HOLY.

CATS.

Man, it’s been crazy these last couple weeks. Thanks for bearing with us while we sorted through the massive pile of player, DM, store, event organizer, and general community feedback. People are super passionate about Dungeons & Dragons, and we’re appreciative of every comment that came through – and although some could have been better stated, nearly all of them contained at least a nugget of truth or wisdom inside. We’ve dug our way out of the wordmines and have gotten the revised season 8 guidance posted on the wizards.com site, and those documents (the Player’s Guide, DM’s Guide, and FAQ) will be joining the Content Catalog and DM Quests on dmsguild.com on August 30th.

All of that said, let’s take a minute to talk about DM rewards and DM Quests.

The Good

rewards! everyone likes rewards!

most of the quests are easily accessible

some of the more challenging ones can be achieved over time

The Bad

some of the quests required a LOT of additional explanation

many of the rewards required an inordinate amount of additional explanation

the quest documents had ballooned up to 12 pages

The Ugly

rewards pile up faster than many DMs can spend them, especially those that are primarily DMs and don’t often play. Thus, the rewards lost some of their value.

some rewards (like the legacy items) are cool in theory and work really well in smaller-scale home games, but for global organized play really don’t work well because of the massive amount of additional explanation needed

because of the page count and complexity, many DMs were either refusing to use the system entirely or were running quests simply to maximize their rewards, which was resulting in less-than-good experiences at public play locations (conventions, retail game days, and so on)

The list of stuff above is really summarized and simplified, but pretty neatly sums up the experience that we’ve been seeing. To stress: people LOVE the quests and rewards, but the system has grown unwieldly and really… kinda ugly. So, going forward into Season 8 and beyond we want to put a couple things out into the public for this system:

Season 8 Updates to Existing Rewards:

due to the experience-to-advancement-checkpoint system, all existing DM rewards will need to be used by March 1st, 2019. This gives everyone 6 months to bring their rewards in-line with program expectations.

beginning August 30, 2018: due to the adjustments to the treasure earning process in D&D Adventurers League play, any quest from Season 7 (and prior) that is completed and would normally award a magic item instead unlocks that item. Uncommon and rare consumable magic items and spell scrolls are granted as per normal, however.

All DM Quests from Season 7 (and prior) expire on March 1st, 2019. Upon that date, all of those quests are no longer eligible for rewards as shown on their quest sheets

So what does this mean? Well, we want to streamline our systems, yes, and we want to keep our focus on new content. Moving our quests in this direction allow us to remove a large chunk of “old” bookkeeping, and also allows us to focus on rolling our new and improved rewards. It also grants us the ability to incorporate some of the really interesting old quests if we need to! We can also include CCCs on more of our quests in the Evergreen section – this section will be pretty static from season to season – while we spin the seasonal quests around the themes of the current season.

Highlights of the revised DM Quest system:

Oathbreaker is teased here because people REALLY wanted to get access to it, and it’s going to require some dedication to earn it.

Seasonal quests must be completed by the end of the season in which the quest was released in order to earn the listed reward.

Evergreen quests have no defined end date.

Quests can be completed any number of times unless the quest explicitly says otherwise.