Tonight begins the new season of D&D Encounters… and I’m not running a game. The story behind this is twofold.

First, my wife and I are in a bowling league on Wednesday nights. The league starts up on August 31, so I won’t be able to run Encounters after that. Thus, I can’t be a regular DM this season (though I will occasionally be a backup, running a 5:00 PM table if the regular DM is not available).

Second, my friendly local game store wasn’t planning to run this season of Encounters until recently, much to my surprise. They’ve been running Encounters every season so far, and I thought things had been going well, but with Lair Assault starting soon the store owner was planning to just run that and skip Encounters. He changed his mind when the Encounters players last week got upset that there wouldn’t be a game.

So, he belatedly ordered materials for this season of Encounters, but they haven’t arrived yet. We’ll probably be running the first two encounters in a single session next week.

Has anyone else seen a store that was dropping Encounters in favor of Lair Assault? I was shocked when I heard this suggestion, since they’re aimed at completely different groups (casual and new players versus hard-core optimizers).