Community

With D&D Next off on the horizon somewhere, I wanted to share some observations from our local area about why LFR play has slowed down over the past year. This is not a complaint, rather intended to inform decisions as campaign administration makes decisions about what will happen "Next."

First, 95% of what I see players complaining about on the message boards has had little impact on play in our area. Item rarity and errata are good examples of this.

The largest factors I've seen affect our community is the significant drop-off of veteran players. In the first few years of LFR, we had veteran players coming back week after week to DM, fill tables, and keep excitement high. Our players now are whittled down to new players who are just discovering the campaign.

I attribute this to three significant factors: the ability to create higher-level PCs, the widening of level bands, and the shortage of new adventures released for play.

During the first two years of a campaign, a new book would be released and veterans would immediately identify awesome builds and unique characters they wanted to try. They made a first level character, and they played. This kept a healthy number of low-level tables and entry points for new players. Key builds often hit their sweet-spot at higher levels. Now, if a player has a neat idea for a new PC, they don't make a 1st level PC; they make the PC at that "sweet spot" to play. Bypassing these levels mean that instead of veteran players requesting lower-level adventures so they can play their "new build," they can "jump in" to whatever is being offered in any given week. This has greatly affected replaying adventures, providing fewer opportunities for new players.

Widening the level bands exaserbates this problem. While during the first years, the veterans tried to keep at least one PC in each level band - playing more in order to do so - the flexibility has reduced the need so that each player only needs 2-3 PCs to have a reasonable chance of playing. This compounds the previous problem, in that veteran players are not replaying games, thus creating more play experiences for new players.

Finally, the shortage of new adventures has all but killed veteran play. Since players no longer feel the need to replay lower-level adventures to level up characters (either to reach the "sweet spot" or to have a character available for each level band), the only draw for them is to play something new. The veterans in our area are also active in convention play, so there isn't much drawing them to weekly game days.

So, that's what I've come to observe in our area. While there has been some burnout and/or frustration for a few players, that will happen in Year 4 of any campaign. Removing the things that brought players back week after week to play have definitely reduced our numbers. Something to consider when looking at what comes Next.  

Of course, changing the rules halfway will have some impact on play numbers. Neither of these changes though has been made lightly (and are also partially the result of a change of scope with the addition of the Encounters and Lair Assault programs). It was either these changes, or a complete collapse and burnout of the people necessary to get the adventures in a playable format to the players. I am not entirely sure it is as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be. Just because two things happen more or less on the same time does not mean they are are related even if they appear to be

For example, I remember seeing a similar drop in veteran players in LG in my area (both the Netherlands and the UK) after 4 years without any significant change to the campaign structure. Talking with these veteran players showed me that after 4 years of fairly intensive convention gaming, their priorities and preferences had changed often without realizing that was the case. The hope is that you draw in new players with the same enthausiasm and skill as the previous set of veteran players, but any well established campaign will have some trouble drawing in new players. Years of background information will always scare away some people, while, more often than not, it is required to keep the driving players in. Maybe the lesson is that no campaign should last more than 4 years regardless of editions?

Mar 27, 2012 -- 6:49AM, JohnduBois wrote:

Or perhaps that there should be transitions in storyline every so often to keep the content fresh so that (a) the veteran players don't feel like it's the same old thing, and (b) the potential new players aren't scared off by years of established events.  

Without the veteran players starting with new characters there still is the baggage of the previous years. Of course, even this is not as clearcut as I make it out to be. Players rarely join at just the start, they slowly trickly in and few players will want to join something that will be finished within a year

I'm in the same area as Uthrac so I've seen the same things. 

I don't know how much of it can be attributed to a single cause, I don't have solid numbers or data for it, however if I had to guess I too would guess that content and the lack thereof is what has caused our game day numbers to drop precipitously.

I want to add that it wasn't just player numbers that were down. We also began running out of DMs. A lot of the veteran DMs just stopped signing up. I can't say for certain that one drove the other, but without DMs we couldn't run games, and without games we couldn't entice new players into the game day. In the end, I think it was a vicious cycle and the game day is down to one table (maybe) a week, from 4 a week at its peak.

And I don't have a single cause for why the DMs stopped signing up, but I do know why certain DMs stopped coming. And the reasons varied from issues with the location (in a game store), to burnout with the system, to disenchantment with LFR, to personal reasons. But each DM I spoke to had different reasons/causes for not DMing, and I'm sure some of them had reasons that they didn't reveal to me. So as I said, I don't think there was a single overriding reason for the DMs not coming back.

I've seen some energy in the players of late, especially amongst veteran LFR players, driven by some of the new content and the excitement of the BIs. But I don't know if that'll last.

From my perspective, it was almost entirely shortage of new adventures. Sure, other factors also impacted, but it started with folks not feeling a need to push to show up to see the new shiny, and snowballed down never recovering.

P.S. Paizo's PDF of everything they make is a pretty awesome reward.