Playing D&D in the Game Store which we are all grateful to have.
Has its problems. Nothing major and everything can be soothed out because there are a fortunate number intelligent, compassionate people involved.
Problem one: paying £10 a session to a (no offence intended) relatively new DM who is ‘doing it professionally’ restricts the player base to those with disposable budget (a minority) but few like-minded* friends (most gamers).
Introducing the idea of ‘let’s gather in smaller groups outside the £10 sessions to game for free the way people used to do it in the mysterious old days’ is regarded as inappropriate and detrimental to the paid DM and the store who charge the DM £ per head for the room. We want to fund the place to keep it going!
There are only 7 days a week which restricts timetabling for sessions. In practise it is one 3-hour one-shot session per week and one 3-hour campaign session per week.
Other problems affect this too: D&D death by it’s own popularity. The one-shot sessions run into overtime such that a simple one hour scenario requires nine hours to play out. This is because of the size of the group. People are desperate for like-minded company in the roleplaying community.
A group of 9 is too large for one shot sessions because:
System mechanic of dice-rolling gets in the way of role-playing, storytelling, character development. For a lot of people that’s what D&D is meant to be about, it just so happens to have a bit of dice-rolling thrown in for good measure.
There simply isn’t time for that interruption in the bare bones of what makes the fight-scene progress.
D&D turns into BattleHammer where every action is gridded into a metric.
For most of the session, most people are waiting for their turn to roll some dice.
In the three hour session each of the nine people got to roll the dice three times. That’s 59 minutes of waiting.
Not so much fun. OoC banter is nice, it’s community building which after all is what this is all about. It takes that time for everyone to get familiar and comfortable with each other enough for personal shields to drop.
Some people will drop out because: boring play session style and high cost. That might help the sessions run more smooth but it doesn’t empower the people so much.
What do they do instead?
They stop playing D&D. They go back to being lonely, playing videogames and watching fantasy tv-series while painting miniatures all by their lonesome selves.
That’s no good at all. Its one perceivable useful function is to justify pushing any repeatedly problematic players out of the group, which happens, Thankfully it isn’t a problem here. Paying to be part of the group is not always a factor in avoiding it.
How can we get the game group size down? How can we also cater to the needs of all the local roleplayers? Run more sessions. It’s the only way. Problems: Not enough days in the week. Not enough actual role-playing time per session. Answer: we need more sessions, more often.
*It’s like, we want to slip into a totally immersive fantasy-campaign world and live there as much as possible.
Without having to wait another week for a 3 hour session in which we have to wait 59 minutes between rolling dice to find out if the orc is dead yet so the story can progress by one step.
The scenario book practically says ‘the last dying orc calls for reinforcements’. That’s another two or three weeks before the ‘one-shot session’ scenario ends.
These are not criticisms of the way a game is being run and definitely not a criticism of the people involved in running the game. We still love it and we still love them for enabling us to experience it.
It is an open awareness of a logistical problem affecting us all at this time.
The criticism is in the clunky, mechanical dice-rolling system of D&D. It slows the game down to a crawl. Hence the phrase ‘dungeon crawl’. In the decades of its patchwork glory, the beloved D&D system has not evolved to accommodate the modern needs of modern life.
What I can do about it myself?
I could have told the game shop all this at dot one before the sessions even started because I have 35 years experience of GMing. It’s a step by step process. It’s taken two months for this situation to emerge so they can see it for themselves. The learning curve of life experience is preferable to taking some mad old wizards word for it. I won’t be the first nor last to say that.
I have never charged money for running games because it’s always been about friendship groups who should not have to pay to play with friends. That’s how RPG has always been for the older generations as a core part of its culture. So, capitalists describe me as ‘amateur GM’ instead of describing me as ‘professional DM’. You’ll see that same philosophy reinforced throughout the state at every level. RPG used to be a place to get away from it to reconnect with something human, innate within us.
DM dungeon master the D&D title.
GM games master covers other rpg too.
Same difference.
I do not want to fall out with anyone about this opinion. I want the game store to prosper because it’s the one really good thing in this town. That the playing group is too large to effectively function optimally is proof of how many people in our community think so.
I can run a game group from home. I’d happily run a group from the shop and charge £ to cover renting the room or to capitalise and buy more miniatures and crafting materials for terrain, to make the sessions better. I’m doing that stuff as lifestyle already.
Problems: the store isn’t big enough for two separate rooms concurrently running sessions (two groups on adjacent tables does not work for D&D like it does for BattleHammer). Not enough money is generated by the rpg session to finance renting a bigger store simply so a handful of people can game once a week. The store is situated in the perfect location for it.
Daytime sessions? Possible but people work in the day it’s why evening sessions.
Running a session from home means inviting people into a private safe-space. I imagine most people respect and would prefer that boundary. Obviously there are issues with that. I live in a remote and hard to access area. The shop in town is ideally located.
The Catch22 is stupid. Something has to give, somewhere. Timetabling and running an extra session per week in the shop is the better, obvious answer.
I should mention to the store owner and the other DMs about this.
The thing is, I am sitting at home, writing a blog about this whilst the money people are probably discussing it between themselves by video call or face-to-face. It has nothing to do with me. I am simply an opinionated consumer gladly hiring their services.
But I do care about the game. I want to run my own sessions, and be an active member of the local role-playing community. We are still trying to figure this out.
The store only opened two months ago. I did not know there were other people who had ever heard of role-playing games for miles around here until I started hanging out there and discovering how big the need for these community groups is. It’s a small tribe united by collective passion for the roleplaying hobby.
Another problem with me running a game is I will run my game. I use a different rules system to D&D because the now evident problem of it’s clunky and mechanical disrupting peoples enjoyment and the flow of the storytelling content of the game. *Which to my way of thinking, is much more important than rolling dice.
I threw the rulebook out 30 years ago. People have a problem recognising that experience of doing this thing is why I take this approach to it. People assume I don’t know what I’m doing because I have no rulebook.
Well actually I’ve written my own rule-book, I play by my own system. It’s more fluid, easier, better for storytelling, but it’s not D&D. It does not use railroad scenarios so much as it uses motives and consequence.
So people don’t want to get involved because they’ve been programmed by the media that D&D is the white light at the end of the tunnel.
Jon the DM was excellent, very professional in helping every individual player when it was their turn, describing story events and customising the scenario book to meet the needs of the players imaginations while maintaining progressive gameplay.
The scenario he chose was one of the official pink&white one-shot box sets. The adventure was what’s to be expected, it covered basic bases for D&D fantasy worlds. It’s the first time I’ve seen inside one of those boxes, oh my God, is it bang for your buck’s! There are a lot of miniatures in it for the price, I was quite surprised.
D&D uses an initiative based turn system - clunky and mechanical system spilling over to dominate the structure of the group and ritually imprint us with the symbolic motif of ‘dungeons’ and ‘dragons’ and all the energies invoked by that.
I’ve written this blog, not because I intend to offend anybody. I’m grateful to the experience and had a really good time. The problems outlined here, I’m thinking a lot about how we can fix to make the sessions more enjoyable for everyone!