Yesterday, as Doc and I were setting up the space for the Charity Epic, we were discussing the playspace with Jess, the manager at Noble Knight. All of our venues came to the same realization that we had – that for the safety of our community we needed to suspend our public play events for now. Misty Mountain Games and Noble Knight Games have both suspended events in their playspace. Pegasus Games is still open, but MadDnD has made the decision to suspend public play events until the threat has past.
This doesn’t mean we will stop having events. There is a schedule for this entire year including Hero Camp and charity events through the year. That includes the Marathon Charity Event at it’s new spot in our summer lineup. Once those venues are open for public play again, we will resume our schedule. And until that point, we will still be doing what we can to encourage your Adventurers League character still tell their tales.
The charity events have been branded under 25th Hour Events, and we started a Discord server for the purposes of grouping the tables together for planning leading up to the Marathon Events. We also used it for coordinating the crew of the Lost Talent, a pirate ship of characters with a similar theme created to play in charity events. We are opening that up for players looking to get together for playing games online. For my Tuesday night show on 20 Sides to Every Story, I run a group of our local players through a game using Discord video chat to pipe into the Twitch stream. Either through voice chat or video chat, anyone can easily set up a game of D&D. It is all theater of the mind without a tool like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, but it is something anyone can do.
https://discord.gg/zWXEmjV (edit: made link non-expiring for now)
If you don’t have it yet, DnDBeyond is a great way to create your character sheets online and share them out to the DM, etc. You do need to own the content you are using on that platform, so anything other than the SRD would have to be purchased on DnDBeyond. Without a subscription anyone can make up to 6 characters. Otherwise there are plenty of form-fillable PDFs that can be used with a shared Google Drive.
These measures will help us to keep our games, our characters, their stories, and our community going in the upcoming weeks. It should be of note that yesterday we watched 7-8 tables of players come together (some of them new to our community, and even D&D as a whole) and took an effort to help wipe down tables between games and do the effort to help protect our neighbors in the gaming community as well as our own players. We rolled with the changes in the format to account for safety, and the removing of some of our standard items like Fai Chen’s Fantastical Faire. That tells us that the community is strong and will come through the other side to sit at a table and roll dice together again soon.
Once the playspaces have opened again, we will be sure to plan a proper party to welcome everyone back. Maybe it will be enough of an event that Fai Chen might make an appearance. Or maybe Mahati. Yeah, that wily old cat would definitely show his face.