I'm playing a lot of Adventure League sessions; the Season 4 Launch and the Suites of the mist series. I'm wondering if they will be using the characters you can download off the dnd.wizards.com website. Will the gm hand me a character sheet or can I download one of my own? I might prepare ahead of time if I can download in advance.
I assume they'll have pre-gens, but a tweet I saw from Chris Perkins suggested bringing an Adventurer's League-compatible character might not be a bad idea. https://twitter.com/ChrisPerkinsDnD/status/698010385849319424
As these are Adventurer's League events, you may provide an AL-Legal character for play. Our events this year are for "tier 1", which means level 1 through level 4 (and in many cases, level 2), so bringing in a character you've been playing through multiple levels already may disqualify that character -- he'll be too strong. We'll be providing a wide variety of pre-gens for the convention, as well as log sheets for your characters. You're welcome to create a level 1 character of your own, as long as it is within the constraints of the Adventurer's League Player's Guide. There are some great downloads and resources here. The Season 4 related player's guide has yet to be released, so I have no information about what sort of special custom backgrounds (etc) may be available.
playing a few of these myself, wanted to try the system before buying any rulebooks... the fact that pre-gens are available is all I needed to know!
Just a heads up: You can download the Basic Rules for D&D 5th Edition for free from the Wizards website. It's a pretty big PDF, and encompasses (I'd estimate) about 70% of what you get in the Player's Handbook printed rule book.
