tl;dr This is a terrible reward; D&D organized play needs a strong leader inside WotC
Wednesday Night Encounters is long overdue in my opinion. The obvious parallel is the success of Friday Night Magic.
Holding it in a public place at a regularly scheduled time has clear benefits.
- Everyone knows where and when they can find some D&D to play.
- It exposes the game to the public, where they can see D&D is about a bunch of people sitting around a table laughing and having a good time, not necessarily worshipping Satan or cosplaying or whatever negative stereotype lingers from the 1980s.
- It makes D&D available to people who can't participate in "traditional" D&D where you drive to a friend's house on Friday evening and play until you all pass out sometime in the early am on Saturday, being useless to the world until sometime Sunday, if not Monday. This mostly applies to pre-high schoolers and people with kids and careers.
Requiring it be held in a store and having the store act as organizer solves all kinds of problems:
- It provides a safe place to play. Players don't have to risk going into a stranger's home, and DMs to have to invite strangers into their home.
- It gives the store an incentive to advertise the event and game, to bring more people into the store for a couple hours once a week. Retailers kill for that.
- The store is more likely to have (or create) a pool of DMs so there is at least one table running every week, instead of having to cancel the game whenever the home DM has a blip in his life.
So I'm not surprised they are canceling support for home games and moving that support to organized, in-store play. RPGA made sense when TSR was too small to support organized play themselves, but that was a very long time ago.
All that said, this latest DM "reward" is really a feces sandwich.
A "reward" from a completely different game? Give me a break.
There are a ton of appropriate rewards for DMs that should be coming from WotC:
- dungeon tiles
- adventures
- poster maps
- dice
- initiative trackers
- rule cheat sheets or cards
- tokens
- miniatures (though I doubt we'll ever see minis again)
- exclusive D&D branded merchandise
- pads of paper, pencils, erasers, folios
- hats, shirts, shoes, bags
- Sigg bottles, Jones Soda sets
This "Ravenloft" reward is not only insulting, its troubling. It suggests D&D organized play is in bad shape internally. There is no strong vision, no leadership, and no coherent communication coming out of that group that inspires confidence in the future.
Store owners and participants can't fix this themselves.
I've been talking about the problem of D&D DM and Player rewards with my FLGS owner. The problem is that there is nothing he can really offer that is an incentive to play, let alone take on the work it takes to run a table.
Giving away $20-$40 books won't happen, especially when he currently doesn't charge to play encounters. Giving away coupons or soda and candy is a little lame. Letting players build up to a free book is also troublesome, and can actively turn away players who can only show up occasionally. By comparison, he's able to give a pack to all Friday Night Magic players for their $5 entry fee.
Rewards are an important part of this kind of program. They bring in more players. They create an inducement to play more and buy more product to use with the reward. And in the case of DM rewards, they recognize the hard work and time donated to make the game enjoyable and encourage more people to sign up for the DM pool (you can never have enough DMs).
D&D organized play is an important component of keeping the game alive and growing. WotC needs to get its act together and stop insulting some of the most important people who make it successful.
