Hatching a Dragon at the Office

The depths of your dorkness never cease to delight me.

-A friend, upon hearing about this

Identifying the Opportunity

Where I work, the Great Place to Work™ survey is a ginormous, huge deal. Like, a beat-us-over-the-head-with-dozens-of-emails, incent-us-with-Starbucks-cards, exhort-us-with-moving-speeches-from-horseback-before-riding-into-battle big deal*.

That’s because where I work really is a Great Place to Work. Fortune Magazine says so, in great big headlines, every year. And furthermore, my little corner of the workplace is beyond great. It’s AWESOME. We rock! We are the Web Geeks! In fact, the only room for we have left for improvement, out of a buttload** of survey questions, seems to be, “There is a team or family feeling here.”

We chatted about that question recently, in our after-survey meeting, and basically, the problem seems to boil down to the problem I think most multidisciplinary departments have: I work on the consumer/patient/employee side of things. So I see you guys every day, but I don’t know what in the hell you do. And I don’t want to interrupt whatever it is you’re doing to just chit-chat, in case you’re doing something really, really important. Ipso facto, I don’t ever really get a chance to know you, and our office remains, for the most part, a silent little cube dungeon.

Which got a few of us talking one day as we were out at lunch…about Dungeons. 

And Dragons.

What if we dusted off the polyhedral dice that have been gathering dust*** for, oh, say, [mumblety-humph] years since college and went on a year-long monster-slaying, treasure-gathering, spell-casting, butt-kicking campaign?

With our colleagues?

At the office?

At lunchtime?

My god, the notion seemed so outlandish, it just might work!

Laying the Groundwork

I ran the notion past my Director, an open-minded chap,**** who thought it sounded like a great idea, if a bit madcap. We also found one other guy in the office who had substantial RPG (role-playing game) experience, who volunteered to be the DM (Dungeonmaster). (He also had some dusty dice.) 

And with that, we were off.

The planning has taken roughly a month. We’ll be running the 5^th Edition Starter Set to get everybody up to speed, with significant modifications or else there’s no way this thing will ever work.

• For one thing, you can’t block off four to six hours at a stretch for D&D at the office. Back when I last played, our biggest worry was whether Russia would drop a nuclear bomb on us.***** And a session could stretch on and on and on. In the workplace, we have actual stuff to do, so that's right out of the question. Luckily, our crazy idea hatched at the exact same time that Wizards of the Coast was releasing a brand-spanking-new edition of the 40-year-old game, and it’s a streamlined ruleset that takes a lot of klunkiness away and allows for faster, leaner gameplay. (Had we come up with this idea last year, we’d have had to scrounge around for old copies of AD&D rulebooks from the 80s, because there’s no conceivable way to shoehorn a 4^th edition game, with its battle grids and minis, into 55 minute sessions). Our game’s going to be strictly theater-of-the-mind, and if there are any arguments, about "Yuh-Huh-I-Was-TOO-Close-Enough-To-Hit-That-Orc," DungeonMaster's Ruling Stands.
• For another thing, while we are a lean-and-mighty team, we are still 22 people. Even if a few people—or half the people—decide to opt out, you cannot run an effective adventure with 22 player characters (PCs). You can’t even really run an adventure with more than eight without things getting chaotic. And then there are meetings, vacations, conflicts…not everybody will be able to make it to the game each week. Which would eventually cause problems—some PCs would level up, others wouldn’t, and the lower-level characters would end up massacred in battles with higher-level monsters. To solve this problem, the DM and I worked out a scheme in which we'll run four pre-fab characters from the box set, plus an additional two (races and classes TBD by group vote) as “pool” characters. 
• The team-building part: Teaming up people from different disciplines who don't usually work together, for the purposes of smashing heads and smiting things.The characters will be assigned to cross-discipline teams of two or three people, who will roleplay each character either a) collaboratively or b) by taking turns. (We’re leaving that up to each team, and are looking forward to sitting back and basking in the potential hilarity of having a Risky Rick paired with a Cautious Cathy playing a mighty-smitey Paladin. Heh.) We figure at least one member of each team should be able to show up at lunchtime each Friday, ready to take the character out adventuring, rack up experience points, find treasure, buy better weapons and armor, level up, learn new spells, and, oh, yeah, in the process, actually learn to play the game. 
• Has everything I’ve written so far in this section been all blah-blah-blah Ginger? Then what you (and ~20 of my colleagues) need is a 46-slide introduction to the Basics of Dungeons & Dragons! {coming soon, as soon as I find a way to upload and embed a ginormous PPT! DISCLAIMER: All Images Borrowed From the Generous Donors of the InterWebs, Copyright Assumptions Hefted Back At Original Uploaders, Yadda Yadda Yadda.}

We start next Friday. Wish us luck. And skill. And the common sense not to rush headlong into the battle with the first dragon we meet without stopping to strategize first, or it'll be a TPK (total party kill).

Most of our colleagues are approaching this with bemusement. But one of our newest colleagues, a female heretofore not initiated into the awesomeness of sitting around a table making shit up, has already gotten into the spirit of D&D. 

The box set is designed to take 25-30 hours to complete, which means 6 months of training wheels—and by then, anybody who's really enjoyed it can decide to start over, for realz, with a character they roll up for themselves, in a campaign we start from scratch. Which leads me to quote quite literally the best thing I've heard at the office in more than a year: 

"I can be a fuckin' shark that shoots fire out of my fins!? AWESOME!!!!!"

-She who shall remain nameless until credit is requested

* Well, maybe not yet, but in campaign mode...
** Approximately 80; I didn't feel like looking it up
*** In my case, not dust; fish poo. My dice were at the bottom of a very large vase that a betta fish lived in, happily, for three years. Oddly enough, he died a couple of weeks after this plan occurred to me. Coincidence? Divine intervention by Boccob the Uncaring, God of Magic, the arcane and foresight? You decide.
**** I can call him a chap because he's from England, originally.
***** Don't get any ideas, Mr. "I Love The 80s" Putin.