Worldwide D&D Game Day!

[William Ronald]

It did appear to be a toughie.


For my part, today, I helped facilitate the event as it was run at Games Plus. William Ronald DM'd one table and had his players on the ropes most of the game. (picture)

The event came very close to a total party kill at times, but my players used their abilities well and had some good luck. (The players used their wits, and expended a lot of resources. Even with that a few different dice rolls could have easily lead to a total party kill -- as some of the PCs went down to negative hit points.)

I do agree that the official adventure was a bit tough, as there were several actions that the PCs could have taken that would put them in deadly peril. They avoided one encounter that would have summoned a lot of enemies quickly, even though their noise did alert some of the other inhabitants of the Fane of Lolth.

I found the event puzzling in some ways. First, if it was meant to draw in new players, then perhaps an adventure for 1st level characters might have been more appropriate. Secondly, I thought some of the design choices were a little puzzling. Still, I had fun running the adventure.

 

[William Ronald]

I and the wife played in Games Day and we had fun. The adventure was a straight up dungeon crawl with some (sub par) premade characters. Everyone had a lot of laughs and my FLGS is planning a week long games 'day' in March. Different games every day gets featured, sample games in the store and discounts on the feature product (they had 10% off all D&D books today plus 10% of the purchase price goes towards a gift certificate you can claim after your tenth purchase - pretty sweet! Too bad I blew my dough on a case of Underdark :d'oh:!

I agree that the characters could have been more interesting and more powerful. The information on them was at a bare bones minimum.

I think there are many gaming stores that are willling to support events like the Gameday, and I think more of them could help attract new people to our hobby. (I also let my players know about next week's EN World Gameday and the upcoming Stuffed COWS RPGA convention.)

 

[Uder]

Four TPKs at our local store using the provided adventure and pre-rolled PCs. Our group held out the best, but once our rogue died it was all over.

Man... that was a tough adventure. Had to be EL6 on nearly everything. The DM's had a blast though

 

[Uder]

I found the event puzzling in some ways. First, if it was meant to draw in new players, then perhaps an adventure for 1st level characters might have been more appropriate. Secondly, I thought some of the design choices were a little puzzling. Still, I had fun running the adventure.

Truly. The fighter had a terrible AC, money spent on a +1 weapon would've been better spent on magic armor and a protective item. I didn't see the wizard's sheet, but the spell selection seemed poor. Of course, it was a very young (12?) girl playing the wizard, so who knows?

OTOH, the rogue and the cleric were better off. I played the gnomish cleric, and his spell selection was actually perfect for the adventure. Lesser Restoration might've been nice, but I used every single 2nd level, so where to fit it? I imagine the rogue would've been even more powerful if the event hadn't been so hack-inclined. Using the changeling's ability to look like a drow could certainly change things...

Actually, I'm sort of glad the pregens weren't minmaxed and the battles were very tough - nearly half of the people playing at our FLGS were SOs/brothers/sisters/children of D&D players and fairly or completely new to D&D. I'd hate for them to be led on a cakewalk through candyland for their first adventure.

 

[Glyfair]

Originally we were going to do the Official Worldwide D&D Day stuff at our venue (Between Books in Delaware). Unfortunately, somewhere wires were crossed and it didn't happen.

Still, I've been running the Mark of Heroes campaign, so I scheduled to run "The Delerium Stone." The fact that it was written by Keith Baker was a major plus.

Everyone agreed that it was a great adventure. Easily the best adventure of the Mark of Heroes series, and possibly the best Eberron adventure written yet. It had some interesting hooks, good scenarios, and even was fun when the PCs did the wrong thing (attacking the people who weren't hostile and had information that was useful).

 

[MummyKitty]

Hm... maybe our DM was just being nice to us...? There were a few times when we had characters go down but we were able to battle back and heal with some potions. The pre-gen characters were a bit strange and had even had some errors, but I thought it made them more "realistic". I played the Kobold wizard and I did re-arrange some of the prepared spells but it ended up not making much difference. I still had used almost all of my spells by the end.

 

[cjdc1973]

We drove up to Seattle to participate in the event at the Sci-Fi Museum with all of the WOTC staff members in the local area. We ended up having Dave Noonan DMing our session and I ended up getting my fighter killed by the half-ogre Barbarian when I tried to save another PC from certain death.

We also started a pick-up session of the new Hellspike Prison scenario for a few hours until we had to leave. The whole event was pretty entertaining, but it could have been promoted better. We expected crowds and perhaps only had a hundred or so people walk through or play throughout the day.

 

[Sammael]

The pre-generated PCs for Assault on the Fane of Lolth were horrible, so I'm not surprised there were so many character deaths.

 

[Corinth]

Monte Cook was at The Source for Worldwide D&D, running some sort of pre-fab looking thing, and damn if he didn't have that table well and firming going to Funland. Smiles all around, laughing, social gregariousness, etc.- someone should've used that for the ad campaign.

 

[Oryan77]

Great, no wonder I got screwed. We planned to play on Saturday and my roommate (doesn't play D&D) tells me Friday night that he wants my group to end the game at 5pm so he can eat dinner on the couch and watch tv and relax Saturday night. He couldn't just do that in his room because "he shouldn't have to". We've started playing in my apt now because my friend who usually hosts is going through a divorce & his soon to be Ex is still living in his house. We play 2 Saturdays out of the month, sometimes only once a month. Now my roommate has a problem with it and demands my group of 4 to only play when he's gone on business trips...he actually said, "You have to accomodate to my schedule". Which means, I have to allow him to watch tv in the living room rather than him just watching tv in his bedroom...he doesn't do anything else besides watch tv when he's home. We got into a huge argument over it and I ended up just cancelling the game. And what does he end up doing? He sits in his room all freaking day with his girlfriend because of the tension between us. So he didn't even use the living room to watch tv.

What a crappy Worldwide D&D Game Day....we even had a new guy that was going to play with us for the first time and he knew nothing about D&D until I told him about it 3 days ago, so he wanted to check it out. And I didn't even know it was WD&DGD! Sorry, I almost unknowingly contributed to WD&DGD flawlessly :\