Team building with RPGs

My manager asked me to run an RPG as an activity for our team building day. Here's how it went down.

Before The Game

Venues

With our team being rather geographically diverse (several of us are home workers) the first challenge was picking a location where the travel wasn't too awful for anyone, and the manager picked Oxford. He found an escape room for our first activity, but it was down to me to find somewhere suitable for the game.

While you can run an RPG in a pub, you need to really know the pub to be sure there isn't going to be loud music/sport/crowds, and that wasn't something I could figure out that far from home. Fortunately, as a board gamer I was aware of Oxford's board games cafe, Thirsty Meeples, even though I'd never been there before. I was confident they could offer a reasonably quiet space with clean tables, and on further investigation learned they also had the other thing that my team seem to consider indispensible: beer.

Choosing a game

When previously considering games for beginners I was pretty sure that Dragonbane would be a good choice, especially when I realised that the game was going to be quite popular and with the event taking place on a week day it was unlikely I'd be able to recruit a second GM. 4-5 is my normal sweet spot for player numbers but this time I was absolutely going to have to accomodate 6. That's a lot easier with something with a board and miniatures and skill rolls and hit points than something that's largely narrative based.

Another reason to go for a game like this is that with one exception, all the players were absolute beginners. And my team aren't all former theatre kids, who seem to take to the improv aspect of RPGs very easily. We're a tech team. Most of them are database administrators and similar. People who can easily get into dice rolling and movement rates and weapon ranges but might take a bit longer to get into character motivations.

And finally, this was a team building event, with a side goal of promoting DEI. Dragonbane is a game that absolutely promotes teamwork, as a successful dungeon crawl often hinges on people working together to defeat the monsters, and also promotes diversity, where you can clearly see the benefits of a diverse team all bringing different skills to the table.

Preparation

By the time it was confirmed that I'd be running an RPG for this event, I'd bought a copy of Dragonbane and run the quickstart adventure The Riddermound multiple times. This seemed like a solid choice. Nice simple motivation for the characters. Get in, find treasure, get out. And I knew it well enough that I wouldn't have to do too much thinking about the adventure itself and could focus on the players.

I decided to use the cardboard standees that come in the core set for the player characters, and regular miniatures for the monsters. This meant there was a clear visual difference between PCs and monsters on the board. Using the standees also meant I wasn't having to explain that I didn't have any duck miniatures so please pretend that this tengu is actually a duck. They could just find the mini that matched the art on their character sheet. Meanwhile our miniature collection does include reasonable minis for the monsters encountered in this adventure.

Naturally I used the pre-gens from the quickstart, although I did also need to add in a sixth character. I created a dwarf bard, Urd Gildenclef, and while the back page of his character sheet didn't exactly match the others (I didn't have the right fonts, and also couldn't quite cut out the art from the book as neatly as I'd like to paste into the sheet) it was near enough that it still looked good and had a matching standee.

What else did I need? Dice, of course. I do have enough dice to loan six people enough dice to play Dragonbane. But, I found myself asking, did I want to? Of course not. Those are my dice, and every one of them has a story. A gift, a prize, a special purchase. I didn't want to lend them out.

Fortunately dice aren't too expensive if you're buying in bulk and don't much care about colours and stuff. I ordered a pack of six dice sets with drawstring dice bags on Amazon for about £10, and then shortly afterwards ordered another six when I realised numbers were about to get complicated. I figured people could keep them if they liked them, and if not I now had a decent set of loaners should I find myself introducing more beginners to gaming.

Then something struck me. Battle boards.

Like all good gamers, I have a Chessex Megamat at home. But the trouble with the Megamat, as the name implies, is that it's big. Really big. Rolled up it's 34"/86cm long, which is not the easiest thing to take with you on the Park and Ride or to carry across Oxford city centre.

By contrast, the battle board provided with the Dragonbane core set fits very neatly into the box. But it's small. Significantly smaller than the Riddermound map. I love that it's included in the set, but it wasn't going to work here.

So began my hunt for a battle map that would easily fit in the backpack with the rest of the gear, which will probably become a blog post by itself, but which ended with me buying an Ergon Games battle map from Amazon, which allowed me to draw the map in advance and then fold it up and put it in the bag.

On The Day

While I'd set a limit of 6 players for the game, I actually ended up with 8 people sitting at the table with me. One was my manager who'd organised the day, and who I knew would be an extra person well in advance. He suggested that he could be an observer, but I had another idea to give him more engagement. He could play the monsters. Easy enough in Dragonbane. I gave him the bag of monster minis and the rule book, and he rolled the dice, read out the attack descriptions, and rolled the damage dice.

I didn't have anything for the eighth person (a much more last minute addition) but there was a suggestion that two people could share a character, and I couldn't see any reason why not. Two guys decided to share, and picked Archmaster Aodhan, which worked out well for table space as I also had his spells printed out. One person had to leave early, so when he did, one of the sharing players took over his character.

I began by putting a couple of x cards on the table, explaining them as being like the emergency exit button on the escape room we'd just been to. I doubted we'd need them, and didn't make a big deal out of it, but I figure it doesn't hurt to explicitly state that it's OK to say no to things.

When giving my introduction to the rules I forgot to explain Boon and Bane, although I should have done given that some of the special abilities involve it. It did get used however, with me telling players when they were allowed to roll the dice twice and why. I could have handled it a little better, but it did go OK in the end. I did remember to explain resting, which as usual proved entirely necessary.

The game itself went as smoothly as can be expected. I was constantly having to remind people which dice to roll, but that was nothing I didn't expect, and the novelty of the polyhedral dice definitely caught people's attention. I made some minor alterations, such as reducing the falling damage for the initial descent into the mound to 1d6, as having characters risk death on the very first dice roll seemed un-fun. (I then rolled 5 and 6 for the damage on the two characters who failed the roll, so they still got the feel of this being dangerous.)

While on previous occasions I've run this game, I've always used the optional pushing rule, this time I didn't. Mostly I've played this with people with at least some familiarity with Free League games (or Call of Cthulhu) who were on board with the idea of getting a reroll in exchange for some kind of risk or penalty, but for complete beginners I decided it would be just one more thing to explain, and ditched it entirely. It's fun to include for more experienced players but the game runs fine without it.

There was only one moment where a character risked death, when the big bad rolled his biggest attack - 4d8 damage. Makander was standing right in front of him at the time, so I suggested that he should be the target, with his armour rating 6 plate armour and 16 hit points giving him a reasonable shot at survival. Only the manager playing the monster rolled 22 damage, taking him down to 0 points. Fortunately his next con roll was a critical, and while it took pretty much the entire party having a go at healing for someone to succeed, he was stabilised. On 1 hit point. Which almost resulted in him getting knocked out again at the end when I called for Acrobatics rolls to get back out of the Riddermound, but fortunately the final player to roll (Urd Gildenclef, as it happened) got a critical, so I told him he was able to bring the duck out with him.

Urd Gildenclef proved to be a very useful party member in the end, providing backup to Aodhan on knowledge skills, keeping the party well informed with beast lore, and of course giving boons in combat with his musical talents. If you're running with the pre-gens and need a 6th character, I thoroughly recommend including him.

You grew up in your family’s underground halls, dreaming of one day becoming a mighty warrior like your father. Until the day when you were first invited to blow the hunting horn that called everyone to dinner, and a new passion awoke. Instead of just listening to the chroniclers tell stories and sing songs of your ancestors, you began learning those stories yourself, and your skill at playing the horn won you many complements. Now you’re out in the Misty Vale, seeking out new stories to some day bring back home.

We ended up wrapping up in 2.5 hours, faster than I anticipated. I soon realised why. Experienced players talk a lot in character. These beginners didn't. So things moved along a little faster than I expected. Since we only had the table for 3 hours, that was fine - realising I was going to wrap things up well in time made things less stressful for me.

After The Game

With about half an hour left before we had to leave, some of the players decided to make use of the cafe's board game library and had a game of Uno. I didn't join in. I had plenty to do packing my gear away, and was happy just to watch.

Then it was back onto the Park and Ride, and an hour's drive home, and I could finally relax. I was exhausted. I felt like I'd just come back from a LARP, and while there had been some walking across Oxford and a bit of activity in the escape room, it wasn't enough to induce that kind of tiredness. Running for beginners comes with a lot more mental load that my normal games. So does running with eight other people at the table instead of the usual four or five. So does running for people who aren't just friends or acquaintences, but co-workers and the manager who asked me to do this. Hardly surprising I was wiped out by it.

That said, I would absolutely recommend this as a team building activity. It ticks the boxes on actually promoting teamwork in a way most of the nonsense you end up doing while team building doesn't, and I think people did find it reasonably enjoyable. Dragonbane is absolutely a solid choice for this situation and the core set is useful for providing the standees to match the character sheets.

If you do try this, and end up with eight prospective players, get a second GM if you can. Big tables are a challenge by themselves, and they're a bigger challenge when everybody is completely new to the game. But if you can't, bringing in the manager as the monster wrangler actually worked pretty well.

Whether I'll get any new gamers out of this, I'm not sure, but I'll certainly be offering to talk to anyone who's interested in learning more when we're back at work.