I’ve now been running D&D Adventurers League games at my local store for a little over three years, since the release of 5E – which is how long the program been in existence. We run two nights a week, and have two separate types of play:
- Campaign games, where the same group of players play through one of the Hardcover Adventures released by Wizards of the Coast.
- Single Session games, where players play through one of the short D&D Adventurers League adventures that takes 2 to 4 hours. The table composition changes from session to session.
Campaign games are by far the more popular – at present we have nine Campaign game tables running each week, compared to three or four Single Session game tables. However, awesome though the campaign games are, they provide issues when a new player wants to join.
Imagine you’ve never played D&D before. You rock up to a table, where they’re playing the finale from The Rise of Tiamat. You sit down with your first-level character and must participate alongside a group of 14th level characters. Is that an enjoyable experience? I would say not.
The D&D Adventurers League requires players to start with a first-level character for good reasons. For a brand-new player, you want them to give them an enjoyable introduction to the game, teach them the basics, and allow them to participate in a way that they feel like they matter. That doesn’t happen at a 15th-level game.
The best solution would to always be starting up new campaigns. Get a group of six players together and a DM, everyone creates first-level characters, and they’re set for the next several months.
Best, yes. Realistic? No. We don’t have the players, space, or the DMs to enable that.
The best solution that has a chance of working is always to be running Tier 1 (level 1-4) One-Shot games. That way, a new player can join in with a group of characters of about the same level and learn about the game and the D&D Adventurers League.
The trick is getting the right balance of Campaign and Single Session games. We run games on Wednesday and Saturday nights. For several years, we ran a 2-hour campaign session from 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm on both days, and an 8:00 pm – 11:00 pm one-shot session afterwards. This works very well on Saturday nights. It worked rather less well on Wednesday nights. Not enough players would stay around for the Single Session games.
So, for the last few months, I abandoned the Wednesday night Single Session games, instead just running Campaign games from 6 pm – 9 pm. That worked very well for those in a campaign game, and then I started getting several new players who could only play on Wednesday nights. There was nowhere they could join in. We wouldn’t have enough at a time to start a new Campaign table, and the existing campaigns were too advanced for them to join in.
I don’t think I’ll go back to the two sessions a night set-up for Wednesdays. It has too many issues, especially given it’s a work night. I’m considering running a Tier 1 table every week in addition to the campaign games, but this leads to the weeks where you get two enthusiastic new players, but no-one else to make up a table, which is not good at all. From February next year, we have the possibility of four campaign tables on Wednesday nights. Do I rotate through them so that each table takes a break for one week in every four and instead runs a Single Session game for that week? Do I use a monthly schedule? Do I take an individual player out from the campaign tables as needed to make up the one-shot?
It’s not an easy decision.
My feeling is the best method going forward is to have a dedicated Tier 1 table, and to randomly select players from the campaign tables when required to fill it out to four players. It’s not an ideal situation, but I always want to be able to offer games to new players.
It should be noted that once a player gets a character up to 5th level, it’s likely they can join a campaign table, as those tables tend to have people drop out due to things that occur in real life, and a 5th-level character can normally join a campaign table and be effective.
During January, we will be running dedicated “Introduction to Dungeons & Dragons” sessions on Wednesday nights (for all those people who received the D&D Starter Set as a Christmas present), so from February on I’ll get to see how this solution works!