Friday the 24th March we played our VALUE game at Sägewerk. The location is nice and the owner of the place approached us, offering us to reserve the entire backroom for us once a month or so, if we could come with 60 to 70ish people. Alas, our community is not that big. But the people at Sägewerk are very nice and receptive to our community, so we have been playing with the idea of hosting a big event at their place. This plan is still in its infancy, so this topic serves to gather feedback and plan.
Let me start with the “issues” at hand, as I say them in order to plan this event:
The idea has to be coordinated and approved with the people at Sägewerk, before we can move forward.
We will require enough DM’s to host this thing, so a lot of voluntary DM work from the community would be necessary
We had the idea of designing a flyer, which we would hang at the front door of Sägewerk. we still need to agree on the contents and design of the flyer.
The idea is to make DnD more accessive to new players. However we need to have a way to assess how many people will be attending. Shall we all send them to the forum to sign up as usual?
We need to fix a date for the event.
I would be very excited to attend the big event if it gains enough traction and support from the community. Voice your concerns and opinions below. Im happy to hear from you
with that amount of people (and doing it as an event) we’ll most likely also need to have additional “support” personal (especially at the start) to help organize attendees and other administrative functions
we probably would need to (or at least imho should) do a more rigid kind of signup (attendance only with signup, signup for a specific table - so dms would also need to have an outline of their adventure ready for the signup process, dms probably would need to be there half an hour or so early so the table “assignments” are sorted before attendees arrive)
it might be prudent to approach some of the tt/rpg clubs in vienna to see if they’d like to do that in a joint venture (Athenae’s Siegel for example has a lot more experience with going to conventions than us), this could also help us in allowing us to do this not as a strictly english event but rather provide a couple of german run adventures as well if we want that
Good thinking for starting this thread; my thoughts on those:
Coordinating w/ Sagewerk and fixing a date are tied - what dates they say are possible sets our options.
Setting a date - not too far out that the Movie has faded from mind, not so close that we have no time to set up - say 5th May? We can float that to Sagewerks and see what they say
A flyer for the venue & games stores is a good idea; I think ‘beginners D&D event’, ‘ideal for new joiners’ and ‘for more info check out…’ this forum
On logistics and sign up - a 2-person team, one to crew the door, one to direct people, get them seated and make sure DM’s have everything they need should be enough.
As to what to run;
suggest to ease prep load we run proven, straight-forward stuff - Lost Mines of Phandelver, Wolves of Welton. If some DM want’s to do their own thing, amazing, but we have a default available
Organising 10 DM’s for a one-time event should be doable if we ask anyone who can DM to take a table as a priority this once
Id be down to meet in person to coordinate things and brainstorm. I already like some of the ideas floating around, like asking Athenas Siegel to help out or running well known beginners adventures. As for the date, I would have aimed for end of april or beginning/mid may as well. That way most people will have had a chance to see the movie, without waiting too long so that it has faded from everyones mind.
As for the flyer, I could volunteer to design something, though I dont know how good it will be and Im also not certain about which images i could use for the flyer. (copyright law) Also im not so good with deadlines (which still leaves open to discussion what the contents of the flyer should be)
Another idea is to sell tickets (maybe via some simple website) to the event. Price could be nominal (say 5 eur) but will help greatly with ensuring attendance and limiting number of participants if needed. We could even go as far as making tickets into tiers (top tier will get T-Shirt with event logo, preferential sitting at the table of choice etc).
How many experienced players who just don’t know about local games are there? Perhaps also adress this group!
As for preparing I think having an idea whom you are playing with in terms of experiece, expectations and how well matched the players are in that regard is more of an factor then the module. Might be a factor for players who have played the usual starter content.
That is what I am thinking to. I was considering offering to DM a high level game for those who are experienced and always wanted to play at higher levels
Made a cruder flyer in half an hour. Would like to have input on first impressions. What am I missing? what should I do better or different?
A couple of thoughts from me:
The QR code is working. Took it from some free QR code site and created it for free. However I doubt this is permanent as it is free and I don’t want it to stop working randomly. Does anyone have any experience with that?
The image being used is from an MTG card. Which there is copyright on. Do we have to find and use an image without copyright or would this fly under the radar? Worst case we can commission something, buy art, or someone makes a high resolution image of their collection* (something like this: https://i.gyazo.com/ce2e28b7bccad977039ad2c516131367.png)
Id love to use the dnd logo. again a copyright issue?
Now that I think of it there should be more information about the event on the flyer. (like there being about 10 tables, about 60 to 70 people ect.) but at the same time I don’t want to frontload the flyer with too much text.
P.S.: I notice the date is wrong, meant to schedule for 25th. Though that is still in the air as is so ignore it pls. ( iknow its a thursday)
Love the idea and in general I’d definitely be willing to DM a game either for first timers or higher levels. It just really depends on the date, because I often work evenings!
Regarding the Dungeons & Dragons logo, it is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast. You can use it following their fan content policy, which can be found here: Fan Content Policy | Wizards of the Coast Most importantly, that means whatever it is used for, it has to be free, non-commercial and has to be declared as unofficial. Alternatively, we could use it if we had a license from Wizards of the Coast, but I am not sure if it is feasible to attempt to get one…
Regarding the art, it is copyrighted, so you would need to have a license to use it, granted to you by the artist or whoever else owns the rights.
In terms of Design, I think it is fine as a base concept. Aside from typographic stuff like font design and such, you could include the Sägewerk logo (if they allow it) and that games are available in both English and German (?) for international players.
Aye, the RPG Vienna logo shouldn‘t be a problem, since I designed i a few years back. Would a freely scaleable vector file be alright, or do you prefer a pixelated version. For the latter: which resolution do you prefer?
So far, AI-generated art is not copyrighted yet. Although, that will be an interesting legal challenge in the future, considering AI-generated art is more or less made by taking elements from copyrighted art and putting them together.
(which still leaves open to discussion what the contents of the flyer should be)
