Sean Merwin

It was legendary. And yeah, I had a sad weekend last week. A friend of mine passed away. Oh, I'm so sorry, Sean. And we actually we buried him on his birthday, which was a couple of days ago, which is odd, but also sort of fitting.

And this was the first time when someone who I was really close with growing up, who was one of the probably three people responsible for me getting into D&D, was a great DM, was a great storyteller. I would not be sitting here today for sure if it weren't for Steve. So my hat's off to Steve. Good luck.

And for all of you out there, you know, appreciate the people who you share this hobby with because it's a very passionate thing for a lot of us. And so, yeah, that's all I had to say about that.

Exactly. Exactly. What also makes life great are our listeners who listen to us and appreciate, most of them appreciate what we do. And if there are any hate listeners out there, thank you. We appreciate your attention as well. But we also get messages from them via various channels. And we're going to go through a couple of those today, starting with Thomas Connolly via our Patreon.

He said, all the con news got me thinking about my convention bucket list and how to prioritize them. I want to rank all the D&D gaming conventions by number of Adventurers League opportunities. I've heard things like X tables or YDMs or Z slots, but I can't find any documented numbers. It seems like you guys might have at least some impressions, if not the actual numbers.

Can you rank the top cons by AL opportunities for me? And this is an interesting question because yes, definitely ranking it by here are the number of opportunities you'd have to play is one thing, but you can only play one game at a time. So to say Gen Con, to say, well, yes, to say Gen Con, which say runs eight slots,

is better than your local home group that runs eight slots but only has two tables is a better AL opportunity is not necessarily true. Now, the special events may tip the scale, right? Gen Con may have a bunch of special events that your local game convention might not. But some of my favorite organized play conventions over the years have been the small ones where I can sit down,

and play eight slots just like I could at Gen Con at either no price or a quarter of the price or a fraction of the cost and still have a great time with a great DM and friends and old friends and new. So that said, we will try to give you an answer to this question. J.S., you want to step in with either answering the question or giving some feedback?

I was in my 30s or 20s or I don't even know. I'm going to add 10 at least, no matter what, 15. That's fair. Yeah. And another contributing factor to the chaos now is that Adventurers League is sort of this now, this amorphous thing that could mean a lot of different things.

When Adventurers League first started, it was these are the adventures you could run and this is the character you could play. And there wasn't a lot of confusion of... what was what.

And now with different campaigns, with different rules, with CCC content and convention-specific content, like Bald Man Games does the Montreal stuff, and we've announced some more conventions, the Greasy Snitches in the UK. So that becomes even more confusing about what is AL, what's not, what's premiering, what's been around forever, what haven't I played?

It's harder to focus that into one specific, this is the convention. If you're going to a convention that Ball Band Games is running, there's a good chance that you are going to have slots full of new games or special content. Same thing with Gamehole Con, same thing with these larger conventions. Beyond that, it's very hard to say.

You have to check in, as Teo said, with each individual convention, especially when you get into the PAXs, to Comic-Cons, to those sorts of fan expos, those sorts of things where it could be a lot of AL content, or it could be just a couple run over and over and over again.

Our next question comes from Snaggy13 via YouTube. Less experienced DM here. I have generally been using passive perception in combat, but probably in a broken way. If a player is in initiative order, i.e. we are counting actions, reactions, et cetera,

I have been checking the character's passive perception, and if it's high enough, and they mention looking, they just see whatever there is they're looking for. Traps, patterns on the floor, a weapon in a corner, etc. It has been an edge case for a while. I just think it is generally better to err on the side of too much info, given that they will forget 85% of what I say anyway.

Am I doing it wrong? Advice is welcome. First, I want to say, no, you're not doing it wrong. But there are a few things to consider. In fact, there are many things to consider, and we'll cover just a few of them here. I think passive perception is fine in a number of cases. I think in those cases, it can be okay, depending on the situation. But let's dig deeper.

Why was passive perception made in fourth edition? Well, in third edition, there was no perception. The skill was called spot, and that was used to find hidden things. Separate from listen. Right, separate from listen. So you'd make a spot check.

and but it was such a tell if the characters are traveling through the forest and the dm said okay give me spot checks and or listen checks and so everyone oh okay and they made their spot in their listen checks and if say everyone fails okay

dm says nothing everyone changes the way they behave right because an in-game clue has put in the player's mind something so the other characters start more actively searching right they change their marching order they they start doing things and so they would never they would never they would go back right they double back me like we walk through the area again like and then the dm has to go why you wouldn't do that like well we're going to i want to set up camp here come on

right exactly it changed the game there was a dissonance there so so what forey decided designers decided to do was make this passive perception check so that the dm while this was happening you just go okay oh no nobody has an 18 so they don't see it and you're surprised or you miss it but then as with any game the players will begin to game that