Dungeons & Dragons organized play

In 1979, Mike Carr, the general manager of TSR, Inc., the original publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons game, conceived the idea of a role-playing gamers club. Shortly after Frank Mentzer was hired in 1980 as one of the first full-time employees of TSR, Inc., he was assigned the task making a role-playing gamers club a commercial reality, which was officially called the Role Playing Game Association (RPGA) in order to promote roleplaying of high quality and to allow fans of roleplaying games to meet and play games with each other. Mentzer officially launched the RPGA in November 1980 primarily to run tournaments at gaming conventions using TSR's top sellers: AD&D, Gamma World and Top Secret. In 1991, the RPGA ran 179 of these events. At each tournament, a Dungeon Master and four to eight players would play a 4-hour adventure supplied by the RPGA. Each player was given a pre-generated character with a background, equipment, and some limited information about the other characters at the table. At the end of the adventure, the players and Dungeon Master would select one player at the table as the "winner" of the adventure, based on his or her knowledge of the rules and role-playing ability. All players were awarded experience points based on how well they did in competitive events, and could add to that experience point total at the next event, allowing them, over time to advance to higher levels. Membership was originally paid by a yearly fee, and included a subscription to Polyhedron magazine (which was originally the official publication of the RPGA). and briefly in Italy. Living campaign In 1987, instead of presenting single adventures that were not linked to any previous or subsequent adventures, RPGA conceived of a long-term endeavor, called a living campaign, where the actions of the players would have an impact on the overall campaign story arc. Unlike previous RPGA tournament play, where players were given a pre-generated character, Living City adventures required each player to provide their own character. Previously, experience points had been accumulated by the player, but now experience points were accumulated by the player's character. Bringing the same character back to subsequent adventures allowed that character to accumulate more experience points and greater powers. To have an effect on the overall storyline, at the end of each adventure, the players would send the result of their play to RPGA headquarters for compilation. Success or failure by a majority of players would result in a change to the campaign storyline. For example, if most players in a particular adventure succeeded in lifting a curse, the curse would not appear in future adventures. "The RPGA set the template for MMORPGs; adventurers existing in the same world in a sort of mega-universe". At this point, RPGA had members on all continents of the world except Antarctica. In 2010, Wizards of the Coast launched a new organized play initiative called D&D Encounters at stores in the Wizards Play Network as a D&D equivalent of Friday Night Magic. The company "supplied GMs across the nation with adventures to run on Wednesday nights. [...] Each night's adventuring contained just a single encounter. These sessions were billed as running 60-90 minutes in length". Shannon Appelcline, author of Designers & Dragons, wrote, "by running Encounters simultaneously across the nation, Wizards hoped to take advantage of social media; they envisioned people talking about the games on Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, comparing their experiences with those of other players across the nation. [...] Overall, the Encounters program would prove extremely successful. Though neither it nor Essentials made D&D Fourth Edition into an unprecedented success story, the Encounters program was well-loved; it got attention on CNN and elsewhere and was successful at drawing players into game stores to play. Eleven Encounters seasons ran through late 2012, before the program took a short break and shifted over to a mixed 4e and D&D Next format in 2013". == D&D Adventurers League (2014–present) ==