Thoughts on Open Tables and Megadungeons

These days it might seem pretty easy to pull together a group of people to play D&D, or other RPGs. Maybe you play with your kids. Maybe you have a group of friends from secondary school or college that you play with. Maybe you play online with friends in far away places. Or maybe you found some kindred spirits at work.

But maybe you have come up empty on all those choices. Maybe you’ve moved somewhere new, or your social circle has shrunk for various real-life reasons. So perhaps you try organized play (for D&D that’s the Adventurer’s League). It can be a good way to meet people, to plug into an RPG community, and is designed to be easy to drop in and out of. But organized play must, as a necessity, be full of rules and restrictions designed to standardize play and create a fair playing field for whoever sits down in any location. Over time that can feel too restrictive, too limited. The truth is, even if you can get a group together to play, keeping that group together long enough to run a standard campaign is difficult. As Mike Shea says in an article on his Sly Flourish website:

Finding and maintaining a great D&D group is the hardest part of D&D.

Enter the Open Table. Justin Alexander describes this concept using a baseball analogy: the usual lengthy campaign is like Major League baseball, but the Open Table is like playing catch. Anyone can toss the ball around a bit, right? And it’s fun. Maybe you’ll decide you like it enough to invest your time into learning more and playing more, join an intramural or community baseball team. Or maybe you just like playing catch.

Like an organized play program, the Open Table game has certain rules in place. These exist to streamline play, make scheduling easier, or make things more fair. The idea is to give folks a way to play D&D when they want to or when they can, and do that in a way that is easy for the DM to schedule and easy for the DM to prep. So what kind of adventure is easy to set up, doesn’t require a lot of planning, that players can drop in and out of without feeling lost or like they missed something? Megadungeons!

I’ve found lots of people who want to play D&D, or who are curious and want to learn more about it. What’s difficult to find is A) a group of people I know and like, who B) are able to play on a regular basis and can commit to that, and C) have play styles and/or DM styles that are compatible with mine. In order for a longer campaign to work, you need to have A, B, and C all line up together. That’s hard to find.

So my plan is to create an Open Table game, using Justin Alexander’s model. My hope is that as people come and go at this open table game, I’ll meet new people and make some friends, and maybe find a few who are interested in a longer and more involved campaign.

I’m doing research on megadungeons, and I’ve bought a metric butt ton of adventures both old school and modern in my search for the right megadungeon to use. Unfortunately, so far I haven’t found one specific megadungeon that ticks all the boxes. Alexander himself recommends Caverns of Thracia, written by the esteemed Jennell Jacquays. I actually have the 3E adaptation of that adventure, so it’s possible I could use it. But it would require some conversion and adaptation before I could use it for 5E D&D. Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage is actually really interesting…but it’s freaking HUGE even by megadungeon standards (23 levels!). It also seems to be a bit spotty on the wandering monster/random encounter tables. Some levels have them, but others don’t. So I’d have to either make some up myself or try to find some online (requiring an investment of more time and possibly money). There are some third-party megadungeon adventures for 5E that have gotten good reviews (and I’ve already bought some of them), but the ones I’ve looked at seem more like one giant spread out level rather than the typical multi-level megadungeon.

The main thing is, the whole reason Alexander recommended using an existing megadungeon adventure is to limit the investment of time and energy used on preparing for sessions. It’s a lot easier to say “yes” to a spontaneous game session if you only need to spend 30 minutes to an hour prepping for the game. Designing my own megadungeon from scratch kind of defeats the purpose. But as I said, so far I haven’t found a 5E compatible megadungeon that suits my purpose.

Enter the Frankenstein Megadungeon. I’m considering just patching together my own megadungeon using bits and pieces from the other things I have. I’m still figuring out whether I can do this in a way that doesn’t end up becoming a burdensome time-sink. So in my new feature series, “Megadungeon Mondays,” I’ll be posting reports on my efforts as well as musing about what works and what doesn’t. Stay tuned Gentle Readers!