Adventurer's League: Questions about the rewards.

[The Shadowdove]

Hey forum-lurkers,

I'm about to play my first AL game. I'm also DMing.

I read through the quests in preparation and have a couple of questions.

The magical item, gold, and experience rewards are pretty straight forward.

What about this renown that they gain in their faction?

And downtime. What benefit can you gain from x amount of downtime days?

Obviously there's an article or document somewhere detailing this that I've overlooked. Feel free to point me in that direction as well.

However, I'd also like your experience and perspective on these as well.

I'm just trying to be thorough so that everyone has a good time without me fumbling around with half answers.

Thank you in advance,

Dove.

[mgshamster]

For a while renown didn't do much, but a recently released factions document allows you to spend renown to go up in rank in your faction, which grants benefits. Link (http://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/199498)

Downtime is spent to do downtime activities as described in the PHB and DMG. There's also other AL specific downtime activities, such as advancing to the next tier when you don't have enough XP to level up (say you're level 4, but at a level 5-10 game; you can spend downtime to go up to level 5).

[The Shadowdove]

Thank ya.

So, where do DMs record their rewards from the end of the quest?

Do we use a log sheet for a character?

[mgshamster]

Yeah, that's all I do. I just record it on a character Logsheet. Since the rewards can only go to one character.

Don't forget to check out the DM Challenges. When you accomplish one, you get extra rewards. Like x2 rewards for DMing am online game. You can find it on the DMs Guild.

[rooneg]

Hey forum-lurkers,

I'm about to play my first AL game. I'm also DMing.

I read through the quests in preparation and have a couple of questions.

The magical item, gold, and experience rewards are pretty straight forward.

What about this renown that they gain in their faction?

And downtime. What benefit can you gain from x amount of downtime days?

Obviously there's an article or document somewhere detailing this that I've overlooked. Feel free to point me in that direction as well.

However, I'd also like your experience and perspective on these as well.

I'm just trying to be thorough so that everyone has a good time without me fumbling around with half answers.

Thank you in advance,

Dove.

Note that most adventures don't give Renown to DMs. There are some DM Quests that do, but mostly you need to actually play adventures to get it. That said, there are basically two levels of renown that are meaningful, 3 renown, which means you're at rank 2 in your faction and can participate in secret missions if you play a adventure that has one (they're fairly rare and only show up in a few tier 2 and 3 adventures each season), and 10 renown + 1 secret mission, which gets you to rank 3, which means you're allowed to spend downtime days to acquire magic items from your faction. There are some higher rank things that happen when you get more renown and more secret missions, but those are the commonly used ones. All of that is described in the Factions of Faerun document (https://www.dmsguild.com/product/199498/A-Guide-to-the-Factions-of-Faerun?).

Other than spending downtime to get magic items from your faction most of the time you use it for random stuff. Like if you're a wizard you can use it to copy spells into your spellbook, or if you've been raised from the dead you can spend downtime days to get out of the "you're weak for a few days" stuff that happens after that spell is cast. At a few levels you can spend it to jump to the next tier of play (20 downtime days to go from level 4 to 5, some larger amount to go from 10 to 11, etc). This is described in the season's player's guide, I think. Oh, and one more use: trading magic items. You can swap magic items between characters who are not playing at the same table (i.e. between your own characters, or with random people on the internet, etc) for a cost of 15 downtime days for each character. Note that you can only trade items of similar rarity (i.e. uncommon for uncommon, rare for rare).

Another thing to keep in mind about rewards. Each reward (or quest) has to be applied to a character all at once. You can't just get the XP, or just the gold, or just the downtime. You get all of it. In practice, rewards tend to get spent to help you level up a character, or to pay for expensive spells like raise dead, or to get enough downtime days to do something. If you don't currently care about one of those things for a character, just bank the rewards and apply them when they matter. There's nothing that says you need to spend them when they're earned.