Roadmap for 2024

The Green Banner sprouts, victorious, over the final battlefield.

Hi DrachenFesties!

Here’s an update about what’s been going on, and what’s ahead.

The Survey

• Roughly 200 people answered the player feedback survey, providing TONS of helpful data! Thank you so much for this incredibly valuable insight.

• We spent two months analyzing your feedback. We ran thousands of hypothesis driven statistical models in addition to qualitative analyses. We read and included every comment.

• This produced a 240 slide comprehensive report, using quantitative & qualitative data from staff retrospectives (for medical, safety, and volunteer experience) cross referenced with player feedback.

• This allowed us to produce a data-supported road map for how to make DrachenFest even better next year. We’re distributing feedback internally, and are making large and small changes to our “source code”.df

Let’s talk about what’s coming up:

2024 Kickoff

• Our "save the date" announcement is just around the corner.

• Tickets will go on sale at the end of October!

• All our photos will drop by the end of the year.

Out with the Forums, in with the Feed

• We’ll be sunsetting the forums and replacing them with a newsfeed-style social media platform.

As a reminder, our official communications are:

• The Play Guide, Rulebook & Warbook

• The Wizard’s Desk blog (you’re reading it right now)

• The new DF-US social media platform - for interactive discussion with other players

• The drachenfest.us chatbox - for direct questions

The Safety Project

We’re doing a deep dive on Safety at DrachenFest. The goal is to create a comprehensive data-driven DF-US safety concept.

• Over the next few months, we’ll unroll a series of blogposts where we talk about safety culture and practice at DrachenFest. (Yes, we're gonna talk about archery.)

• We’ll also discuss rules and ref trainings, player safety culture, hazards and risk management, safety in roleplay, battle, siege, and monster safety, medical & fire & build & security safety, and our participant policy.

Updated Rulebook & Warbook

Next spring, we’ll release updated game documents.

• Updates to Large Monsters and Crafting, among other things

• More clarity and documentation around guild skills

• New format options

Website

• Dedicated pages for DF-US enterprises and recurrent vendors

Other Projects

There’s a lot we want to share about the game vision and spirit. These ideas may end up as blog posts, or as part of the play guide.

• A ‘spirit of the rules’ project, where we share our vision, talk about the intention behind some rules, and discuss some back-end processes

• We’ll continue developing our ‘consent based rogue roleplay’ culture, (adding, for example to the ‘thievery boards’).

• More guidance for Camp Leaders about how they can help structure play within their camps

• More tools for scheduling events during the festival and knowing what’s going on

2024 is going to be unforgettable! We can't wait to see you there,

-The DrachenFest-US Team