Lessons Learned from large beginners D&D events.

Compiling our lessons learned from our Night of the Rolling Dice beginners intro D&D event as per Gorgon Bones best practices - though this allows me to hit the trifecta of Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community. A key focus of this one was to distill it down to something which is as low-touch as possible - we launch it ~ 2 months out, get a roster of DMs then do nothing until a week beforehand. Everyone is busy, this is your 'plug-and-play' event template.

Write up of the actual night is here: 60 sign ups, 45 attendees, 9/10 tables ran, players seemed to go home happy, feedback on the Meetup is 4.8/5.

What worked well

- Repeatable template - we have a playbook now for how the thing runs and can base decisions on learned experience rather than best guesses.

- Booking well ahead of time (30-50 days) gives plenty of time for the event to percolate in Meetups and other calendars and for people to find their way to us. For both night-time events we hit capacity with a week to go. It does mean re-confirming with your DMs and venue that they have not forgotten but far better that then scrounging for either on short notice

- Venue interaction - we tightened up orders - only drinks before you go to table, food orders get your name on it - which practically eliminated unclaimed (and unpaid) orders at the end of the night. This got arranged by email with the venue beforehand - their standard practice is bringing things to tables which had issues when people were moving around.

- Nudging those signed up to confirm - giving folk a reminder to drop off the list if they cannot go a few days out followed by a 'check if you are up off the waitlist' mail to the same folk the day before served to get over a dozen people to flag they weren't coming and pull a bunch of the waitlist up

- Dice sales - people can borrow dice on deposit for the evening - everyone wants to take them home which generates a few quid to pay off our minimal costs

- Raffle - we did not lean hard on our FLGS this time around so I scrounged my shelves for duplicates and we cooked up another few prizes just to have a few bits for a small one - still worked well.

- Masking tape name tags - a roll of masking tape and a black marker gives good-enough name tags at minimal cost, minimal waste afterwards

- Pre-gen characters - with lots of folk (>60%) saying they were new and needed characters, previous ideas of helping people create their character are not feasible. We created a block of pre-gens and had them ready to hand out. I used Fast Character for mine, it was good enough for the night.

- Safety brief / safety tools - flagged as a thing people appreciated - we have x-cards on the tables and give a 'play nice' intro speech - you can read it all here - but feedback from even my table was immediate and positive so good to know people find it helpful.

What to do differently

- Make tables inter-transferable - everything T1, no additional complexity of trying to fill multiple tiers in case (as happened) noone turns up. Maybe offer a T2 option but be clear that if we cannot fill it, this flips down to T1. We got enough folk to run a high level table on the first event, 4/6 T2 respondents no-showed for the last so we could not run.

- Clarify the venue conditions - we had someone ask could they bring their dog; while wanting to be hospitable to people, the venue is crowded and loud and we game for 4+ hours so it is not a great idea. Will make that explicit in future

- Seek more stuff for the raffle - ask folk to sweep their shelves, put more effort into talking to local retailers to rustle up some stuff

- Establish a clear list of primary and back-up DMs. I messed this one up and when counting the list of DMs failed to include myself which led to one of our DMs making the hike across town to have no table waiting. They were a good sport about it but could have been a lot worse

- Have the list of games ready before the players turn up. To assign players to tables, one of our number greets folk as come in and asks them what type of game they want to play then directs them accordingly. We were late doing that and ended up with a stack of folk we were telling to stand there while we waited to get the assignment list finished - next time plan to have it finished and in the greeters hand as they walk in the door

- Stash everything in a 'go box' - all the stuff needed for the event into one box, one person holds - bring one thing to one place and unpack it and you should (in theory) have everything you need in there.

- Simplify 'borrowed' stuff - even where people have potentially useful things - map books, minis, etc. - better not to volunteer them, to avoid the hassle of tracking and retrieving them afterwards. If a specific DM asks someone else for something, that works fine between two folk but anything contributed to the communal pile should be low value things noone cares to get back (e.g. pre-gen characters)

- If available, try to anchor tables with at least one experienced player if possible to show complete new folk how the game runs - what are ability checks and so on.

- In an ideal world, better acoustics or table-distancing to keep volumes manageable, this is one I do not see us being able to act on anytime soon.