Salutations, Adventurers!
With the release of the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion, players have been given access to a whole new slew of player options this storyline season: Deep Gnomes, Genasi, Goliaths, and more spells than you can shake an Elemental Prince at! That all sounds like some exciting potential for adventure along the Sword Coast and on the shores of the Moonsea.
But not so fast! Does your character have access to those options? The answer lies in the rules regarding story origins. In the D&D Adventurers League Player’s Guide Story Origin is the very first step of the Character Creation process:
Choose a Story Origin
Select your story origin for your character. Most of the time, this is simple—it’s your starting adventure’s storyline season. Your choice of story origin tells you what rules you can use for character options. You can choose any available story origin, even if you plan on playing in another storyline.
Players currently can choose the Elemental Evil and Tyranny of Dragons storyline origins. The Elemental Evil origin gains access to most of the new options from the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion, the Tyranny of Dragons option does not. In future seasons, other storyline origins may become available, and these origins may eventually be withdrawn. Therefore, in sum, new character options are tied to story origins. Story origin is one of the few things you can’t change in a rebuild. Therefore, if you want to use rules from a new rule source, with very few exceptions you need to create a new character with the appropriate story origin.
Characters with previous story origins
So, what does this mean for characters created in a previous season? Well, it does not affect what adventures they can play; story origin has nothing to do with what adventures a character can play. Any character can play any adventure, regardless of story origin, so long as the character meets the adventure’s level requirements. However, the rule does mean that existing characters cannot take options from other story origins when advancing or rebuilding.
Why have Story Origins?
Some of you may be asking why the rule sets these limits. First and foremost, it avoids power creep. By limiting each character to a set of character creation rules that have been designed, balanced, and tested against the rules presented in the Basic Rules and Player’s Handbook, the League ensures that characters created with new content are no more powerful than characters created with old content or with future content. In previous organized play campaigns, character creation becomes increasingly more complicated and characters became increasingly more powerful over time. The storyline origin rule avoids that possibility.
Without the rule, the cost for a new player to start playing in the League, not only in terms of books, but also in terms of time spent learning the rules and creating a character, would climbs rapidly as new rules are added. By limiting the available rules, the entry cost for new players is kept low, and the amount of information they have to master is also kept to a reasonable level.
Imagine, if you would, a future in which the story origin rule did not exist, where every new set of rules were permitted. In Season nine, new players and Dungeon Masters would have to obtain eight seasons’ worth of rules expansions and understand how they interact with one another to build effective characters. With the story origin rule, players only need to focus on one rule source in addition to the Basic Rules or Player’s Handbook and need not worry about synergies with rules from other sources.
Moreover, the designers don’t have to worry about unintended side effects. In Season nine, if they introduce a new a new druid archetype, they don’t need to worry that it might have an unintended, unduly powerful effect when combined with a race from season four, a spell from season seven, and a feat from season six, because such combinations are not possible. Players are limited to one story origin’s worth of rules for building and advancing their characters. In this way we maintain balance as both Dungeons & Dragons and the D&D Adventurers League continue to grow.
There are some other, great consequences of the story origin rule. First, you’re probably only ever going to need the Basic Rules or Player’s Handbook and one other rules source to play in the League, not a bookcase full of material, and you won’t have to haul it around when you play at your favorite local game store or at conventions! It also gives existing characters a reason to want to start about two new characters a year. That means there will always be strong demand for tier 1 content, so there will be plenty of games that new players can join! Finally, it gives you something special. You can create Deep Gnomes, Genasi, and Goliaths and use the Elemental Evil spells. Players starting in later seasons may not have that opportunity.
Some have argued that it wouldn’t cost the League anything to let players just use all the new options right now, since there is only one additional set of options today, and those options have been tested against the Player’s Handbook so aren’t unbalanced. However, if the League does that, what does it do as new options come out in the future? They won’t have been balanced against anything other than the Player’s Handbook. The League would have to playtest them, and that playtesting would become more onerous each time a new rules source is released. The League might allow an option, only to have to ban it later when an unnoticed synergy were found. That’s happened in other organized play campaigns, and it’s never gone over terribly well.
It’s not that the League doesn’t want you to have fun, it’s that the League wants you to continue to have fun season after season. The characters you build today will be just as effective as the characters of tomorrow; you’ll be able to continue to play them through the tiers and adventure together with newer characters from future seasons!
Keep your swords high!
Art Severance
You can usually find him on Thursday nights doing what he loves most, playing D&D in his home office in a Los Angeles suburb with his husband Al, their dogs Wednesday and Luigi, and several close friends.
Latest posts by Art Severance (see all)
- What are Story Origins? - April 22, 2015
- The Role of Local Coordinators in the D&D Adventurers League - March 9, 2015
- Winter Fantasy D&D Adventurers League Panel and Q&A - February 24, 2015
