Well, Saturday was a confusing day. It was my regular boardgaming day in town, but I was also set up to run a session of D&D Encounters if there were people wanting to play. Yes, it might be an unsanctioned "catch-up" session or something, but I’ve got my hands on the adventure so I might as well run it in the local store to help D&D along. This is a program to help stores, isn’t it? Besides, I’m hearing enough about non-Wednesday sessions of D&D Encounters that I might as well have fun with the adventure.

So, come late afternoon on Saturday, I’ve got a few people interested… and then the regular store-based group of D&D players turn up. Without their DM. Now, I would be amiss if I said I wasn’t expecting this, because I was. This year, these players have been cursed by not one but two completely unreliable DMs. Things were mostly ok last year, but this year it’s been a real curse. Now, I thought that they’d have a DM tonight, and that I might be able to run the D&D Encounter for some of them before their session if they were amenable. But, with no DM for them, plans changed. I quickly resolved to run the first three D&D Encounters for them. That’s as far as the campaign has run, so they wouldn’t be getting ahead of the world. 

While I think the Wednesday-only restriction is stupid, that doesn’t mean I disagree with most of the other details of the campaign. It’s entirely *because* I think it’s a good idea that I’ve been arguing against that restriction.

It helped that only Rich was there of my regular boardgaming crew; he was more than happy to play some D&D. Nathaniel was also there, but he was mostly involved in a Magic draft. There was a time when I thought we’d have to have two groups, but when the numbers boiled down there were six players, me and Nate. Nate would have liked to play, but the Magic draft had taken *far* longer than he had expected and Aimee was waiting for him. He would have stayed if we’d needed him to run an extra table, but it didn’t occur.

So, I found myself DMing a table of six players: Paul, and his son Ben, Rich, Jackson, Shane and Dakota. Those last two are quite new players, but Dakota has read a bunch of Forgotten Realms stuff and bought some of the books. I used my copy of the Character Builder to create a character for him (a Genasi Swordmage). Rich had spent part of the afternoon creating a Shardmind Wizard, and then the other players took some of the pregens: Jackson a Tiefling Psion; Shane a Elf Ranger, Paul the Githzerai Monk, and Ben the Tiefling Battlemind.

We had a lot of fun. I have a few issues with how the encounters are constructed, particularly the final set of skill challenges, but overall everything worked. Jackson’s Psion got killed in the first encounter, came back to life, but he dropped out of the game midway through the third challenge; I’m not quite sure if he wasn’t enjoying it or was just tired. Everyone else stayed. 

(If Rich wants to comment on the adventure, I’d be interested to hear his thoughts. I do think he appreciated the chance to play an arcane character; he’s been stuck with his paladin in the Friday campaign for a long time, and that campaign has been greatly disrupted this year as well – not my fault!)

However, I now have a problem: to keep running D&D Encounters with this group isn’t that much of a hassle. An hour or so every Saturday? Fits into my schedule nicely. However, it really, really needs the players to be there – and with the group lacking a reliable DM, this is less certain. So, in a moment of weakness, I said I’d DM them next week assuming their irregular DM isn’t there.

Now, this is utter madness: that weekend, I’m already running three other games (Friday night D&D, Sunday afternoon D&D and Sunday evening Serenity). Finding an adventure isn’t terribly difficult (I’m not a D&D Insider for nothing, and there is also the Living Forgotten Realms game), but taking the time to run it on a weekly basis? It’ll kill my boardgaming, and there’s the distinct possibility of DM fatigue. However, the alternative – of letting a D&D group die – is very much something I don’t want to let happen, especially as most of them are young and playing in their first games.

My preferred solution would be for them to engage in a weekly campaign with the same characters. However, if the campaign were structured so that each session could have a different DM if necessary, then I wouldn’t need to run it every week. For this reason, the Living Forgotten Realms campaign seems a good choice as a starting point. Note that the LFR game does allow DMs to create their own adventures (the MyRealms adventures), so even if you don’t like the LFR adventures, you could create your own adventure or adapt another. The LFR campaign has minimal tracking, as well. My friends who played through a couple of years of Living Greyhawk would be much relieved: instead of a sheaf of papers, you get a single page which has a place for the name of each adventure, the gold, XP and magic item you got from it… and that’s it. (Which is a useful bit of tracking in any case).

So, if Martin, Nathaniel, Adam, Rich or anyone else would like to DM this group on an intermittent basis, please let me know. I’m relatively comfortable doing 1/fortnight, and I think Mick would normally be able to cover the rest, but if you want a guest DM spot or something more frequent, let me know.

Of course, I’m then led to the crushing realisation that it probably wouldn’t be just one table: if everyone turned up who wanted to play, we could have two tables of 4-5 players each… and that requires more DMs. You see where wanting to help the game in your local store gets you?