release FNM & a Game Day event at Monsters and Magic.

Rolling in Adventure League

One of the most common comments I get when I do Character Creation is: 

Are you guys not playing the the Adventures League?  You're rolling for stats. The Adventures League only supports Point Buy or Standard Array.

Which is 100% accurate--and I do not disagree.

The characters we are randomly creating in my character creation videos will need to be modified to be Adventure League legal, and all D&D Encounters characters must be Adventure League legal.

When the AL was first announced with the Epics, Expeditions, and Encounters legs I was totally excited--organizing the Organized  Play structure around the way in which public play actually happens seemed like a totally brilliant idea. New players could start at weekly Encounters, move to "convention-style" play in Expeditions, and occasionally kick off new rules in Epic style games. 

Simple. Elegant. Awesome.

The Expeditions players needed to ensure that all of the characters used in Organized Play were balanced and thus they had to create character creation guides. 

AL Character Creation guides are regularly revised to ensure things stay balaned with Expeditions. These guides then had to be used in Encounters. Thus no rolling dice for character creation in Encounters.

An unforeseen consequence of the Adventure League structure, but completely acceptable to ensure that the Expeditions games are 'fair'.

I would guess that Epics will largely be exempt from the Adventure League guides since the vision for Epics seems to be one off adventures. I assume that these will ideally include new rules, pregen characters, and the like--things we have always seen included with Event Driven games, but only time will tell.

So back to the original question, I am playing D&D Encounters, which is a part of the Adventure League. I will clean up my character using the Point Buy system now that I have a 'working sketch' of what I think Waynemeth the Male Svirfneblin Sage's stats should be...