Organized Play: Can You Learn To Love It?

So, what do you think -- is Organized Play awesome? A means to an end? Or not worth touching with Piratecat's 10' pole?

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I'm going to go with that last one. I'm not big on doing any noncompetitive hobby in organized fashion, but especially D&D. The experience is built on personal relationships and individual creativity. I imagine one could play a game and call it D&D, but I don't see even a great organized game giving the same opportunities as a weak home game for personal growth, creative fulfillment, social engagement, and sheer recreational value.

Moreover, while the "meeting new people" aspect probably meant something in the '80's and '90's, it's now very easy for people to connect online and meet in a non-organized setting. It makes more sense for people to meet up and some local venue and play their own game that to go to a large convention, and it makes more business sense to support that.

If I were in charge of the brand, I'd do away with any semblance of organized play.

I may be a little biased given I volunteered as a Triad member for a couple of years in LG and was a regional admin in LFR for a couple of years as well. However, here is my Organized Play experience:

I found out about LG from random posts on the internet and I investigated it because my D&D group had mostly fallen apart and wanted to see if there was a way to meet new players which I couldn't seem to find in any local stores or online. It may be that Winnipeg only has 600,000 people and our D&D Community is likely only a couple of hundred in the whole city. It's hard to estimate given that Winnipegers in particular don't seem to want to leave their houses or meet new people.

So, I eventually figured out what LG was and I ordered 2 adventures and ran them at a games day, but my friends and 2 random people we managed to convince to play were the only ones who would play.

Still, the adventures were interesting and I liked the flavour of Ket(our region of Greyhawk). We decided to order some more adventurers and ran it at another games day a couple of months later.

Then, I moved to Australia in 2002 because I met a woman online that I decided to go visit. I was there for a year and had no friends there and wasn't really sure what to do while my gf was at work. So, I looked for events in Sydney on the WOTC web site and found a store that ran LG games on a regular basis.

I showed up at the store and found out when they ran games. I showed up to every game and over time became good friends with the store owner as well as a number of regular D&D players. I joined a weekly D&D group in addition to showing up to all the LG gamesdays they put on as I enjoyed it so much.

Don't get me wrong. There were some bad DMs, a couple of bad adventures, and a couple of quirks from people that got annoying over time. However, the rules of LG and of 3e D&D kept a minimum quality of game, IMHO, so it never dropped below a threshold where I hated it. A couple of times I lamented that I had a particularly bad gamesday. But I shrugged and came back the next week to a really awesome adventure or DM that made it all worthwhile.

Eventually the 40 or so regular players at our local store became a community. I'd hang out with them outside of gaming and played board games with them or go to see movies. It was good to play with different people all the time. I got to see a lot of cool ideas for characters and meet a lot of people I never wouldn't have without LG.

Unfortunately, I had to leave Australia. But right before I left, I posted on the official LG mailing list that I was looking for anyone who wanted to play LG back in Winnipeg since I knew there was no group already doing so because I looked before I had started it myself. I found a player who said that they used to play LG in Winnipeg, but with just a small group of 6 people who only ran them as home games. He said he'd love to play again because they stopped when his DM left town.

So, I asked every D&D player I knew and him to come to a game. The people who showed up enjoyed it so much that other people started becoming more and more interested in it. Our local group grew to about 30 regular players. Our largest gamesday had 4 full tables of 6 players and 4 DMs.

During this time I also realized that there were other people doing the same things in other cities and if you went to them you could play more adventures. So, I played at GenCon. I made a trip to Fargo, ND for a concert and while I was there, looked up some local people who played LG and played a game or two. I became fast friends with a group of 15 or so regular players in Fargo. They came up to Winnipeg a couple of times to play our adventures too. We even created a yearly convention that took place at the International Peace Garden(which is on the border between ND and Manitoba) just so we could all meet halfway and play both adventures that MUST be played in ND and ones that MUST be played in MB since you can freely cross the border while in the gardens.

During this time we also had people from Edmonton/Calgary come to our Garden Games convention and became close enough friends with them that we made a couple of trips to Edmonton to play over there.

I eventually applied to become Triad since I was enjoying the friendships I had developed as part of LG and wanted to give back something. This allowed me to become better friends with the group of players in Toronto and surrounding areas and I visited a couple of their conventions. It also allowed me to become friends with some people from other regions who I still like to at least say hi and hang out with at GenCon every year.

The announcement of the end of LG(due to the end of 3.5e D&D) hit everyone hard. I've mostly lost touch with my LG friends. We don't run Garden Games anymore because it's entire purpose was to "get around" LG rules.

We tried to start the same sort of community for Living Forgotten Realms and for a while there it looked possible. However, there was no incentive to travel to conventions or even games days to play. So all our truly "Organized" play fell apart and we just ended up playing LFR adventures at people's houses. Until even that fell apart as people I knew slowly decided they didn't have time to show up on a regular basis or just didn't like 4e and stopped coming.

I'm currently not involved in any OP. I wanted to play at least a couple more LFR adventures this year at GenCon, but they decided not to have any there. I'm taking that as a sign of the end of OP, at least until whatever Living Campaign they come up with for D&D Next. Though, I'm awaiting its introduction eagerly. Hopefully it can help bring back the community I built up a couple of years ago.

Ahnehnois said:

I'm going to go with that last one. I'm not big on doing any noncompetitive hobby in organized fashion, but especially D&D.

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It seems to me that any hobby you do, competitive or otherwise, that takes multiple people takes *some* organization. There's scheduling and all to do, if nothing else. So, like most things, it isn't all or nothing. It is more a matter of how much organization there is, and how many people you're going to wrangle.

If I were in charge of the brand, I'd do away with any semblance of organized play.

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Ah. So, it doesn't float your boat, so nobody should have it? If you were in charge of the brand, I'd hope you'd base decisions on a bit more objective data than that. I don't play much tabletop at cons*, to be honest. But at the cons I do go to, the tabletop spaces generally seem pretty busy - it would seem to me that failing to take advantage of what folks are going to do at cons anyway would be a poor business decision.


*Other than "house cons" like EN World gamedays, that is. I do occasionally play live-action games at standard cons. Heck, I go to cons that are only live-action games.

My attempts to be part of the RPGA in the 90's - and afterwards - were such a disaster, I will not touch organized play with a 20' pole. I've also tried Living Greyhawk and a living Pathfinder, but never found them to my liking. Organized play is so different, in a way so foreign to how I game from home gaming that I find it repulsive. I will say that out of all the organized play I endured that Pathfinder came the closest to something I could stomach. I can see why game publishers relish organized play - it puts eyes on their game, which is likely to generate sales of their product - I just really, really dislike what I've been involved in.

As for the reasons, it was all a mixture of all 3 of the downsides listed; with #3 being the biggest offender for me (and #2 not far behind).

Umbran said:

Ah. So, it doesn't float your boat, so nobody should have it?

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As you point out, it is entirely possible for people to organize themselves if they choose, perhaps through local gaming stores or the internet. What we're talking about is a standardized game experience provided by the company making the game, which I think is not a worthwhile endeavor for the company.

If you were in charge of the brand, I'd hope you'd base decisions on a bit more objective data than that. I don't play much tabletop at cons*, to be honest. But at the cons I do go to, the tabletop spaces generally seem pretty busy - it would seem to me that failing to take advantage of what folks are going to do at cons anyway would be a poor business decision.

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Not necessarily. If you've decided that your core game experience is a small group of people playing at a private location you want to support that. You don't necessarily want to support other options that detract from that, like online gaming or convention gaming.

What if the organized game at a convention is so "repulsive" (in the words of [MENTION=52734]Stormonu[/MENTION]) that it detracts from your core gaming experience? What if people who do like it become used to it and don't move on to play in other venues.

If that's the case, you want to put your resources into encouraging those same people to purchase products and run their own games, rather than dumping a bunch of money into creating and running your organized game.

I'm perfectly willing to understand that some people don't care for OP, and some really like it. There are a lot of different reasons people game, lots of different styles and tastes, and no one is right.

But this is something Ahnehnois said that I don't understand:

Ahnehnois said:

What if the organized game at a convention is so "repulsive" (in the words of [MENTION=52734]Stormonu[/MENTION]) that it detracts from your core gaming experience? What if people who do like it become used to it and don't move on to play in other venues.
.

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I don't understand how the way other people choose to play can detract from your own experience in your own home game -- any more than my inability to stop making bad choices in my diet will make you any fatter when you're not eating with me.

Seriously -- if my dietary choices made other people fat, there'd be an obesity epidemic.... oh, wait.....

All kidding aside, how does organized play at a convention mess with your home game? Have you had players that come to you expecting some of the trappings of organized play that you don't like?

-rg

Ahnehnois said:

As you point out, it is entirely possible for people to organize themselves if they choose, perhaps through local gaming stores or the internet. What we're talking about is a standardized game experience provided by the company making the game, which I think is not a worthwhile endeavor for the company.

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Upon what financial or marketing data do you base that opinion?

Not necessarily. If you've decided that your core game experience is a small group of people playing at a private location you want to support that. You don't necessarily want to support other options that detract from that, like online gaming or convention gaming.

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Ah. You've yet do demonstrate how convention gaming has any negative impact whatsoever on home gaming in a private location, much less a negative business-significant impact.

What if the organized game at a convention is so "repulsive" (in the words of [MENTION=52734]Stormonu[/MENTION]) that it detracts from your core gaming experience? What if people who do like it become used to it and don't move on to play in other venues.

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What if you did research to find out if that experience was at all common before deciding what you'd do to the business? Recall - "anecdote" is not the singular of "data". A couple of people with bad experiences does not mean the thing is not positive for the business on the whole. Though, I note that his presence here to post suggests that the experience didn't drive Stormonu from the hobby...

If that's the case...

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IF. If it is, then you either want to change how organized play runs, or eliminate it. But you didn't start with an if. You didn't start with options other than outright ending organized play. I have no issue with you saying, "I don't personally like organized play." I only have issue with passing such judgement on it that you'd take it away from people who do like it because of your own personal experience.

Umbran said:

Upon what financial or marketing data do you base that opinion?

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None whatsoever. This is a "what do you think" thread. Thus, the "if".

What if you did research to find out if that experience was at all common before deciding what you'd do to the business? Recall - "anecdote" is not the singular of "data". A couple of people with bad experiences does not mean the thing is not positive for the business on the whole. Though, I note that his presence here to post suggests that the experience didn't drive Stormonu from the hobby...

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Such research is unlikely to exist even for WotC. It's very difficult to determine how many people the hobby might capture if it did things differently, or how many people gave it a shot and left, or what drove such people away. Again, this is a thread for speculation and opinions, as the OP's question makes clear.

I have no issue with you saying, "I don't personally like organized play." I only have issue with passing such judgement on it that you'd take it away from people who do like it because of your own personal experience.

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What if I told you that I don't like "reality shows", and if I were in charge of CBS, there never would have been a "Survivor"? Or that I'm a vegetarian, and if I were in charge of McDonald's, there would be no meat on the menu? Am I then "passing judgment" on those things? Am I taking them away from people who do like them, hypothetically?

The people who actually are in charge of making these decisions have a lot of evidence at their fingertips of varying quality, but it is only a part (often a small part) of their decision-making process. People have opinions. I'm merely opining as to what I think is the best thing to do in this case.

For the OP, #1, 2 and 3 for the downsides, I've experienced them, but I found them more tolerable and not too often for tournament play. What I hated about organized play was waaaaaay back in the Ye Olde Days of Living City where the most vocal and aggressive player took the certs at the table. I played at one table where one guy who was playing a bard or some such character threw a fit about the certs and he got them all, but at other games, one or two players pretty much dominated in taking the certs for themselves while the rest of us got to pick over the coins.

What I truly enjoyed about the living campaigns was that the stakes were real. If your character died, it was up to you to have enough funds to get him raised and if you didn't have the money, oh well, new character. Also, some of the modules were killer modules so you could play an entire con's worth of modules, get close to your next level, play the last module, get killed and now it just erased all the experience you cumulated from your weekend and possibly then some. You also had to effectively manage your time you spent with your character with time units as well. I truly enjoy games where the threat of dying and having it cost you makes for a more emotionally intense game.