Soon after joining TSR, he was invited to participate in TSR's first "DM Invitational", a contest to choose D&D's best overall dungeon master; other contestants included Len Lakofka and Erol Otus. At Gen Con 1980, it was announced that Mentzer was the winner, and he was awarded a silver cup and a gold dragon chain of office. Mike Carr of TSR had been contemplating starting a TSR-sponsored D&D fan club. Shortly after Mentzer won the DM Invitational, Carr approached him about taking on that task. Mentzer agreed to form some sort of group but, rather than a simple fan club, he was interested in promoting better quality role-playing, especially during scored D&D events at conventions. Mentzer felt that the system as it stood rewarded those players that stayed quiet at the table, in effect punishing good role-players. He came up with a scoring system where the dungeon master and the players all voted on who had been the best role-player at the table. With this in place, Mentzer formed the Role Playing Game Association (RPGA), an organization that would promote quality role-playing and allow fans of role-playing games to meet and play games with each other. Mentzer wrote four RPGA tournament adventures set in his home campaign setting of "Aquaria", which he had been running since 1976; these were published by TSR as the first four of the R-series modules: R1 "To the Aid of Falx", R2 "The Investigation of Hydell", R3 "The Egg of the Phoenix", and R4 "Doc's Island". Mentzer envisioned them as becoming a part of Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk setting, the first part of a new "Aqua-Oeridian" campaign set somewhere on Oerth outside of the Flanaess. (The connection between Aquaria and Greyhawk was never made, but these four modules were later revised by Mentzer and Paul Jaquays and re-published as the "super-module" I12 "Egg of the Phoenix" in 1989.)