D&D Encounters is a new Organised Play series by Wizards of the Coast to promote Dungeons & Dragons play in stores. However, my original enthusiasm for the project waned and faded when I discovered that the program could only be run on Wednesdays. My local store, which has game space and runs miniatures, boardgames and the occasional D&D event, has a basic problem with running D&D Encounters on Wednesday: it isn’t open late.
Restricting D&D Encounters to Wednesdays only (any time on Wed, mind you, not just the evening) allows Wizards to promote a program that, regardless of where you are, you’ll know what day it occurs on. Thus, if I wander into my FLGS on a Wednesday night, or if I’m in Melbourne, or if I’m in New York, I should be able to find a D&D Encounters session to play in. That uniformity of day does a lot to help promote the program and help settle the idea of D&D Encounters in everyone’s minds. This, by itself, is not a bad thing.
Unfortunately, it then trips itself up and gets into trouble. And we must go to the reason there is D&D Encounters at all in the first place. My explanation for this may be inaccurate – I’ve gotten it 2nd or 3rd hand – but it makes sense to me.
You see, Wizards of the Coast are getting very concerned about losing D&D players.
Unlike many other hobbies, D&D requires a stable group to play. Most groups play in private homes and not in game stores. Then, when a group loses players, it is very common for the group to break up completely rather than recruit new players: where do they find new players? Magic: the Gathering breeds communities of players, especially as it often takes place in game stores where new players can easily find the games. D&D, in contrast, often exists in small self-contained groups that might exist for decades with little contact with the wider D&D community.
So, the loss of one player leads to the loss of the group, which leads to the lost of several D&D players.
This is a problem.
The solution, as Wizards sees it, is to promote more in-store play of D&D. This leads to the various D&D players in each local community coming to know each other, and thus the loss of a player means that everything need not come to a halt: there is enough of a replacement pool so that the group can continue. I don’t think this is a bad idea, although there are problems…
D&D Encounters is then, as I see it, the primary tool that Wizards is using to promote the formation of these local D&D communities: an exclusively store-based program for D&D, which won’t disrupt individual games that much, and allows people to have fun and meet other players.
Unfortunately, the Wednesday-only restriction then kicks the idea somewhere Eric’s grandma won’t allow me to post. There are many stores that will be able to run Wednesday-night D&D Encounters and get the community together for it. Fantastic! Chris Tulach twittered the other day that over 700 stores were participating in the first D&D Encounters session. Good for them. Pity then the stores that can’t run a session on Wednesday due to a number of extremely valid reasons:
* They don’t normally open late, so opening for D&D Encounters adds too much expense to run economically
* If run after 6pm, the schoolchildren who otherwise would be interested (if it was on Friday or Saturday) need to do schoolwork and can’t attend
* If run before 5pm, you get the schoolchildren, but the adults (who might actually include the only possible DM) can’t attend.
I’m sure you can think of more.
So, an idea for running D&D Encounters to benefit stores (and thus the formation of local D&D Communities) actually only benefits the stores (and communities) that are able to gather on these Wednesdays. Hmm.
It seems to me that the local store (and community) would be a far better judge of when the most convenient time would be for this. But no, that’s not what has happened. To confuse us all, all the initial promotional materials indicated we could run D&D Encounters on the day of our choosing with Wednesday preferred… but then they changed their mind.
I’ll just touch on a major drawback of the D&D Encounters scheme for promoting D&D play in store and the formation of communities anyway: it’s really based on being played by people who really like D&D combat. Running meaningful roleplaying & problem-solving in those encounters is likely to be very hard indeed. Impossible? I doubt it; but the very nature of the beast is that the roleplayers and storymakers aren’t going to be attracted to this like the combat/tactics players are. So, a local D&D community might form, but not made up of the greater population of D&D players.
That’s how I see it, anyway. Others may give better explanations. In fact, I hope they do.
The big issue, as I see it, is WOP tried to hard and shot themselves in the foot. Encounters is a good idea, but the night that is ideal to run that forced event is Friday. What do they have on Friday? FNM! They can’t run it then! And the Weekends are for big events, and most shops organize their RPGA games on the weekends. So that leaves the dead middle of the week.
The day they choose was out of necessity, but it’s a horrible day. I think that they would have been better off on a different week. That being said, however, I can’t even GET a game at any of the tables at my local store. 🙂
Kicking & Posting
Nice article again M. But, I laughed hard with your hilarious ambiguous sentence about “kicking it somewhere Eric’s Grandma won’t let me post” – so, you can’t even post it there? That’s rough – lol.
But, back to the issue discussed above. I find it interesting how WotC are so in tune with modern marketing strategies – you mentioned that MtG develops “communities” of players, whereas D&D is almost exclusively played in private homes. Really, a fascinating social comment, and so interesting that WotC have recognised this as a standout weakness of recruting new players, and hence, new customers.
Never thought of it that way…
Another thing…
Two problems with a set night and that night being Wednesday:
1) Wednesday is a common child-custody night in the U.S. so you have a lot of kids and dads tied up in the evenings with a family night that may not want to commit to doing D&D at a store for a few hours, or may have kids that are too small. Not so bad for teenagers but for those on either side of that range it could cut into your numbers.
2) Wednesday is a common church night also for several major denominations, and that’s going to cut across all age groups.
I’m not sure what the ideal night for this would be, but I’m fairly sure Wednesday night isn’t it.
Just a few thoughts
Blacksteel
http://towerofzenopus.blogspot.com/