A View From the Retail Store

As many of you know, I am one of the owners of EndGame in Oakland, Ca. Our store is very heavily driven upon an event based community model. We host a variety of different games on different nights, and these events tend to ebb and flow over time…with one exception: Dungeons and Dragons.

For the past five years we have hosted the RPGA on Monday nights. With very few exceptions, this hearty group of adventurers has met at the store without fail. It has been very interesting watching such a solid, committed group go through the switch from D&D 3.5 to 4e.

At the store, we get to see “version changes” often. Miniatures games like Warhammer 40,000 get new rules every few years. Board games even see revisions. But the grand pappy of RPGs throwing a change in the works is a pretty big deal…especially when it was as “ground-up” as 3.5 to 4e was.

Let’s backtrack for a moment and discuss the overall switch:as a single store we have sold over 125 copies of the PHB alone, and well into the hundreds of all the offical WoTC 4e products. It has been the largest success in terms of sales in our role-playing category that I have personally witnessed. The general acceptance of the new edition in our one retail location has been at least 6 to 1 on the positive side of those odds. At this point, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a force of nature…

Now we get back to events. My most requested demo in the past 2 months has been 4e. The RPGA has been firing off four full tables of 4e each week, with one or two tables of 3.5 for those looking to finish off the mods before making the switch. Now we fast forward to the largest single event I have ever run at the store: A Weekend in the Realms.

WoTC has chosen to herald in the switch from Living Greyhawk to Living Forgotten Realms with a full weekend of D&D. We are rolling a little different, and hosting the games in a single day. Initially we had five tables lined up, with three time slots through the day. 15 games of anything is quite the feat.

Those games filled up in just a few short days.

Then we added a sixith table, and finally a seventh. Twenty-one games of 4e in a single day, at a single store. I mean, damn.

To make a long story short, 4e hit the ground running at EndGame. We had some fear, and some of our customers certainly had some doubt…but that is long past us now.

One store, one day, 21 games. Long Live 4e!