In this article, I’m going to start on an examination of the history and challenges facing the D&D Adventurers League since the beginning of D&D 5th Edition in 2014. This is my outside view of the program, which, while I’ve seen a lot of it through organising games and conventions, writing adventures and being a community representative, is limited. I am not privy to the internal conversations between Wizards of the Coast and the D&D Adventurers League administrators.

My hope is that this series will give you a better idea of the challenges facing Organised Play for D&D in the modern age, as well as the recent history of the DDAL.

The D&D Adventurers League has been essential to my experience of the game since the release of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. At least two-thirds of my play is through the DDAL.

My belief is that the D&D Adventurers League has three primary goals:

• To provide new players with an entry point to Dungeons & Dragons
• To provide players with an ongoing experience if they’re unable to otherwise make regular play
• To support the release of the latest official D&D release

There are other goals, but I think those are the elements that are most important.

For the first few seasons, the D&D Adventurers League supported these by providing a selection of mostly stand-alone adventures that linked into the main themes of each hardcover.

In Season 1, Tyranny of Dragons, the adventures were set around Phlan in the Moonsea region. Each adventure was a little quest in the region, often featuring Cultists of the Dragon. There are big events in two stories (Tyranny in Phlan and Escape from Phlan), but otherwise you could play most of the stories in any order.

In Season 2, Elemental Evil, the adventures were set in Mulmaster, again in the Moonsea region. And these adventures again were mostly stand-alone quests that had featured the plots of the cultists of Elemental Evil.

In Season 3, Rage of Demons, we moved to Hillsfar, and the adventures featured the effects of the madness caused by the Demon Princes being loose in the Underdark. These adventures were a little more linked into three ongoing stories, but the adventures still stood alone very well.

These three seasons were a form of the DDAL that suited me well. By the time of Season 3, adventures were released to support three tiers of play, and their release was intermixed: A couple of Tier 1, then a Tier 2, then a Tier 3, then followed by another lower level adventure. To some extent, the Tier 1 adventures told one story, the Tier 2 adventures told another story, while the Tier 3 adventures told a third story. All linked back to the same themes, but you could happily play any adventure without playing previous parts. However, you got more out of it when you played them all in order.

In addition, they told a developing story in the Moonsea region. In the first season, a disaster overtakes Phlan, and the fate of the refugees of Phlan becomes an ongoing plot thread in later seasons. I felt these adventures did a fantastic job of making the Moonsea feel like a living place, while still being accessible so a new player could jump in at any point.

Season 4, Curse of Strahd, was the first real step away from this. It was entirely set in the plane of Barovia, as people from the Moonsea region were drawn into the land and trapped there and had to find a way to escape. It contained what I consider to be the first real misstep of the campaign. It was this: If you played a season 4 adventure, you were trapped in Barovia and couldn’t leave until you found an exit point.

What this lessened was the D&D Adventurers League’s ability to be portable.

The idea of portability comes from this: For an ongoing player, there are three aspects they probably enjoy:

• Being part of an ongoing story
• Being able to keep the same character from adventure to adventure
• Being able to go to any store and convention and play any adventure

Season 4 didn’t work with the third of those points. All of a sudden, if you played one of these adventures, you were locked out of playing any other adventures unless they were in the same season. And if you missed the time your local store or convention ran an exit point? The character was unplayable unless you sacrificed a significant amount of downtime, which low-level characters might not have.

The reason that this rule existed was not to punish players. It was entirely story-related. For as long as Ravenloft has been a setting, it has entrapped characters in its embrace. Trying to find an escape route is a feature of many Ravenloft adventures. By including this feature, you reinforce the story, and make committed players happy that the setting works as they expect.

Unfortunately, it brought thematic and portability into conflict. The main effect of this has been that Season 4 adventures are rarely scheduled by organisers these days, unless a group intends to play through the entire campaign.

Season 4 also used the idea of an ongoing story more strongly. The adventures linked together with tighter bonds to tell one tale. This strengthens the appeal for ongoing players, but makes it harder for a new player to drop in later. This becomes more important in later seasons so I’ll cover it then.

So, with the fourth season of the D&D Adventurers League, some of the tenets of the earlier seasons weren’t in effect. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea: Most of the season 4 adventures were very enjoyable to play, and if you were able to play all of them in order you had a superior experience. (Not perfect, but that’s true of almost every adventure release!)

And, despite the entrapping of characters in Barovia, plot threads from the main action in the Moonsea continued to be developed. However, with Season 5, a major change was on the way, and I’ll cover that in my next article.