Running a D&D Social Event Session

Recently I had occasion to run my first social event in a D&D session. I thought it worth sharing my experiences and reflecting on how it went.

First, what do I mean by a social event? I’m talking about an event where there are lots of people, some of whom might be significant, who the characters can wander about among and interact with. There is usually some form of structure and some idea of events which may happen.

Our campaign has had a lot of investigation and combat recently, culminating in a heist (strongly based on Masterpiece Imbroglio from Keys from the Golden Vault) and, particularly with it coming up to Christmas, I thought a winter ball would be a welcome change of pace. It could also be a place where they could be highlighted and start to come to the attention of the more important (socially and politically) NPCs in the area.

I used The Alexandrian Party Planning guidelines from his blog and the Social Events section of his excellent book So You Want to be a Gamemaster (starting p354).

Preparing for the ball

I’ll structure this after the Alexandrian guidelines.

Step 1: Location. It was the winter ball at the palace, so I imagined a big Cinderella-style ballroom inside the palace, with a sweeping flight of stairs everyone comes down on entry. Justin recommends having multiple zones of activity, so I imagined a couple of side wings/alcoves, one with an ice sculpture of a massive bird of prey (a replica of a statue which is being built in the bay). I couldn’t find anything that really suited in my collection of maps, and I wasn’t planning a massive combat, so I just went theatre of the mind.

Step 2: Guest list. Justin recommends 10-20 people, each with notes including key info such as relationships with other NPCs, triggers and reactions, actions they may try to take, clues that can be gleaned from them, scenario hooks, shared experiences with PCs, unusual or important gear they may be carrying.

And here I struggled. I haven’t really had a need for such a cast of people to date, so I was really creating from scratch. I also wanted to bring in some references to some other locations which are becoming relevant to the campaign, so we had a few visitors. Building up this list of NPCs took several hours of prep. Maybe I was overthinking it, but don’t underestimate the amount of time this might take…

Step 3: Main Event Sequence. Justin’s example in the book has 11 points, but I kept this fairly simple and mostly just improvised. We had arrival and a bit of mingling, characters discovering and investigating the ice sculpture, Gareth meeting a blast from the past, unveiling of the portrait they had just rescued in the heist, dancing starting, and the ball ending and everyone being sent home.

I also prepped a couple of minor combat encounters – some ice mephits in the ice sculpture who might get out and cause mayhem, and a couple of “pet” death dogs tied up in a corner which might somehow get loose.

Step 4: Topics of Conversation. I came up with a few rumours, mostly about local characters, had some talk about the troubles in a town up north which I’m hoping will form the next stage in the campaign, and gave some of the cast some topics, but also struggled with this one.

How the ball played out

I decided to make it a masquerade ball, and the players had fun in advance finding images of the masks they were going to wear. Since this was also supposedly as a reward for the success of the heist, the patron who commissioned the heist also commissioned each character a new outfit. The session started with them describing their new outfits (I always start the session with them describing what they look like, what they’re wearing and what they’re carrying, following recommendation by The Angry GM). They had decided on a colour scheme of black and gold, most of them leaning more towards the black, and for each one, once they had finished, I added a circle in black thread embroidered somewhere on a black sleeve or front (with no explanation…).

We then had them going up to the palace, presenting their invitations, crossing the courtyard (description of some of the other guests crossing as well, including a woman apparently just wearing feathers – inspired by Birgitte’s outfit from A Crown of Swords), entering the main door and going up a flight of stairs to the entry to the ballroom. Well – if they’re going to enter the ballroom coming down a flight of presentation stairs, they’d better have gone up to a level high enough to come down from…

They then started milling, and asking for descriptions. They picked some people who sounded interesting, split up, and started talking, and here is where I started regretting the masquerade… What I hadn’t thought about was that part of my aim was for them to know and get known, but if everyone is in disguise, that’s not so easy. Particularly when people stick to their disguises (as they would) and only give names relating to the disguise.

So it was the foreign visitors who stuck out, and who they ended up talking to. Gareth (who is originally from Glantri) tried talking to a Glantri Lord, who wasn’t interested, snubbed him and walked away.

Gareth went to speak to the woman in feathers and discovered it was Laura, someone from his past in Glantri, so started having a conversation, but he seemed to have been the centre of most of the conversation so far, so although it made sense for the story for the two of them to have a conversation, I felt I needed to give the other characters some time, and moved the spotlight. (We’re now having the conversation they would have had over Discord, which has the additional benefit that’s it’s really secret).

Some of them investigated the Death Dogs, who were sitting placidly, chained up in the corner next to the alcove with the ice sculpture, and then went to look at the ice sculpture, using it as an ice breaker for conversation with one of the other attendees. Vars saw a pointy face inside the ice – one of the mephits, although he didn’t realise this.

They overheard a couple of other people talking about redstone (redstone has become a significant material in the campaign – influences from Minecraft purely accidental, honest guvnor…), Lan recognised a different Glantri accent, and spoke to him and he mentioned he was here on a trade trip. There were also several people talking about an expedition to a village in the north which is having some sort of trouble, some of the people talking favourably, others saying it was a waste of money (this village has been being trailed for a while now – I’m hoping it’s where the campaign will go next…).

Their patron appeared, there was a sudden lull in the activity, and he revealed the portrait which they had rescued, now hung on the wall at the back of the ballroom.

The band struck up and people started dancing, Gareth with Laura, a couple of the other characters dancing with each other, and Lan failing to find a partner.

I was starting to run short of conversations by this point, particularly since they couldn’t really recognise anyone relevant, and I was feeling it was starting to drag, so I decided it was time to bring in one of my diversions. Suddenly there were screams from the side of the room – one of the death dogs had got loose. Lan (wizard) and Jinnie (halfling rogue with a couple of spells) tried casting a combined Sleep on it, and (rule of cool) I decided to allow the two spells to combine this once (making clear this was not a precedent) – and with the two sets of rolls added together, it was just enough hit points to put the dog to sleep and allow it to be chained up again. Cue adulation…

While this was happening, Gareth’s owl familiar noticed a flurry of activity somewhere else in the room, someone collapsing, and the cleric and paladin rushed over. Someone had just been stabbed and was bleeding to death, so they stabilised her. Clearly loosing the dog had been a distraction to allow this to happen.

Gareth and Lan’s players asked whether their familiars had seen anything (Lan has a fox familiar), and at the time I said no – I had just improvised the scenario, so didn’t know who had done it. But maybe I’ll retcon that, and give them a bit of a description for the next session.

That was about all there was time for, so I described a few more dances and then the end of the ball and people heading home.

Reflections

This was my first such social event. Time for takeaways.

First, I would like to thank Justin Alexander for his structure. I found it a really useful framework to work with.

Second, I seriously underestimated how much prep it would take. I thought it would be a nice quick session that I could just throw together, but then I realised I didn’t have the cast of characters I needed, nor the plot hooks… It was just as well I had an unexpected extra free afternoon – it took most of that and I still didn’t feel ready.

Of course, if I had already had the people to hand, that should have been easier, and it would just have been a matter of choosing them and giving them some rumours and conversation about recent events.

I also discovered that a masquerade sounded a fun addition in abstract, but in actual fact got in the way, since they didn’t yet know the people, and part of the point was to for them to get to know others and for others to get to know them. Maybe if they already knew the people, having the disguises would add interest, but in this case it was a mistake. I’ll now have to find ways for them to recognise people who were there, maybe passing in the street.

It also felt difficult balancing the different characters within the situation so that all the players got a good turn.

It definitely helped having the ice sculpture and death dogs as conversation pieces – I hadn’t realised quite how much until one of the players started using them as something to talk to one of the other people there about. If I were to do another, I would try to have more features there that could become topics of conversation.

I’m also glad I had prepped a couple of mini events to give a bit of a change from conversation, even though I only used one of them.

This social event was a useful way of introducing some visitors and new characters, bringing in new threads and emphasising some existing threads in the campaign. I’d have liked to establish more NPC relationships (positive and negative) for the group to observe and/or overhear, but I did at least manage to drop in a few things. Whether they remember or not is another question…

I found it difficult keeping track of the NPCs I had prepped. Justin recommends having a page per NPC, but that felt like a lot of paper, so I went off a simple list and tried to remember. I wonder if there’s a half-way house.

I should have been willing to give the players something that the familiars had seen of the people involved in the assassination attempt. I really need to get better at improvising descriptions and allowing the baddies not to be perfect assassins…

I was a bit concerned during and after the session that it was a bit slow and unfocussed, but the players said they had enjoyed it, which is the important thing.

Would I do it again? Probably, given the right context, but I’d want to make sure they already knew more people, and I would almost certainly avoid disguises.

Header photo by Llanydd Lloyd on Unsplash