Plans for AL season 9 starting in September

Here are two weird suggestions, not sure if I like these myself tbh:

  1. Allow the DM to change the tier of an adventure by adjusting the DCs of checks and picking different monsters for the encounters (or adjusting them otherwise). I ran a lot of tier 1 adventures of the Elemental Evil season and had players coming back. I adjusted the story hooks slightly to turn it into an overarching storyline, which worked really great and everybody enjoyed that. But with current the leveling system the characters leveled way to fast so we couldnā€˜t continue with the story because their level was too high for the respective adventuresā€¦ Taking slow progression is possible ofc, but doesnā€˜t feel satisfying at all.

  2. I donā€˜t thing I like this myself: Have community magical item unlocks. We start with a relatively short list of evergreen items (+X weapons, bag of holding, ā€¦) and if a party unlocks an item in an adventure it gets unlocked to be buyable for every player in the community.

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Another wild idea:
Character advancement could be session based. So for example it takes 1 session to get a character from level 1 to 2. Then it takes 2 sessions respectively to advance to level 3,4 and 5. For the tier 2 levels it takes 3 sessions per level etc.

Getting magic items could be tied to levels, still requiring the item to be unlocked by finding it. So maybe you get 1 magic item when you reach level 4, 1 item when you reach level 6, then at level 9ā€¦ Something like that.

The advantage would be, that it would make it easier for players to track the progress. Just write down the session and potential magic item unlocksā€¦

Final rules just dropped today - they have backtracked on seasonality, only offering some extra options for creating s9 characters. I think that they got the feedback. Gold is back and you can once again keep what you find magic item wise (but only to a limit based on tier). Level up is at the dms discretion based on what the party has achieved or 4 hrs play t1/ 8hrs t2-4 in hardback. So like checkpoints but with dm discretion if they think the party has really achieved something. Gold is back to some extent but with caps to prevent low level parties getting totally weird.

Sounds better than initially expected.