I played a significant amount of Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. When I was 14, 15 years old, me and my chums from the swim team would get together a couple of times a week to play during summer vacation, usually from early afternoon to late at night, particularly on Saturdays.
One thing I remember from those times is Mum telling me after the fact about some of her friends asking her if she had any concerns about the game I was playing, as it was the height of the "Satanic Panic." AS she tells it, her response was a "hell no," followed by an explanation along the lines of, "I've met all his friends, I can barely tell they are here in the basement except for the occasional fits of laughter, and it's Saturday night and I know right where he is. How many mothers can say that about their teenager?"
The other thing I remember is my father traipsing into the basement during a game to grab a beer from the fridge while doing yardwork or some garage project or other, taking a lug or two from a stubby bottle of Labatt's and asking with a grin, "so, who's winning?"
A chorus of adolescent boys would try to explain, all at once, that this particular game didn't work that way, and my poor dad would nod grimly in acknowledgment and head upstairs under a cloud of confusion - what kind of game is it where no one wins?
Honestly, I keep thinking back to schoolyard games in elementary school - you played tag because it was fun, not because you were better at it than everyone else. D&D, a cooperative storytelling venture in which the referee and players try to stitch together a drama out of crazed settings, arcane rules for combat and tactical sorcery and polyhedral dice rolls, has far more in common with tag than any sport I can think of.
But in a lot of important ways, I think an enormous group of players in Provo Utah may recently have won D&D; they recently held a game with more than a thousand players, at once, in a single place, in order to set a Guinness World Record.
A game store owner in Provo was told his mall was willing to work with him on a large event, so he decided to fulfill his dream of a record-breaking D&D game. He only needed 500 players to do it, but went big and arranged 200 seven-person tables that he then started to fill with Dungeon Masters and players.
The scenario was called "Dead Wars" and involved the arch-lich Vecna, a legendary villain since I began playing the game in 1979 or thereabouts, besieging a city with an army of the undead. Each portion of the battlefield was represented by a single table with its own DM. Costumed "generals" would run results back to the main DM, who coordinated the results and kept everyone informed as to the overall shape of the battle.
Midway through the game, when he announced Vecna had breached the wall and was standing within the city, he was met with a chorus of boos. And I am not even sure who the biggest hero was or what the best moment might have been, but even if Vecna had ended up victorious, every one of the 1,227 players could lay claim to a Guinness World Record when the dust settled.
Having worked for Games Workshop for over a decade, I am no stranger to big tabletop games, having seen and participated in many at American, Canadian, and even a British Games Day - but those are wargames, and even the largest ones I saw never had over a thousand players engaged at one time.
How do you create a scenario that lets everyone feel involved? How do you coordinate everything so it is actually one enormous game and not just 200 smaller ones? How do you wrap everything up in a way that makes everyone feel satisfied with how they spent four hours of their time?
I don't yet know the details, but I can tell you this much: it all started with a tremendous amount of organization and preparation.
Store owner Andrew Ashby got sponsorships, got a website and set up a registration process that let established parties sign up with their own DM's but also allowed lone players to take an open seat at a stranger's table. Seeing tables of kids side-by-side with adults playing with teens is one of the best things about this whole affair.
Chief DM Dax Levine created a scenario that let everyone play in one battle but do something unique at their table, and which would influence the overall results:
(from Reddit)
It was suprisingly smooth, actually. I was prepared for at least a certain level of chaos, but I was shocked how well it went. So, the story was that an army of the undead lead by Vecna was attacking a sanctuary city. All the players were defending the city in some way. There was a head DM and about 200 table DMs. The tables were split into three sections, depending on which part of the city they were defending--tables were either at "The Wall", acting as gatekeepers, or serving as city guard. The tables had different tasks, which added to the success or failure of each section. The table DMs would report to moderators, who would then give updates to the head DM. If sections failed as the story progressed, then things became more difficult and different storylines were activated for the other tables
Edit: I forgot there was a fourth group: the cavalry
There were 4 roles: gatekeeper, walls, cavalry, and city guard. Each table fulfilled one roll.
There were 3 acts. At the end of each act, the moderators tallied up the successes and failures from each table from each role to tell the DMs which scenario to run for the next act.
For example, my players were gatekeepers. The outer wall fell in act 1, which meant in act 2 there were extra armored Ogre Zombies charging the front
If the cavalry failed to take out the artillery, There would have been rocks falling each round etc.
Vecna did lose. They had a special mechanic where each table was given a magical spear and they fought an avatar of Vecna. We all had to stab him with it at a certain time (in real time), then we all rolled damage together. I think we did something like 24,000 points of damage collectively.
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