Beginning with Season 9, the D&D Adventurers League is moving to a new form of character creation, advancement and play restrictions. Dubbed as “Seasonality”, it links characters more to individual seasons. (You can find a brief description in the latest Dragon+)
The effects of this are primarily the following:
- When you create a character, you choose a Season for that character to belong to.
- Seasons 1-8 are treated as one season. (pre-Seasonality season)
- Seasons 9 and onwards are treated independently.
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For that character, you gain special benefits:
- Special character-creation rules
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Ability to play all adventures in that Season with full rewards (story awards, magic item unlocks)
- This means the Hardcover and the DDAL adventures!
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You can also play any non-Seasonal content with full rewards, such as:
- Community-Created Content (CCCs)
- Season 0 material (e.g. Dreams of the Red Wizards, Lost Tales of Myth Drannor, etc.)
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However, you only gain limited rewards for playing adventures from other Seasons
- No Story Awards
- No Magic Item Unlocks
- Still full Advancement and Treasure Checkpoints (and renown, and downtime).
So, the main restriction on this is that you can’t create a Season 10 character, then jump into Season 9, gain the best items from that, then return to Season 10.
What’s Good About This?
The major benefit is that it allows the D&D Adventurers League to play around a bit with its parameters (character creation, rewards, etc.) without worrying about those benefits causing problems when combined with those of other seasons.
I’m thinking of it as the PHB+1+1 rule – you can use the Player’s Handbook, one other rulebook, and one season’s special rules to create your character.
That said, it might be that characters belonging to a season might not follow the PHB+1 rule exactly – the season’s character creation rules can be as different as desired.
What’s Bad About This?
It’s a lot harder to run adventures from previous seasons. Players will tend to want to play the current season or non-Seasonal material (mainly CCCs and Dreams of the Red Wizards).
Your existing characters are unlikely to want to play Season 9 content.
How Should I Approach This?
If you want to play Season 9 content, you probably should create a new character, play through all the Season 9 content, and then move onto non-Seasonal material.
For existing characters, they probably should ignore Season 9, and just play CCCs and Dreams of the Red Wizards. (Have you seen how many community-created adventures there are now? There’s a lot – and more are coming!) However, you can still play Season 9 adventures, even if you don’t get the special awards (and your character might not care about those in any case. Your existing unlocks still work).
What’s Dreams of the Red Wizards?
It’s a new sequence of adventures for D&D Adventurers League play. It is non-seasonal, and covers Tier 2 through 4 adventures – as well as containing its own Epic. As a result, any character – regardless of their initial season – can play them.
What I’m not Sure of Yet (but hope answers come soon!)
- When you create a character, can you choose one of Seasons 1 to 8 for that character? The FAQ implies you can – it says you can’t choose Dreams of the Red Wizard as a season for your character (it’s non-seasonal material), which implies you choose a season for your character as part of creation. This occurred in the original conception of the DDAL, but the “Story Origin” didn’t quite work. Answered: You can choose any previous season – with Seasons 1-8 treated as one season.
- Are each of Seasons 1 through 8 counted as previous seasons? (It occurred to me that they could be taken as one “pre-S9” season. I don’t think this is the case, though). They’re treated as one season.
- Do Epics count as part of the Season they’re in, or are they non-Seasonal?
- What rewards will CCCs be able to give out going forward? (It might be that the list of items is reduced, or it could just be that non-Seasonal content is a lot wilder in scope!)
- When characters playing high-level S9 content are all S9 characters, it may be easier to judge their power and write adventures for them. Or not. We’ve seen some *very* wild characters in our Tier 4 games!
- What season does Ghosts of Saltmarsh belong to? (I get the impression its non-Seasonal content).
- For older characters, do you assign a season to them based on what sounds good (as long it’s from season 1-8)? Older characters belong to the “Pre-Seasonality Season” or “Seasons 1-8”.
Merric’s Overall Impression
I think some really good things could come of this, although it’ll be interesting to see the particulars in play. Honestly, this is a much lesser change than the Season 8 rule changes (which I generally like, except for how gold is awarded).
I do think it’ll push a lot of people towards the Community Created Content for the D&D Adventurers League, but as it looks like that program may be expanding, this isn’t a bad thing.
More thoughts as they come to mind!
But what’s the special unlock for Season 9 characters?
Not 100% sure, but may be this:
My biggest problem is how this changes going to interact with “Drop in, Drop out” nature of AL Play. I personaly don’t have much time to play DnD and this why i like AL. For the 2.5 year i play AL i have 1 T3 character and 6 T2 characters. This new changes heavely encourage me to leave my older characters behinde for the every new season now on, so basicly they say to me ‘Don’t have time for AL? AL don’t have time for you!’.
100% in agreement with this. I designate 2 days a week to D&D (1 to play, 1 to DM) Since I dont have a regular table to join as a player, the drop in drop out portability is crucial to my being able to advance a character properly to the higher tiers. I know first hand many other players can’t designate that much time as myself and this will discourage new players from joining and drive away existing players with busy schedules.
So many questions! Is it fair to say it silos off Season 9 play from the rest of AL in the same way that Eberron AL play is siloed off from Forgotten Realms? And for similar reasons?
No. An Eberron character can play no material of Seasons 1-9 nor CCCs. A season 9 character can play previous adventures, plus CCCs
Merric, I see nothing in the article that indicates you can create a previous-season character. What it states is that starting with Season 9 they will ask you to create a new character for the season, and for each season thereafter. It doesn’t say that you can decide to create, say, a Season 4 character and count DDAL04/CoS content as your “current season” (gaining story awards and item unlocks). Because of this in September there will be two kinds of characters: Season 9 characters and pre-Season 9 characters. When Season 10 comes out there’ll be Season 10 characters and pre-Season 10 characters.
Is there another document somewhere that indicates otherwise?
Look at the section in the FAQ that asks if you can create a Dreams of the Red Wizards character
Yes, what of it? It’s quite the leap to assume that means that any season 1-8 will be a valid choice for a character (“PHB+1+1”). In fact, the point that “every season you’ll be asked to create a new character” indicates you can never choose an old season.
That just means you can’t choose DRW as your season, it doesn’t say you CAN choose any other season. As we all know, in DnD, and especially in AL, if it isn’t specifically said, then the general rule applies. In this case the general rule would be, “…we’re going to ask players to create a new character at the beginning of each season.”
We haven’t seen the rules. We’ve seen a description of part of them.
Ok, I can see how that can be interpreted as such. Thanks. In addition Lysa mentioned outright during Adventurers Wanted today that you could choose a season for a character. Some may still be confused as she only mentioned creating a season 9 character, and “choosing that as your season” but I think with all this together that it’s safe to assume that’s what she meant.
I do think it’s a bunch of additional bookkeeping for players, though. She mentioned that current characters are considered “Season 1-8 characters” and can obtain rewards and unlocks “as normal” for Season 1-8 content. I suppose folks could rush to create a bunch of level 1 characters to get in under that “legacy” banner but that feels contrary to the spirit of things.
Kind of a hassle for us DMs, too. “And this is your magic item unlock, unless you’re not a character for this season, etc. The season 8 changes made explaining things to new players about twice as much work for me. Not looking forward to this on top of that, heh.
This just creates a lot of extra work for DMs.
Now they have to enforce these rules. They have to separate the players who will earn the rewards from each session from the ones who won’t, and the difference is arbitrary. The DM has to explain to those increasingly angry players that even though they spent the last few hours playing through the same adventure as everyone else, they can’t get this Season 9 magic item unlock because their character, who just got enough ACP to hit second level, did a Season 8 adventure before and unlocked a Cloak of Protection. And now they can never, ever receive any Season 9 magic item unlocks or story awards because their seasonality is wrong.
I guarantee not all of those players will be understanding and say “okay, well, now I know for next time. Let me just start over with a brand new character.” They’ll decide that league play is not worth the ridiculous rules and set up a homebrew game.
No DM that I’ve spoken to is looking forward to having this confrontation. Almost all of them have already decided to ignore the seasonality rules. They don’t level the playing field or help newcomers. The reasoning given for these changes is either flawed or dishonest. All this will do is discourage people from playing long-term when they discover that their choices are resetting their favorite characters to 1st level every season or not getting to experience the full scope of future content.
Large segments of the AL community – “We hate parts of the Season 8 rules.”
WOTC – “Hold my beer. Season 9 will make you long for a return to Season 8 rules.”
If I was to create a new character right now, declare it as season 9 (Do I just write this on the character sheet?), play only CCC/non-seasonal content for now, could I then jump into season 9 when it begins in September?
Then seperately, could I then play other season content right now, and as long as I don’t take/accept any story rewards etc, would it still be eligible for season 9 come September?
Season 8 rules were awful. This looks to be worse. Why is WotC trying to reinvent the wheel?!
There are definitely reasons. I hope to touch on them in some upcoming articles.
In an effort to make “new players feel welcome” they are just alienating all their current players. I have yet to meet a single person likes these new rules.
This is exactly why I’ll be switching from AL to homebrew and not buying anymore of their “seasonal products.”