A program like D&D Encounters for the rest of us

Posted on July 15, 2010 by

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So I was thinking about D&D Encounters, and how it can really be a fun thing for those people who may not have too much time to game, and can squeeze in an encounter a week for about 2 hours or so or gaming.  The problem is that WOTC limits this program to gaming stores only, on Wednesday nights at 7pm, and if you can’t make it to a game store at that time, you are basically out of luck.

So, with that in mind, my crafty little brain got ticking and I thought about a community based project similar to D&D Encounters, but not limited to Wednesday nights, nor to a gaming store.  Here’s my thinking:

  • A “season” worth of encounters, roughly between 10-15 encounters per.
  • A team of encounter writers plan out the story arc, and each take up a few encounters to design.
  • A team of PC optimizers and creators can make the Pregens.  Yes, it would use pregens.
  • Artists could help in creating maps and monster tokens, and exposing their work to the community at large.
  • The program would live in its own blog, where the downloads would live, along with the week’s post explaining the encounter, and opening a discussion following the encounter, to discuss its weaknesses or strengths.
  • A new encounter would be available for download on the same day every week.
  • Play at home, play online, play whenever you can.  Just play.
  • Once the new encounter goes up, discussion can then begin on the previous encounter, so to not spoil those that haven’t played it yet.

The cool thing I see about this is that if many people participate, there could be tons of discussions about the encounters, and tons of eyes looking at the works of people that are passionate about creating, writing, being cartographers, or artists, or whatever else.

The next step I’ll take here is to build a small team of organizers to sort of get it off the ground, and see what happens.  I’ve spoken to some already, and have an idea of who the team will be, at least of organizers, the actual encounter builders and artists will be selected later.

I think for the behind the scenes stuff, Google Wave may be a good place to start collaborating on the actual set-up of the program.  Something tells me there may be a bigger audience for this than I may think, so I want to get it right.

If you’d like to follow this on twitter, I am using the #homedndenc hash tag for any tweets related to this.

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Posted in: 4e D&D, Gaming