Its approximately 6 months later, and our work based D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) groups are still going strong.

Everyone is having a lot of fun, players are forming relationships, ridiculous stories are occurring regularly and the campaigns are progressing nicely. Some of the groups have even finished the smaller adventures that they were running and are looking for new challenges.

Speaking of groups; there have been some minor mutations from group to group as far as people go, but overall they are mostly the same as they were in the beginning.

And therein lies something of an issue.

There Are *Rolls Dice* 5 People In Each Group

To be honest, we play a lot of D&D each week. We have a groups playing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and there has been some interest in putting together a fifth group on Friday. Until we decide to pivot as a business into D&D related software (which I’m sure is only a matter of time), that’s probably as much D&D as we can squeeze in.

But those regular groups do lead to something of a problem; being mostly static, there is little room for new participants.

Think about it; We generally limit each group to 6 people (1 DM and 5 Players), but we have to keep a little bit of overlap between the groups so that the DM’s get to play as well, so with 4 active groups, we can really only involve 20ish unique people. That goes up to 25 with 5 groups obviously, but there is not much room left to grow at that stage.

I’ve got a bit of a plan to add some chaos into the whole situation later on this year (a full group reshuffle), but that is not going to magically allow a whole bunch of new people to participate, because I imagine that just about everyone will want to continue to play.

What I really want is another way to get people to play D&D that is more flexible than a long term campaign, letting people participate without having to make a long term commitment.

One Shot, One Kill

Of course there is, and they are called oneshots (well, I call them oneshots).

A oneshot is generally a single D&D session intended to only last a few hours, as opposed to one that lasts many sessions over the course of weeks or months or years). A short self-contained adventure that you can get just about anybody into with a little bit of preparation.

Now, because this blog tends to trail reality by a significant amount of time, I’ve actually been organising oneshots monthly since last September or so, so we’ve had a few at this point. They are typically on a Saturday, where I can safely steal one of the cool meeting rooms that we have at our office for an entire day without having to worry about stepping on anyone’s toes. Our meeting rooms are great; big tables, massive whiteboards and easy access to a kitchenette and facilities. Also free.

At this point, I’ve played in some of the oneshots and DMed in others and every time its been a pretty great experience.

The last oneshot I participated in took a completely ridiculous direction where our group decided that we were a rock band and that our agent had simply booked us a really crappy gig (we were in prison), but we were determined to put on a good show anyway. It only got more ridiculous from there, and the last encounter of the day was us having a rock battle with an ancient blue dragon, with each party member having to make up their part of the final song. Also a tamed a spider and we wrote a song called Rider of the Spider.

The best part is that because it requires limited commitment, a oneshot gives a much wider variety of people the opportunity to sign up, assuming they can sacrifice a Saturday. Additionally, it leaves room for partners and other family members, which is a great way to get to know someone.

Partners know all the deep dark secrets about your colleagues, and in my experience, love to share them.

The only complication that I’ve found, which isn’t really all that much of a complication, is that I need to organise and sign people up for oneshots months in advance. This helps people make arrangements with family as necessary, organizing babysitting and whatnot in order to be able to spend a day enjoying themselves.

To be clear, its February now and I have a oneshot planned for later this month. Attendance has been sorted for this oneshot since November last year, and I’ve already signed up a bunch of people for the July oneshot.

A New Challenger Approaches

Allowing more people the opportunity to attend is not the only benefit from the oneshots though.

Theoretically, oneshots provide the perfect environment for nascent DMs to get involved without having to commit to a long and sometimes gruelling multi-month campaign. They just need to come up with an idea (or steal something off the internet), do some prep and then execute it over the course of a few hours. Its a limited engagement almost perfect for new and inexperienced people to have a stab.

Now, I’m always interested in training up new DMs because without DMs, the whole D&D thing ceases to exist, and they are something of a rare breed (compared to players). We still lose people from time to time, and sometimes those people are my precious precious DMs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, as some amount of employee turnover is natural and healthy, and while the presence of a solid social component can and will reduce undesirable turnover, its never going to prevent it. People grow and change and move on and that’s okay.

So it helps to have a cupboard full of possible DMs.

Also, if I look at it entirely unselfishly for a few seconds, being able to DM can definitely lead to the creation of new skills that are useful outside D&D. So really I’m doing these people a favour.

Ahhhh, the sweet sound of an assuaged conscience.

Conclusion

I’m sure its obvious at this point that I want to get as many people involved with D&D as possible. Maybe we’ll even introduce other tabletop games at some point in the future, because really its not D&D specifically that is beneficial (though it is great), its the relationships and culture that it inspires via its collaborative storytelling. I’ve always wanted to play Shadowrun for example, as its such a cool setting, and I’m sure we’d see the same benefits regardless of which universe we’re using as a foundation.

Anyway, apart from the fact that I personally really enjoy both playing and DMing (though DMing can be exhausting sometimes), I really do believe that having a regular social activity like D&D is incredibly healthy for any organization. There are just so many great side-effects to establishing and maintaining positive relationships between colleagues through channels other than actual work.

With more people playing D&D than ever, I assume it can only get better from here.

Its been about two months since I first posted about Dungeons and Dragons, which seems like a sane amount of time to wait before writing a followup. A lot can change in two months after all.

And change it has! As is unfortunately sometimes the case, we had to do some pretty classic organizational restructuring and as a result, our old DM has gone the way of Gary Gygax.

To be clear, he’s not dead, but he's definitely no longer with us. His absence is keenly felt, both from a D&D point of view and from an organizational point of view. Also it makes me sad.

Its not all doom and gloom though.

His departure provided a natural opportunity to refresh and revisit our D&D group and paved the way for a second “season” of D&D campaigns.

Where once there was a mere eight players in a single group, now we are legion. Surely it is only a matter of time before the entire company pivots and we flip to some sort of D&D related business.

And I for one welcome our new draconic overlords.

The Phoenix Returns To Life In 1d6 Days

While the dissolution of the first group was a sad day indeed, our attempts to reform were immediately met with a fresh wave of interest from a wide variety of people.

I like to think that its all because of the masterfully crafted email that I sent out looking for fresh blood, but its probably more likely that the buzz generated from the ridiculousness of the first groups campaign provided for solid word of mouth advertising.

It wasn’t long before I had a list of about twenty people who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The best part was that the people were from all across the business, and ranged from other members of our development team, to our support department, all the way through to marketing.

Having discovered in the first season that seven players and one DM is somewhat challenging to run (similar to how large teams get less effective), the goal was to try and limit each group to five players. Using the power of maths, that meant we would have four groups.

Of course, with the departure of our sole DM, we’d need to find a new one. Actually, we’d need to find four new ones, as running even a single group can be time consuming at the best of times, let alone four completely different groups.

Taking into account everyone’s availability, the desire for each group to have a mixture of newbies and experienced people and the fact that the volunteer DM’s would also like to be able to play was somewhat….challenging. My logistical skills are pretty good these days though, so once I’d exited the fugue state brought on by all of the constraints, we were left with four groups organized over Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings and everybody reasonably happy.

Also, I was a DM, because I’m a sucker like that.

Behind The Curtain

Having only played D&D once before, peeking behind the curtain was both enlightening and not really all that surprising.

To make things easy, the fresh DM’s all picked solely from the pre-built adventures supplied by Wizards of the Coast. Its a lot simpler to get a handle on the responsibilities of being a DM when you are provided with some guidelines and ideas that are easy to extend (or not) as you wish, without requiring you to think of absolutely everything.

I picked Hoard of the Dragon Queen, which is a pretty big campaign that is actually the first half of a massive two-part adventure (the other half being Rise of Tiamat). Using our very first group as a high water mark, I’m not sure we’ll ever finish it, but that probably doesn’t matter as long as we have fun while we try.

For me, already being in a leadership role, the transition to being a DM is probably only about half as hard as it is for someone who has never had the experience of organising and guiding a group of people. Of course, that leaves the other half of the difficulty fully intact, so its not all easy riding.

To compare:

• As a player, you really only have to know the details about your own character and the basic gameplay tenets, and even those are not super important if you have a solid DM to guide you.
• As the DM, you need to know everything. Literally everything, top to bottom, all the rules and constraints, how the game flows in the abstract and how your campaign needs to progress. You also need to be good at improvising, as you can plan for a huge variety of things, but once it gets into the hands of your players, all of that might go out the window.

Finally, the last (and possible most critical part) is knowing when to step in and when to let things go. You have to be careful to not spoil anyone’s fun (within reason) and to enable those cool D&D moments to happen as organically as possible, but you also need to maximise the amount of fun happening across the entire group.

Like I said in my first post, its a fine line to walk.

Epic With A Capital E

Interestingly enough, with multiple groups running at the same time, we might eventually be able to do some sort of epic crossover. Imagine a campaign where one or more different groups are working together to accomplish a greater goal, or even better, maybe the groups are working against each other, possibly without even realising it.

You could probably retrofit multiple groups acting together into one of the pre-built campaigns, but to be honest, you’d be better off putting a custom one together that was built with the concept in mind from the start.

Its a neat dream, but as we have people who are both players and DM’s, we would have to be pretty careful as anyone filling both roles would know too much.

I think I’d be more than willing to give up the ability to play to put something like that together though, as it would be an amazing experience for everyone involved.

Cure Wounds, Gain 1d8 Hit Points

Last but not least, one of the completely unintended side effects of running D&D groups at work is employee retention.

This comes in two flavours.

The first is the simple presence of social activities that help to bind people together around more than just work. For us, D&D is just another addition to an already healthy space, but being focused on much smaller groups it results in slightly different benefits (tighter bonds, closer friendships, etc).

The second is the continuity of the campaign itself. D&D groups are essentially engaged in collaborative storytelling, weaving an epic, personalised tale together over time. Its hard to pull away from that on a whim, so it tends to increase the barrier to leaving for non-critical reasons.

I say non-critical, because if your workplace is bad enough, no amount of social activities will keep the good people around.

Having said all of that, I would never prevent a former employee from continuing to participate in D&D. As long as they can regularly make the sessions, they are always welcome in any campaign that they were already a member of. Obviously current employees get preference when it comes to putting together new groups, but there is no reason to be a jerk about it just because someone has moved on.

Conclusion

We started this whole thing because there were a few of us that just wanted to play D&D, and having a bunch of people who were already together on a day to day basis made it a lot easier to organise. Its pretty hard to get a group of adults with various adult responsibilities together on a regular basis after all.

The result of that initial, relatively selfish desire has been a wealth of social activity that is effectively linking a bunch of different business units together, and is helping to smooth out some of the natural stress inherent in working in a challenging environment.

All in all, I think its been a worthwhile usage of my (and other peoples) time and I highly recommend it.

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