D&D Game Day at Atlantis
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I ended up going to the D&D Game Day at Atlantis Games in Portsmouth after swinging in last week and making sure they were doing anything with it.
Sure enough, I showed up and a game was in full swing. I had approximately an hour or so with which to spare, so I asked if there were any other games starting up soon. The group who was currently playing invited me to play, since they had only just began the first encounter. I sat down and was given the character sheet of Balastar of Bahamut, an 11th level Dragonborn Paladin.
The party had just stumbled upon a Dire Bear, two Troglodytes and a Quickling in a town square, and as the group’s Defender, I stepped up and rushed headlong against a Trog with the Dire Bear one square away.
Then I waited.
Waited.
Waited.
The problem, as I saw it, was a bunch of players unfamiliar with the characters and powers. It made it difficult to decide what powers to use at any given point, because there were at least a dozen of them.
Also, we had a DM running it whose only goal was the destruction of the party.
We only ended up getting through about 3 rounds in the hour I was there.
If Wizards is attempting to get new players into the hobby with their Game Days, they shouldn’t ever have 11th level encounters. Last year’s with 1st level characters was perfect, as my wife can attest. It made her want to play for the first time, and worked out well.
Ouch. Well, at least you got to play…???
In my case, I was totally excited to participate in this thing, so I shot Wizards an email asking a few questions, 3 weeks in advance, and never got a reply. Again, i sent a reworded email, 1 week prior, but no response.
I called up 8 Gaming stores in the vicinity, and NONE of them were doing it; most didnt even had a clue what I was talking about. Keep in mind that these were also the stores which I had looked up using Wizards “Game Day Locator” or whatever it was called…
I was just wondering if you had a seen this blog with the concept of creating a Worldwide OGL Game Day? See the blog here: http://lpjd.blogspot.com/2009/03/worldwide-ogl-game-day.html.
We had a good mix of experienced and new players at my table. This helped keep things moving. The first battle took a long time while we got familiar with our characters, but by the next combat encounter we were rocking right along.
I think another thing they should consider is not having GM’s who are trying to kill you off fast. That’s almost as bad as having Al Beddow show up with a Red Dragon for his adolescent fifth lvl players to go up against, and then,once their character dies, send them off to buy him a Happy Meal from across the way.