Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Organized Play or Find a new love

A lot of people I think have always questioned the role of organized play games in the context of the overall game experience. For people not familiar with organized play. A character is created with a certain rule set and guidelines and that character is given experience at an end of a 4 to five hour module. The character then can be take to other organized play games such at GenCon. The rules are specific and experience is tracked by such things as a logsheet. After the four hour session play continues with another adventure, where ever that adventure takes place. It is different from a home game which a DM normally runs for a group of friends and play freezes then picks up later. I think at first when they were created by Frank Mentzer at TSR in 1980 they were to connect games. The Role Playing Gamer's Association grew from a local Midwest USA focus to cover the world. TSR allowed the RPGA to use other systems such as Shadowrun for Virtual Seattle and Call of Cthulhu for its adventures. This ended in around 2003 when marketing the d20 system for 3.5e became the focus of the RPGA. In 2008 when WOTC switched to the 4th edition rules set for D&D it killed its eight year 3.5e campaign Living Greyhawk and started a new campaign Living Forgotten Realms (LFR). Paizo created it own organized play group the Patfinder Society. The rules for LFR had a few changes such as module replay allowing a new character to play a module that an older character had played. Also modules were set to optimize the 4e rules set not allowing sleep or extended rests for the majority of play. Recently with the announcement of 5th edition or #dndnext is its been termed. A few people in my local area have been complaining about the lack of commmitment from WOTC to LFR. I think this needs to be looked at with the purpose of oraganized play or marketing. As much as people don't care for this WOTC is putting its energy into dndnext. As much as it pains my friends to see their love (for LFR) much like mine for Living Greyhawk start to die dndnext is coming out in 2014 so LFR is a relationship that is doomed to end.