I only know because a buddy of mine was telling me about his weekend gaming plans and mentioned this was happening. My initial thought was, "Oh he's playing in a big-assed tournament." No, no he was not. Him and the Mrs. were slinging dice at the single largest group of players sitting down to the same game, not a single adventure being played at 200 tables of 5 players and a DM, but basically one big-assed table of 1000 players and 200 DMs.
Wait...what? This is a thing?
Well according to the Guinness World Records folks this is a thing, and is so knew it isn't even on the website yet, but the hosts have a pic of their record on their Facebook page.
The session was four hours and a massive war front against an undead army lead and the PCs, all 1K of them, are the ad-hoc army of the Kingdom of Grand. It was called Dead Wars.
It was a 5th Edition D&D game, which I know next to nothing about and probably won't (not any OSR snobbery, just my buddy said he really doubt I'd care for it and I trust his opinion to not waste my resources). All I could think of is how much of a logistical nightmare setting things up could be, both in and out of game.
Still, kind of cool to have the chance to participate in a bit of history and maybe even find some new gaming friends. Unfortunately for most of us, this happened in Provo, Utah. Now I used to live in Boise, so I know where Provo is, but for the rest of the US.....it's a suburb (of sorts) to Salt Lake City. Of course your probably guessed that because most Americans can only name Salt Lake City as a city in Utah.
Now I don't know how far those Guinness folks want to drill-down, but I'm down for a big-assed 1st or 2nd edition game.......
Oh, and congrats to We Geek Together, you pulled it off.
In my not so humble opinion, it doesn't count as a single game if there's more than one GM. An assistant or apprentice is fine, but a single game can only ever have a single master.
ReplyDeleteI agree--a single game requires a single GM, so this (cool it may be) shouldn't qualify. I ran a group of 16 players for 18 hours continuously (except for bio breaks) in 1976, and I'm sure there are others who can top that.
ReplyDeleteI, for one, would love to hear that story... what happened?
DeleteThe way this worked (I know because I hosted it with my family), was that we had 1 head DM, who was over the entire event; Each table then had their DMs that were running each part of the battle, and would report between the tables back to the head DM outcomes at different stages of the battle. The reports were handled by generals that facilitated the communication between the tables and the head DM, which in turn generated a dynamic storyline based on honest outcomes.
ReplyDeleteWe just posted the instruction manual should someone want todo this outside of Utah.... Or perhaps we should travel.
Anyway, is was a TON of fun getting to know all the D&D players in the area (and from many other states as far away as Hawaii who flew in for the event)...
Loved the post