Gameplay Café D&D (Formally Booze & Board Game)
Last year I gave myself a task to try and help D&D grow in the UK. Despite the fact the game is more popular than ever we over here still struggle to find groups to play with, or to even convince our friends that it’s something we want to try.
So I started to think about suitable venues in my area that could host a game, this eventually led me to a place called The Retailery where I went to see one of my friends bands play ‘The Wise Naive’ on Halloween. While there I met someone who ran a weekly Board Games night in the venue and after a bit of talk we agreed to try bringing D&D to the night, starting with once every two weeks to see how it goes.
We launched a few weeks later and it was almost a disaster, we basically only generated characters, I was the only one with any books, sheets, pens, etc, and by the end of the day we’d barely done any actual gaming. Unsurprisingly not everyone came back.
However the next session was much better, we ran a Curse of Strahd module ‘Suits of the Mists’ and it went well, people from the beginning have become regulars, we have a whatsapp group to discuss plans and offensive humour and last night saw our first session requiring two DM’s.
Numbers are up, word is getting out and now we have to deal with recruiting more DM’s to try and cover for the inevitable upsurge in numbers from here. We’ll keep lumbering through CoS modules for a while but my next plan is to move us into a West Marches environment in order to give the DM’s we use more freedom.
West Marches are outlined in this fantastic video by Matt Colville, so if you get a chance you should watch it, and most of his other videos as well.
