Off to Gen Con!

Please pardon the interruption as I am off to Gen Con!  Last years trip was awesome, and this year seems even more packed with great fun events that I'm sure you'll hear me gush about when I return!

Now wish me luck on my seemingly endless 16 hour car ride...

Is Gen Con Becoming a Board Game Convention?

 One really has to wonder if the focus of Gen Con is moving from Roleplaying games to Board Games.  Take a look at the Dealer's Hall map.  Wizards has one a single sizable booth, Paizo also has a single (but smaller) booth.  Yet Mayfair games has an entire section of the dealer room floor and Fantasy Flight has an entire neighborhood. 

Then there is the disparity in events.  This year there are almost nine hundred more board game events than RPG events.  Maybe this has been coming for a while.  Take a look at the number for the last few years..


(Year: RPG - Board Game)

2006: 1453 - 1043
2007: 1738 - 1275
2008: 1781 - 1234
2009: 1614 - 1326
2010: 1809 - 1931
2011: 1940 - 2833

Now I'm not saying that board games are bad.  Hell, I like them as much as the next guy, but I've always seen Gen Con as an RPG first convention and it seems like that might be changing. 

I Love You GenCon. Please Stop Hitting Me.

As some of you may know, this year marks the second time our gaming group, The Viking National Guard, will be attending GenCon. In fact, last year was the first time any of us had ever made the trip to attend the convention, and we all had a blast. Labyrinthian has talked about some of the things that we did or saw last year, and if you stick around for long enough, eventually we’ll start telling you about the Lost GenCon Tales. But despite the great times I had last year, there was a darker side to the trip. Something that happened over a month before the actual trip that managed to cast a shadow over the entire ordeal: I never got my badge.

If you've never been to GenCon, the way registration works is that you order your badge sometime before May. You can get a couple bucks off if you do so in January, but I think last year we didn’t actually register for our badges until March. Sometime at the end of April or the very beginning of May you can start buying your tickets for the events you’d like to attend, be they seminars, table-top games, board games, or a number of other offerings. They start sending out badges in June and continue to send them out until mid-July. Last year I happen to know that they sent out the last shipment of badges on July 15th, because when I sent an e-mail to their customer service department on July 19th, that was the response I got. When I still hadn’t received my badge on July 24th, I sent them another e-mail, and was told that I had opted for USPS delivery, and since the USPS doesn’t offer tracking numbers on packages sent through them, there was nothing they could do about tracking the shipment, so they have to assume that everything they sent out was received successfully. They pointed out that since the badges aren’t personalized, any badge they print out will be active, and this prevents people from getting multiple badges sent to them and bringing their friends for free. They went on to say that I could buy a brand new badge for another $80 when I get to the Con, but there was nothing else they could do for me.

Now, I understand that they don’t want people to get into the Con for free. I can respect any decision that’s made for business reasons, but the fact of the matter is that this still doesn't excuse shitty business practices. Because I’m not the first person this happened to this year, and, in fact, it’s something that’s been happening for years. Years. If this was an unavoidable situation, I wouldn’t be angry about it, but it’s not. After finding out about the situation, I figured out a solution in about thirty-six seconds. Because the USPS actually DOES offer tracking number, it just costs $.75 per package. I’m going to say that again in a different way, just so everyone can be sure they read it correctly. The USPS will give you a tracking number for your package if you give them seventy-five cents. I had to pay over 100 times that amount just because GenCon couldn’t pony up three freaking quarters to make sure nobody has this problem!? And you know what? I’m more than willing to accept the cost of my badge going up a buck just to avoid the one in a thousand chance this doesn’t happen to me again, and I’m willing to bet just about everyone else feels the same.

By this point, you’re probably wondering why it took me almost a full year to complain about this. And that’s a valid question, but the truth is that I really did have a blast last year. I got to hang out with some of my close friends for a few days away from the daily grind, I got to meet some cool people, play some cool games, and just had the best vacation of my life. I was pissed going into the Con, but coming out I was more than willing to let the whole thing slide. So what happened between then and now to bring all of my bad feelings back to the surface? GenCon Event Registration 2011. Every year on the same day, thousands of people log onto the GenCon servers at the same to register for events. The way it worked last year was that everyone could manually register for each event individually, and if you could get your tickets into your shopping cart first, those tickets were reserved for you until you checked out. So if someone was running a Ghostbusters d6 game (a game that’s very underrated, but also extremely rare to find someone actually running), the person who got the tickets was the person who managed to get to them first. Kind of like shopping on Black Friday, only instead of 100 units of one item, there are often only six.

This year things worked a little differently. Instead of registering manually, you built up a “Wish List” containing all of the events you’d like to attend. When you set up your list you did so in order of priority, so the first item on your list was the event you most wanted to attend. It seemed like a great system until registration opened at noon this last Sunday. Our group had a meeting on Friday night that lasted almost six hours, figuring out how our Wish List should look, and when it was finally set up in a way that everyone was happy with we nominated The Professor to be the one to process it on Sunday. There was a grayed out box that said “process list” under our Wish List, and all he had to do was press that button at exactly 12 p.m. on Sunday morning. The problem came about when he actually pushed the button, because despite the fact that it was exactly noon when he set our Wish List to processing he was greeted with a message saying our list was 1269th in line. At first I assumed that they were going to go through and process the highest priority on each person’s list one by one before going back to the beginning and doing the same with the second highest item, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, they processed #1’s entire list before moving on to #2, then #3, then #4, and so on, until they got to all of the lists in the queue. I’ve heard that there were over 3000 lists in the queue at one point, but all I know for sure is that of all the events we tried to sign up for, we got almost none of them, and only one that was in our top ten. There was a guy on the GenCon forums who said out of the 50 events he signed up for, he only got into three.

Our group is having an emergency meeting tomorrow afternoon to try and figure out a way to patch up what was looking like an amazing trip, but why is it even necessary? We didn’t get into all of the events we wanted to last year, but at least we were able to get into the ones that we really wanted. I’ve heard people say that this year’s system was less stressful, and I can see how that’s true. Last year was a frantic dash around the site, trying to gobble up tickets to the events that we wanted, and this year we just let the system do the work for us. But I would much rather take the semi-stressful, completely frantic hour from last year over the less stressful, anger inducing experience from this year. As someone on the GenCon forum put it, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

The truth of the matter is that we’re still going to have a great time this year. Because in the end, the fun of GenCon is in the experience and memories, and everything else are just details. But as fun as the event itself is, should I be forced to get this angry and disappointed every year? I guess all I can do is fall back on the old proverb: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times? I’m going to Origins.”

Gen Con 2011 Event List Is Out

Last night Gen Con released the Event list for 2011.  You can download it in the obnoxious .csv file and open in Excel, scrolling through 8171 rows trying to find what you are looking for, but my suggestion is just to use this much better website for browsing events. 

I've got to say I'm a little disappointed with the event list.  There are a couple of games I really wanted to play at the convention that just aren't available.  Aces & Eights is probably the biggest of these.  Last year there was only one game and this year none... Very disappointing.  I really wanted to play Pendragon as well, but that is also totally unavailable.  Hackmaster Basic is finally getting some love this year, so that is good, but there are no Song of Ice and Fire RPG games.  It's good to see more 1st and 2nd editon D&D games being played this year.  The two 1st edition games we played last year were a blast.  We will definitely be signing up for more of those.

Friday Videos: True Dungeon 2011 Trailer

 Gen Con is fast approaching and everyone is excited to see what the people of True Dungeon have cooked up this year.  As always they are giving everyone a sneak peak at the upcoming dungeon in the form of a three and half minute trailer to help get people exited.

2011 Gen Con Hotel Rush

Gen Con Housing opened at Noon and the Professor and made a coordinated effort to book rooms for our groups pilgrimage to Gen Con in August.  To be honest I was more than a little concerned given the reputation of Gen Con's online systems coupled with my group's past experiences, but it all worked out great.  We got our first choice, the Westin Indianapolis, right across the street from the convention center.  This will (hopefully) make our experience even better than last year where we had to drive back and forth from our hotel near the airport and carry our stuff around all day.

If you haven't booked your hotel room yet through the room block do so ASAP, especially if you are looking for one of the closer hotels!

Those of you who have booked your rooms and got what you wanted join me in a collective, "WOOT!"

Mr. Labyrinthian Goes to GenCon - Part 2: Of Gravestones and the Vampire Strahd

I live in New England, Connecticut to be exact.  Let me tell you something about CT... it is far as hell from Indianapolis. Despite already knowing this we all agreed to get into two automobiles and drive there.  Originally we were all going to pile into the Professor's van, but due to mechanical difficulties we were forced to take two alternate vehicles.

The ride seemed like it would be just fine... for the first six hours.  The rest of the drive really sucked.  We left at 6pm Wednesday and didn't arrive until around around nine or ten AM on Thursday.  I don't actually know which as I was in an exhausted stupor while we were checking into our hotel.  One thing I do remember though the haze of exhaustion, the number of gamers we saw on our way in and at our hotel as we were checking in.  I just remember turing to Bear and pointing out how Gamers stick out like a sore thumb.  I mean think about it, 99 times out of 100 you can spot them a mile away.

So we checked in, moved out stuff in, and did our thing.  Revil, the Professor, and Moox all went right away to the convention.  Professor and Moox had entered a HeroClix tournament and Revil had gotten screwed out of his badge by the USPS (A tip we learned on our first GenCon experience, people.  Pay to have your badge FedExed to you because GENCON WILL NOT SEND YOU A NEW BADGE OR REFUND THE MONEY TO YOU IF THE US POSTAL SERVICE LOSES IT.)  and had to go and get a new one.  Only Revil had gotten any sleep on the way there so Moox and Professor were forging on exhausted.  Myself, Bear, and Trip all went to sleep to try and get as much rest as possible before our first event. 

We got up around 2:30 showered and headed over to the convention.  As this was my first trip to GenCon I did a lot of research including looking for parking lots ahead of time.  A lot of people said parking was a nightmare, but it wasn't a problem at all for us.  We parked in the same 24 hour lot every day for $10.  Good price, not a bad walk, and no chance of our car getting stuck overnight.

On our walk to the convention we spotted more gamers, easily recognizable as always, also making their march toward the Convention Center.  As I spotted more and more of them I got a strange feeling, but wasn't able to fully understand it as we arrived and all other thoughts were pushed from my mind.  As I've said I've done a lot of research, seen plenty of pictures, and heard a ton of stories about the world's largest gaming convention, but nothing could have prepared me for walking through that door for the first time.  The scale of the thing was overwhelming.  I felt like Harry F-ing Potter walking down Diagon Alley for the first time, totally immersed in something I'd only heard about and wanting to look everywhere at once.  I wanted to stop and look at all the interesting things people were doing, playing, or had on display.  I was so distracted that I kept falling behind the group.

Everywhere I looked were Gamers which brought back that feeling I'd had earlier and made me think about it.  Now I'm not sure if others feel this way, but often I feel like Gamers are people on an island.  Each local gaming group is like an island of Gaming culture in the sea of non gamers that make up the world.  Gamers are often social outcast and the hobby to which we belong is looked at as, at best, very strange.  But seeing all these Gamers, which in the downtown area far outnumbered everyone else, I realized that for once, this strange thing that I do is normal.  Now if you are new to this site then you don't know that I am a huge closet gamer.  I don't talk about gaming, pretend that I don't do it, and it took ten years of dating my (now) wife to tell her that I game weekly.  I love RPGs, I love D&D, but there is something about the stigma that I haven't wanted any part of since I was 11.  Which is why the convention evoked such an odd response from me.  I just couldn't get over the knowledge that I was surrounded by people who not only knew about gaming, but wouldn't think I was weird for doing it.

Once I got over my wonderment we went and found the Professor and Moox at their Heroclix tourney which was still going on when we got there.  Though Moox had drawn Red Hulk and was doing well The Professor had gotten a really crappy draw (His best figure being Peter Parker) and was doing as poorly as one might expect.  He withdrew from the tournament so we could make it to our True Dungeon 101 seminar and Moox hung around and kept playing.

True Dunegon 101 was my first GenCon event, sort of anticlimactic as it was just a seminar to show people what to expect from True Dungeon. Sadly it might have been the best seminar we went to, but I'll explain that later.

We left a few minutes early to make sure we made it to our Thursday night event, one we had all be waiting for, Ravenloft. No, not some campaign setting or redone module, I'm talking about the original I6 Ravenloft. This and True Dungeon were the two events I was really looking forward to. As I've said earlier I think Ravenloft is probably the best D&D adventure ever written. There are a number of reasons, but I won't go into them now. Instead I'll tell you about the amazing time we had.



Mike, the gentlemen who ran us through Ravenloft at GenCon has a website that we looked through beforehand, and even got to pick characters  We bought all the tickets to the event so for the first time ever, our group would all be on the same side of the screen, something I was excited about.  Immedietly upon arriving at the table I knew we were in for a real treat.  Mike had set everything up including props and items like rubber bats to set the mood.  We literally didn't need to bring a thing as he provided everything including markers for the characters and poker chips for spells.  It was readily apparent that Mike has been perfecting this game for quite some time and he has streamlined everything from the rules to the phyiscal materials (Dice, character sheets, etc) help speed up the game and maximize the fun.  Mission accomplished!

 This was my Gravestone trophy I got when my character died.  Everyone one and they were all different.

We got off to something of a rough start as far as actually playing the adventure since Moox showed up late to the event (his Heroclix had run over).  But once play got underway we had an absolute blast. I don't want to ruin anything for those of you who have not played Ravenloft before so I'll try to keep things as spoiler free as possible.  We started off at an Inn outside of Barovia as per the module.  We were drawn in with the classic hook and were off and running.  The DM was an excellent roleplayer and though we were all using pregenerated characters we really started to get into them.  Things were going really well for us until we reached the castle.  We had made allies with the townsfolk, were on good terms with the gypsies, and my Paladin Sir Richard Dragonblood had defeated one of Strahd's principal lackeys in a duel.  But as I said, we had a reversal of fortunes upon arriving at Strahd's castle.  Both My character and Revil's died during the one truly brutal random encounter in the adventure.  It was all down hill from there.  One by one, room by room our resources were widdled down to nothing until everyone was dead.  We loved every minute of it!  Bear was the last one to go.  He out in the blazes of glory destroying Strahd's organ out of pure spite.

Though the game was scheduled to only last until 1am we ended up playing until 5am, just missing the 12 hour mark.  Mike was a great sport and was willing to see the whole thing through.  The Professor should also be congratulated.  I consider an act of super human gumption and commitment that he stayed up having had no sleep for almost 48 hours.  Moox didn't have what it took and quit about half way though the game and I ended up taking over his character when mine died.

Ravenloft was without a doubt the best game we played at GenCon and probably spoiled us a bit.  Though we didn't defeat Strahd we did get plenty of Ravenloft Gravestones as a conselation prize.  For those of you making the trip out of GenCon next year check the event guide to see if Mike is running his Ravenloft game again.  If he is make it your number one priority to sign up for this game, you probably won't find a better one anywhere at the Con.

From Left to Right: Bear, Revil, The Professor, Trip, and our DM for the night Mike.

Exhausted we returned to our hotel to preapre for the next day... uh, I mean later that day.

Mr. Labyrinthian Goes to GenCon - Part 1: Look for Our Sign to the North

Ever since I was a little kid I've heard tales of Gen Con.  For years I've wanted to go and dreamed what it would be like, only to be disapointed time after time.  But no longer!  That's right, I have returned safley for my group's pilgramige to Indianapolis where I attended Gen Con for the very first time.

Though this was my first and only Con to this point, one of our members (Moox) had been to a few smaller conventions (like GaryCon) before.  As no one in my group has been to Gen Con before we did a great deal of research and preparation.  We found maps, lists, and articles about attending the Con that all proved useful.  We brushed up on the rules for some systems we haden't played in a while, made our hotel reservations, and of course preregistered for out events. 

The event list was nothing short of daunting at first glance.  Thousands of events to choose from made it very difficult figure out what we wanted to do.  We took time out from out weekly game to go over the event list and see what we wanted to do.  Though I know some people believe in mostly playing with strangers during conventions, we mostly wanted to play with one another.  All of us on one side of the screen was a new experience that we were all intersted in taking advange of. 

Here is a quick recap of my schedule for Gencon

Thursday:
True Dungeon 101
I6: Ravenloft (The Original Adventure that started it all!)

Friday:
The Antagonist
Pimp My Game
True Dungeon

Saturday:
Eureka! Cooking Up Adventure Plots with Gnome Stew
Worldbuilding 101
Castle of the Mad Archmage
Shadows Fall on Absalom

We didn't schedule any events for Sunday as we wanted to leave in the early afternoon and make sure we had some time in the dealer's hall for any final purchases.  Again, these are just the events we had scheduled, obviously we did other things.

The final  preparation that we made was to procure team "uniforms" for Gencon.  We went through one of the many online manufactures for the actual shirt creation, but they were designed by our very own Professor Obsecure. 

Needless to say they are amazing, and they were a huge hit at the Con.  People kept coming up to us and asking us where we got the shirts.  Here is a picture of AngryBear and ManOnFunTrip rocking their shirts.  Trip is the one with the horned Kevlar Helmet. 

The story of why we call ourselves 'The Viking National Guard' is something of a long one, which I'm sure I will relate one day.  For now I'll just explain each of us has a different color logo on the front of our shirts, and a different name and number on the back.  The names were those of various norse gods.  Here what the back looked like...

To show you the amazing detail on the logo designed by the Professor here is what mine looked like...

In part 2 I'll discuss our ride there, my initial impressions of the Convention, and our first night of gaming!

Professor Obsecure Saves GenCon

Yesterday event registration opened for GenCon.  This posed a problem as I was quite busy.  Sundays are sports days for me and I leave early in the morning for football, continue right on to softball, basketball, and then ultimate frisbee.  This means that I usually don't get home until about 9pm, well after most of the tickets for great events are all taken up.  Other members of my group were similarly engaged, Revil was with me playing sports, ManOnFunTrip is in the air national guard and had drill this weekend, and AngryBear had to work. 

All this could have spelled disaster but the Professor stepped up and saved GenCon for our group, for which we are all grateful.  Perhaps we are doubly so as this is, for all of us, our first GenCon experience and, for all but one of us, our first gaming convention ever.  In short, this is a very important event for all of us.  We are very excited and didn't want anything to ruin it.  Thankfully nothing did.

Though we didn't get into the Convention's only Aces & Eights game (that's right, as of right now there is only ONE) we did get into some other great events including the two we were most excited about.

The first, probably to no one's surprise, is True Dungeon.  We have heard about it, seen pictures, and videos for years and always dreamed of going, and now that dreams will be coming to fruition in August.  We were fortunate enough to all get into the same dungeon run, despite a number of problems with the checkout system.  The other event we are all very excited about is an original I6 Ravenloft game.  Regulars on this site know how much I love the original Ravenloft, it is probably the greatest adventure of all time.  Though I have run it, I have never gotten a chance to play it.  Now I finally get to do so along with all the other members of my group.  I can't wait.

Aside from those we are playing the Castle of the Mad Archmage, and a Pathfinder game called Shadows Fall on Absalom.  Aside from those we signed up for a few seminars, including the one held by the fellas over at Gnom Stew.  We had been warned from a number of sources not to sign up for too many events so we left plenty of time to walk around and check things out.  Additionally we are still hopeful that there will be come Hackmaster events (that's right, as of right now there are ZERO Hackmaster games) so we are leaving time open in the hopes that there will be some.

I have great hopes for this trip, and my excitement is only likely to build in the coming months.  August can't get here fast enough!