Episode 58: the freezing fifty-eighth episode of the PokeProblemsPodcast. This week eveyone is sick, and Green Mario steps up to the plate to pretend to play Pokemon! We start off with a quick chat about Super Mario Run, and a spoiler free review of Star Wars: Rogue One! Miz Sylver sent us a list of news items to chat about! This included the Failure of the first Pokemon Sun and Moon Global Mission... The Wolf Doctor blames it on the extra step of registering to participate. Pokemon GO is having their Jotho Holiday Event through December 29th, in which you can catch Pikachus with Santa hats! They also have introduced "baby" Pokemon such as Pichu in egg hatching. You should all enter the Say YES to Nintendo 3DS Sweepstakes, being thrown by Southwest Airlines and Nintendo. Enter daily between now and January 15th. Overwatch's Winter Wonderland special event is running through January 2nd, get holiday loot boxes that can include holiday skins, emotes, and more. Shantae: Half Genie Hero is finished, and if you Kickstarted it you should have your code in hand. We talk about Kickstarter, and how some great successes have come out of it, like Shadow of the Demon Lord.
Then we get to the heavy discussion: D&D Adventurers League! Greg Marks aka Follow @skerrit7h3green aka Green Mario talks about how D&D organized play is incorporating more writers and refuses to spill the secrets on the themes of Season 6 of Adventurers League. (Miz Sylver wrote an adventure for the current season, Giant Diplomacy, which is premiering at NewCon in Portland, Oregon December 30-January 1!) Greg does tell us about a bunch of new improvements being brought into Adventurers League. The new season will see more Tier 4 adventures (for characters level 17-20, high level characters!), to encourage players to continue through the league adventures. The Adventurers League has also incorporated player feedback to make the adventures easier to run. The adventures will feature highlighted story beats, to help ensure continuity between adventures, for example, if the players are supposed to retrieve an item for a later adventure, the DM will know in the current adventure; recurring NPCs will have added characterization so they a more consistent across adventures; encounters that utilize special rules will highlight those rules and have tips and tricks to make the encounter more interesting to play. In addition, Wizards is taking a more active roll in leading the D&D community, through customer service and organizations like the Heralds Guild. It's great that Wizards is paying more attention to D&D! If you want to see Green Mario in person, his early 2017 convention schedule is:
How does he manage all this while working a day job and writing official Wizards of the Coast adventures and adventures for Kobold Press and Catalyst Game Labs? Don't forget to check out his most recently released adventure, The Vault of the Devourer! If you want to chat with Greg, you can contact him in many ways! His personal FaceBook, Follow @skerrit7h3green, Google Plus, emailing him at resource@dndadventurersleague.org or finding him in the Adventurers League Facebook.
Thanks for listening! If you have any questions or comments, we want to hear from you. Do you play D&D? What are your thoughts on Star Wars: Rogue One? Is Greg more of a Spiky Mario than a Green Mario? Tweet, email, or comment on the blog or Facebook to let us know!