Bit of a rant/vent but nothing to r/rpghorrorstories level.

The set up; Been playing in an AL for the better part of a year, working on and off in a city about two hours from home and hopping into the league which runs a game every two weeks. So far my experience has been mostly okay with some good nights thrown in, nothing too crazy positive or negative but it's been great to see such a variety of IC and OOC players and get used to working with strangers instead of close friends when I play. I'm runing a monk (played a few of them before) and just got into tier two.

Tonight's game was the first at tier two, infamous for killing PC's, and the first game back after the christmas and new year holidays. I was at a table with some familiar faces and a DM who I've never played with before.

Trouble arises: At first I was a bit confused because before the game started I saw that the DM didn't have a lot of material with them. One set of dice, a spiral notebook, and his phone. I don't expect miracles but it looked light right off the bat. They sat down, we did a table introduction and the DM said that they were one of the more 'theatre of the mind' DM's in the league. Fine by me until they followed up with 'except tonight where I'm going to play with this for the first time' and got handed a battle map from another player. Now I got a bit worried. Neither style is really better than the other IMHO and a lot of times you need both, but trying out a new method for the first time at a league game doesn't bode well to me.

The game gets underway and I see that the DM is running the module off of their phone. No print out, not even a full screen, reading things as they go off of a smartphone. The rhythm was something like pause for 15 seconds as the DM reads the adventure, interact with what's going on, wait for the DM to see if there's any relevant information in the module, and repeat. Even when they were interacting with the PC's the DM would pause at odd times during sentences as though they were a text box that needed to be manually progressed to get through the information. We were 6 players in a crowded room so it could be quite difficult to keep things cogent throughout the session.

The Players: Only one was a real problem, the Druid. I'd played with them in the session prior and was confounded as to how they'd reached level four but seemingly had no concept of how their character worked. I know that druids can be a little fiddly with divine casting, wild shape, and some unique spells. But this one didn't seem to understand the basics of preparing and casting spells at all, needing things like DC and ability scores explained to them by the group. Over the past few weeks they didn't seem to improve at all despite having spell cards and at least the PHB at their disposal. They were going through their spells at the table before the game not knowing what level spells they had at their disposal or how many to prepare. I tried to help them a bit and showed them how they could prepare 8 spells up to level three. The prepared 8 level three spells by picking them 100% randomly from the deck. There's only so much you can do for people.

The rest of the group wasn't bad per sey but very rule lawering and with some complicated builds. There was a lot of spell casting (which required a lot of referencing) and a lot of strategy talk trying to optimize the action economy. I try to play tight and to the point, knowing generally what I'm going to do at the start of the turn, rolling attacks and damages together, and being clear about what my character's actions are. So in combats my turn might last thirty seconds, the next players might take three minutes.

The Game Itself: AL is kind of paint by numbers in my experience, the modules aren't too technical and the objectives are clear, being clever is useful but not strictly necessary. This module was rather convoluted. Questgiver A asks us to clear out a dungeon but sends us to Questgiver B for more info. B asks us to collect some materials from said dungeon (not clear at first if this was just supposed to be a cover story for us going there) but says we should meet Questgiver C on the way for more info. C does have more info but also asks us to gather materials from the dungeon and fix its haunting problem (not the original goal at all). We get to the dungeon and meet the ghost who surprise surprise gives us more info and asks us to recover an item to avenge? sooth? physically release? their spirit. That item is presently inside of a big monster and none of this matters to the job we signed up for with QGA.

The team is very cautious about proceeding through the dungeon and approaching encounters so it takes a while to progress. The DM is slow to move the module ahead, the maps aren't prepared, side conversations are a regular occurrence, the game is dragging. None of this is helped by hearing the table next to us run the same adventure and have a great time of it. The first monster is in a big room with a hidden safe path through it, it's been about two hours of faff up until this encounter and the thing is immune to non-magical damage. I don't have any means to do magical damage. Balls. Kind of sit this one out but step on the 'wrong' square when falling back and get poisoned anyway. Combat crawls along but eventually gets resolved.

Backtrack and go down a separate tunnel and come to a pit 120 ft deep with an elevator and a spiral ramp along the side. Team decides to light up a stone and mage hand the level to let the elevator down then follow it on foot. I go a bit ahead to stealth along but for some reason another player decides they're going to mad dash down and race the elevator, perhaps to ambush anything that may be at the bottom. This is all done in initiative going around the table counting out steps on the map, it gets incredibly frustrating to wait round after round as people walk along a path like it's a lord of the rings reenactment. Of course the player that rushed ahead ends up falling into a pit trap, with spikes, and powerful skeletons, who smash them into the spikes and paralyze the player with their attacks. They go down (KO) well before anyone else can reach them.

They survive and get rescued but it's another laborious process, by this time other tables are finishing up and we're running out of time before the shop closes. I have an hour commute to get home once I get out of this and an early start tomorrow. But still it goes on, and on, with no real sense of urgency until the last five minutes when we nova the final boss and quickly pack up.

It wasn't a horrible session, there are some people it's harder to play with and we had plenty of laughs but it was the first time I'd been at League and felt like I shouldn't have bothered. I try to be prepared, I try to push things along, I try to know how this game works and by god none of that seemed to help in the slightest. If there's anything to take away from my pissing and moaning it's that a little prep goes a long way. Read your books, know the spells you use, and get yourself organized before you start rolling dice. It makes things a hell of a lot better for your fellow players.