This is a second part of a series of articles examining the history and challenges facing the D&D Adventurers League since the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition in 2014. This is an outside view of the program, which, while I’ve been involved in many facets of the league, I am not privy to the internal discussions and research of Wizards of the Coast and the D&D Adventurers League administrators. So, everything here is my own opinion.
In the first article, I described the first four seasons of the DDAL, from its beginning in 2014 through 2016. At this point, the seasons lasted approximately six months each.
During the first three seasons, D&D Adventurers League adventures were distributed for free to stores and conventions. The designers of these adventures were paid directly by Wizards of the Coast. However, in January 2016, something new came into being. That was the DMs Guild, a site where designers could sell their works for Dungeons & Dragons.
The D&D Adventurers League adopted the DMs Guild as its new way of distributing their adventures. Previously, adventures could be found on a password-protected website, to which stores gained the password for free. The adventures on the DMs Guild were not free. The DMs or organisers had to pay for them. This came into effect with the release of Season 4, Curse of Strahd, in March 2016.
Speaking as a designer of a couple of these adventures, this was a great change. The amount of money I’ve made for writing the Tier 4 adventures The Mysterious Isle and Eye of Xxiphu is far higher than what I would have received if I’d gained the flat fee that Wizards previously paid the DDAL designers. And Wizards also made available the previous DDAL adventures on the Guild, so that talented designers like Shawn Merwin could also share in the benefits. That turned out to be a significant amount. Defiance in Phlan was originally released for free. It has been released again in Dragon plus as a free download. And yet it’s still an adamantine best-seller. (That’s over 5,000 copies sold). There are only 26 products as I write this that have sold that much on the DMs Guild. (My adventures have sold over 1,000 copies each). Getting designers suitably rewarded for their work is important, and something that is too rare in the RPG industry.
However, this changed the dynamics with stores significantly. While before they had a steady stream of free adventures that they could use to promote Dungeons & Dragons, this was no longer the case. When a new D&D product was released, stores would gain one free adventure – either the first of the new season or a specially-written adventure such as Underworld Speculation – but everything else they’d have to pay for.
This relationship of gaining free adventures and products for stores as a promotional device had been around for years, although it was most noticeable with the D&D Encounters program during fourth edition (2010-2014). Under that program, Wizards provided printed adventures to stores, which would be played on a weekly basis. In the early fifth edition days, printed adventures were replaced by PDF adventures and printed certificates. But with Season 4 of the D&D Adventurers League, even that support ended. Only a few adventures a year would be provided for free.
I believe this was partly a result of the success of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition. Fourth edition needed a lot of support to sell. Fifth edition was doing fine. However, the idea of also rewarding creators for their work more directly based on how many people used them likely also played a part. (In addition, a few stores ordered adventures and then didn’t run them.) Like many things, the reasons for the change are manifold.
The release of D&D Adventurers League adventures on the DMs Guild also changed another significant part of the program: Players could now play the D&D Adventurers League adventures anywhere they wanted. Beforehand, you couldn’t play at home: it had to be either at a convention or in a public place (generally a store), though public streaming was allowed. Now, you could play anywhere you wanted, including online. This opened up the potential audience for DDAL adventures greatly.
The reaction of stores and organisers to this news was complex. It’s too easy to say everyone hated it. Some stores dropped the program, others kept going, still others started afterwards and had no problem with it – for them, it was how it always was!
(In the case of our store, we started accepting donations each session that went towards the costs of the adventures. We’re still using that system, about four years later, and it’s going well.)
However, it was still a big shift. The D&D Adventurers League had moved away from being a marketing program aimed at stores, which its predecessor, the D&D Encounters program, had been. What was it now?
Overseeing the changes brought to the program in 2016 was Chris Lindsay, who was significantly involved in setting up the DMs Guild, and has remained a major force in promoting the Guild and its authors. He replaced another Chris, Chris Tulach, as the Wizards’ head of the DDAL in the middle of 2015, and so found himself dealing with the challenges of both the DMs Guild and the D&D Adventurers League at the same time – in addition to his other responsibilities. Chris Lindsay had been involved in various Organised Play programs for over a decade at this point; he was hardly inexperienced. And, in addition, there are other people at Wizards of the Coast who contribute. But Chris was now very noticeable as the head of the D&D Adventurers League.
This was 2016. The DM’s Guild had launched. The D&D Adventurers League was trying its first radical experiment in storytelling with the Curse of Strahd season where characters couldn’t leave the setting and had to complete the quest. The distribution of adventures had changed, and designers were getting paid more for their work. And yet, that wasn’t it for the changes of the year! Next time, I hope to cover the beginnings of the Convention-Created Content (CCC) program and the release of Season 5 (Storm King’s Thunder), perhaps the best regarded of the DDAL seasons.