Re: Re: About Living Campaigns and Living Dragonlance
vrykyl said:
Good afternoon, everyone!
(3) An RPGA staff member (and I apologize for not remembering the name) approached me at our booth at GenCon and asked our interest in creating a sanctioned Living campaign for Dragonlance. I gave him my business card and asked him to call me sometime after the show.
This statement actually explains a lot, and presents a good opportunity for me to get upon a soapbox and explain some of the RPGA inner workings.
For those of you who don't know, the RPGA is an organized play organization supporting D&D and other d20 System games owned and run by Wizards of the Coast—sort of the DCI of roleplaying games.
Living campaings are highly popular style of play in the RPGA. They are typically worldwide campaign-style campaigns where you play a character of (usually) your own creation, and advance that character through that Living campaign’s adventures. Living campaign play happens just about every day, and definitely every weekend of the year from San Francisco to New York to London to Athens to Kabel to Sydney in homes, FLGSs, and conventions large and small.
Each event is run a Senior GM who is in charge of that event. We also have a number of campaigns. Each campaign has its own campaign administration, which runs the daily working of the campaign.
That said, there are only two real RPGA staff members in the entire world: Ian Richards and myself (we typically wear the standard black WotC shirts on the convention floor). If you don't talk to one of us, you are talking to someone on a campaign staff or one of the Senior GMs. Neither of those sets of people can add new programming types to RPGA events.
Many times, some of our zealous supporters who wish to add to our already substantial offerings go out of their way to see if they can get the support of a company to create a Living campaign. Because like many things gaming, the RPGA can seem an arcane thing from those outside it, representatives of game companies can get the impression that they are speaking to a person who is higher up in the organization then they actually are. It's not that these folks are out to mislead you; it is that they are excited and like to explore possibilities; possibilities that ultimately need to be siphoned through such business realities as budgets, business plans, and work schedules.
Thanks for the clarification, Jamie. I really appreciate it. I wish you all the best on your Sovereign Stone and Dragonlance endeavors. It also gave me an opportunity to explain to folks a little of how the RPGA works, which I realize can be arcane at times.
We like arcane. 
