If you’ve spent any time with Dungeons & Toast, you know we have a habit of looking at perfectly ordinary Toastmasters activities and asking an important question:

But what if it were a quest?

Giving a speech earns XP. Taking a meeting role becomes part of your adventuring career. Showing up in costume, completing officer training, or helping the Guild in some other way can all become achievements worth celebrating.

Lately, we’ve been working on some major upgrades to the Dungeons & Toast Guildhall—and they all revolve around one idea:

What if the entire meeting experience felt a little more like playing the game?

Three new systems—the Meeting Herald, Quest Board, and Scribe Ledger—are being built to work together across the life of a Dungeons & Toast meeting.

Before the Meeting: The Meeting Herald Calls for Heroes

Every adventuring party has the same problem eventually:

We have a quest. We have a date. We have snacks. Does anyone want to be the Evaluator?

Filling meeting roles has long required a fair amount of nudging, reminding, Discord posting, and last-minute volunteer wrangling. The Meeting Herald is designed to make that process easier — and hopefully more fun.

As a meeting approaches, the Herald can identify roles that still need volunteers and issue a call to the Guild through Discord. Instead of simply announcing that a role is vacant, those messages will include an Accept This Quest link.

And when the important roles are already covered, there’s no reason to pester everyone unnecessarily. The goal isn’t to send more reminders. It’s to make the reminders we do send useful, timely, and easy to act on.

Between Meetings: Visit the Quest Board

Of course, not every adventure begins with an emergency summons from the Herald.

Sometimes you go looking for trouble.

The new Quest Board is being designed as a central place in the Guildhall where members can see opportunities to participate in Dungeons & Toast.

Looking for your next speaking opportunity? Available speech slots for the month appear as quests waiting to be claimed.

Want to earn extra XP? Featured quests can call attention to opportunities such as paying dues early, participating in a speech contest, completing officer training, or tackling another pre-selected challenge.

Some quests may be available to everyone. Others may have only a few openings. Some will appear only during a particular month or season.

The important part is that instead of opportunities disappearing into Discord history or being mentioned once during announcements, they’ll have a home.

If you’re wondering what your character can do next, check the Quest Board.

After the Meeting: The Scribe Ledger Records the Deeds

Naturally, every good adventuring guild needs someone to write down what happened. (Did anyone take notes last session?)

That’s where the Scribe Ledger comes in.

Dungeons & Toast awards XP and achievements for all sorts of things that make our meetings more fun — not just giving speeches and filling roles. Members might arrive wearing a costume, sporting an on-theme virtual background, or by inviting a guest.

Until now, recording some of those achievements has involved a decidedly unmagical process involving lists, messages, and a fair amount of manual bookkeeping behind the scenes. The Scribe Ledger is being built to turn that bookkeeping into part of the Scribe’s normal post-meeting duties.

The Scribe can pull up the meeting, see the adventurers who attended and the roles they filled, record the relevant accomplishments, and submit the completed ledger.

Less bookkeeping for our officers. Fewer achievements slipping through the cracks. And, most importantly: More XP for adventurers who earned it.

One Adventure, From Beginning to End

Individually, each of these systems solves a fairly mundane club-management problem.

Together, though, they’re designed to be quality-of-life improvements at all different levels of participation.

The Meeting Herald tells you where the Guild needs help.

The Quest Board shows you adventures you can choose for yourself.

The Scribe Ledger records what the party accomplished.

And behind all three is the same philosophy we’ve been experimenting with since Dungeons & Toast began: gamification works best when it isn’t simply a layer of points pasted on top of Toastmasters.

It should make participating more fun.

A vacant meeting role isn’t just an empty box on an agenda. It’s a quest nobody has accepted yet.

A speech slot isn’t something an officer needs to beg someone to fill. It’s an opportunity sitting on the Quest Board.

And when you show up, participate, help the party, and do something worth celebrating, that accomplishment shouldn’t disappear when everyone logs off Zoom.

There is still more work happening around all three systems, and you’ll see pieces of them appearing in the Guildhall as they’re ready.

So keep an eye on the Quest Board.

Listen for the Herald’s call.

And give the Scribe something worth writing down.

The Guildhall is getting an upgrade — and we’re going to need adventurers.