I wanted to make sure our Grand Champion and Master of the Arena, Lauryn, Queen of Fire, had sufficient chance to bask in her awesomeness before we did an after-action report of the tournament!

First, I hope fun was had by all!! If not, and if your issue is not addressed here, please shoot me or Chris an email!

This was the first time we have done something like this, and we learned a lot! We found some issues that definitely need addressing to make everything run smoother next time, and with hope that will make it even more fun the next time around.

1 – We recognize and acknowledge the challenges with the coins and the Deck of Dragons. For future events, there will be a limit of 1 store coin used per character. This should create a much smoother experience while still maintaining the fun parts of the deck. Chris will also be going over the cards and making sure everything is 5e kosher; the last D&D game I DM’ed was 3.5, and it showed, sorry y’all!

2 – Tournament length and bracketing – This was a LONG event. With potentially a lot more folks showing up next year, our thought is to do bracketing tournaments on the weekends before the main Championship. Our thought would be to do 8 person brackets on the first, second, and third weekends of the month, with 4 from each bracket advancing to the finals. Then we could do one big, final tournament of 12 optimally. This will also help in that folks won’t be sitting around waiting for their turn to play, which I know was not fun for some folks, and I do apologize for that.

3 – Board size vs. number of players. With 8 players, the big table we were on was too big to create consistently quick interactions. It also allowed some hiding, which while I think is fun and appropriate, it should be a more ‘lick your wounds’ kind of hiding as opposed to ‘I’m going to sit out of the game for 15 rounds’. A smaller play area, or a larger number of players in the same area, should help with all of those issues.

4 – While I love that two people picked up the Necklace of Fireballs, I’m sure we could all imagine what it would look like if all 20 players had them.=) While we definitely don’t want to do away with cool magic items like that, we’re looking for a way to limit the potential abuse of what could happen if everyone took them. One way would be to allow 1 each of the rare magic items and maybe do a draft for them during the bracketing tournaments. Another way would be to do a draft for the rare items, with position being determined by ‘store support points’, which would be some mixture of the number of events attended throughout the year and purchases at Small Town Games (which means I also need to work on our loyalty program!). We will flesh this out at our Everhold Teams Tournament some time in March!

5 – A side note on the coin/Deck front. It should be noted that all 3 players in the top 3 only spent a single coin (and I’m not even sure if the Barbarian did that), and in one case, that was a gift from a friend and not even an intended purchase.=) So while they can have powerful effects, we did find that those who had a lot of cards from the deck were regarded as 1st-line enemies by many other players, which ultimately limited their lifespan!

All in all, I thought it went well, and it looked like fun was had. With hope these changes going forward make it even better! Again, if you have ideas or suggestions, feel free to let us know! Ultimately, this is all about fun and good sportsmanship!