Last night, I ran Giant Diplomacy for my D&D Adventurers League table at my local gaming store. Around me, three other DMs were doing the same, attended by 23 players. Most of those players have been with us in the four preceding weeks as we’ve run the other adventures in this series. Together, we’ve all shared the experience of playing these adventures. Afterwards, we typically compare our experiences, discovering how each group handled things differently, and what triumphs (or disasters) they achieved.

This is not how D&D was when I first entered the game in the early 1980s. However, the concept of the shared experience was there.

There were two main ways in the early days of having a similar experience to other groups. The first was through play of the published adventure modules. The first few years of D&D saw no adventures being published, but in 1978, the first three AD&D adventures were published: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and Hall of the Fire Giant King. These were followed by more adventures over the next five years, and then even more.

The very first adventures published were played by a lot of people. They were the only ones available, and so if you wanted to run a professionally-created adventure, you didn’t have much choice. It helped that most of the adventures were pretty good, and their reputation spread by word-of-mouth.

And thus, you got a community of players who, though they’d never played together, had played through a common set of adventures, and thus had a shared experience.

The other way was a more local phenomenon: that of the players who went to a D&D convention where they all played a specially-written scenario together. Obviously, this didn’t involve as many players than those playing the printed adventures, but you still had people who had shared the experience with you. However, the experience of the published adventures was a much stronger one over the entire D&D community.

As we got to the mid-80s and later, the adventures lost their ability to unite people, partly because there were so many of them being published, and partly because a lot of them weren’t much good. To some extent, this was replaced by the rise in campaign settings, so that two people who played in the Forgotten Realms setting could compare notes, but we began losing this idea of sharing play experiences beyond saying “We both played D&D.”

A new form of sharing a D&D experience came through the rise of Organised Play. In OP, the idea of the convention scenario was expanded to a world-wide level. Thus, an adventure written for one convention would be played at many conventions around the world. This did expand the reach of those scenarios, but it was still restricted to convention-goers, and those that actually chose to play that adventure. As the years went by, the play of these adventures expanded to include store play and home groups, thus expanding their reach and making them more of a shared experience.

This became even more true with the D&D Encounters program, which had people playing exactly the same part of the adventure each week. However, there were several inherent problems with the program, chief of which was how heavily railroaded the experience had to be, taking away from one of the main strengths of the game: the ability of players to not follow a script. That it was also part of the relatively unpopular 4^th Edition didn’t help either.

The release of 5^th Edition did wonders for revitalising the shared experience of D&D. And it did so in two ways: one planned, and one unexpected.

The planned one was the release of only two significant adventures each year. When the game was released, you had Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set and Hoard of the Dragon Queen (the first part of the Tyranny of Dragons storyline). And that was it for months. So, if you were going to play D&D and not create your own material, your choices were limited, just like in the early days. It helped significantly that Lost Mine is a really good adventure, regarded as one of the best ever released for D&D. If your first experiences of D&D are with 5E, it’s likely you’ve played Lost Mine.

Then, with each new adventure release coming about six months apart, people had time to complete one and then play the next. (Or, at least, the one after that). With the play of the hardcovers also being promoted in game stores, we got a much stronger shared experience. As well, because we weren’t being drowned by a lot of other releases, we’d talk about them a lot in all the ways the modern world allows us to do.

The unexpected one was the rise of Actual Play. At least, I didn’t expect it, and I’m pretty sure the people at Wizards didn’t expect it either. However, they’ve certainly embraced it, as the Stream of Annihilation shows. When you have groups like Critical Role streaming games, this creates a new type of shared experience: of watching the game, and watching with lots and lots of other people. If you watch Doctor Who or Game of Thrones, you know that you’re not alone and you’re part of a community of fans. Now that is extended to a new way of participating in D&D.

I love this. I’m not an Actual Play devotee myself – I’m entirely too busy with running my own games of D&D – but for many people it provides a new way to learn about the game, to participate in the game, and to interact with other players of the game.

This is not to say that doing your own thing is bad. I happily run a homebrew campaign, and have for most of the past two decades. Creating your own material is a large part of the game. But staying in touch with what other people are playing? That’s now easier than ever. And all of it strengthens the D&D community.