Quote from: Zachary The First;781139They might be getting close capacity for the main part of the ICC (although I still saw many unused areas), but all of that part downtown is interconnected via the tubes. I'm guessing if they moved a few events a bit further away, it would open up room.

The city loves Gen Con—it's a serious money-maker, and I think that's apparent by the way local businesses have really embraced it and tried to cater to it.

EDIT: The 500 is huge, but it's also on the west side of town, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has a lot of campers and single-day attendees.


To give an idea of just how massive the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is, by the way, here's just some of the stuff you could fit inside:

And it goes without saying, the 500's infield crowd makes the Gen Con crowd look like a bunch of tame church mice.  There's a reason why the 500's infield (as well as the Kentucky Derby's infield) is known as a place of drunken debauchery.

I think this has run it's course, so I'm going to now hijack with some of my GenCon experiences:

I played in that Battle of Hoth mini's game Zack was drooling over.
I was Imperial 1, with an AT-AT, and my wife was Imperial 6, with an AT-ST and, eventually, Darth Vader. I was really hamming it up with the taunting of the rebels (Bill Cosby BuckBuck impression. "We hit your AT-AT for 90 points!" "What's that? A piece of paper? Someone threw a piece of paper at me!") , and they focused on me. I went down first. My wife was head-hunting rebel forces and killed Leia, Han, and Luke with her e-web gun crews. Chewie opened the door to the base and sent some rebel troops out, but didn't close the door. The door right next to Vader ... My wife killed off the troops with her heavy weapon squads, rushed two stormtroopers through the door, and followed with Vader. It was a very cool moment. Then 800 rebels inside fired at Vader and killed him. But, she did prevent a rebel transport from taking off, which eventually was the deciding factor in which side won the game. Note the square grid in the pictures. The AT-AT's moved 4 squares a turn and could only move forward. It was a LONG slog. At four hours the game lasted about an hour too long.

I came away with a very favorable impression of 13th Age.
It was a lot of fun and was everything the D&D game should have been. It was an intro game and did a great job of teaching the system and the world, without being generic or lame or mechanics focused. The DM was a little ... academic? but he still did a decent job. I was an Emo Necromancer who carried around the bones of his neonatal dead twin sister "Little Girl." I was the biological son of the Dwarf King and The Emperor, who I had negative feelings toward, but I was raised by the Lich King, who I had conflicted feelings towards. I spent most of my days up at the Elf Queens's at the Sylvan Learning Academy, and spent summers with The Crusader. I learned courtly manners from The Diabolist at my dads dinner parts in Necropolis. My One Unique Thing was that I was a time traveling spaceman, and thus the only true necromancer in the world. Fuck if I know man; it was the DM's job to work it in. After 30 minutes or so of play I settled on a teenage emo thing. If I ranted and raved maniacally (think evil necromancer monologue) I had a chance to get my dailies back. I turned that in to raving at my 'dad', the Lich King, and how he didn't control me, blah blah blah. Teenage angsty rebellion. I really enjoyed the game world and I really enjoyed the system. The adventure (a halloween special) was decent, if a bit railroady. But it's a con game and so that's more ok than usual. It's not something I would run, probably, but I wouldn't mind playing it. I was really inspired by the game world though, and the icons. Nice environment to adventure in.

The official D&D EPIC sucked shit.
Saturday night my wife and I played in the D&D Battle Interactive. It was the second worst game at the con for me and I was very disappointed. My wife enjoyed it more, but still stayed up in bed several nights trying to figure out how to 'fix' D&D. We both really love D&D and are sad to see it mismanaged. The problem is Baldman Games, the group that runs the games at the cons. They suck. They don't get the adventures to the DM's on time so the DM's are unprepared. Plus, the DM crew is not the greatest. They need to fill tables so the standards for a DM are pretty low, then they work them to death. Our guy was on hours 12-16 or running that day. Notably, if you pay a shit ton of money, you are guaranteed a good DM. But not if you pay $12 for the 3 hour BI. Note that that ticket cost if roughly FOUR TIMES GREATER than a normal game would be. We got assigned a table and DM very quickly. Good job Baldman! We then sat there and sat there, not knowing what to do. The DM was reading and resisting questions. He then wanted to start the game. But we didn't have characters. Then we needed factions. WTF are factions? Then he says "Ok, you can go look for missing trade goods, or talk to some fey, or kill some kultists. What do you want to do?" That's the fucking intro for the game. And the entire game was like that. "Ok, some wolves attack. They are corrupted." or "Ok, you get attacked some by some owls and eagles. Roll for init." No fucking life at all. No flavor. No excitement. No D&D. "The dragon makes some attacks but they are all disrupted by the elf ghost." That was supposed to be one of the big climactic portions. The quality level of these games is below "Piss Poor." Late adventures, overworked DM's, bad DM's, DM's in a tactical mini's mindset. Fucking. Lame. We finished WAY early, because I played to win. Some wandering DM kept dropping by our table to have the dragon attack. While we were sitting there shooting the shit. No one gave a shit what she was saying. We just sat there, a look of apathy on all our faces. Kill me. Who cares. She wasn't in to it at all.

DCC Kicks Ass
I took my son over to 'Escape from Catastrophe Island', the after-hours event being run the DCC gang in the bar of the Embassy Suites, on Thursday night. It was crazy badass fun. The 30 or 35 players were all split up in different but adjacent tables and were all on the island simultaneously. An event at one table could trigger an event at another, or all, of the tables. We started with a 0-level and some kind of goofy random item. The night before there had been flaming eels in the water and some other funky stuff. We met giant floating moai, a stone kobold, insect swarms, erupting volcanos, typhoons, lava people ... my face got eaten off in the first encounter by the stone kobold after I smashed his spirit token to pieces with a hammer. After dying I turned in to a ghost and was able to continue the adventure! My son saved himself by playing his card, a herd of angry hippos, when the statue came after him. It got carried-away, cartoon-style, in the stampede. Doug Kovacs was my DM. You will find no better group of people than the DCC crew and their bizarre, metal, gonzo games. D&D the way it should be.

Saturday afternoon my son and I went to play in the official DCC funnel run by Harley Stroh. Again .... top tier con experience. I play pretty aggressively. That's not a good match sometimes.  The format is like the old Tower of Gygax: you pay a generic, sit down, and then when you die someone else takes your seat and you can get in line again.  The first time I died I was sledding down a slushy incline to get aware from some evil dwarves and lost control and knocked a fellow party member off the cliffside with me. I mean to use my spear to jab it in to the ground to keep myself from falling, but in my excitement I forgot all about that. Oops.  The second time I crowbar'd a portcullis up and then ran up to a dwarf screaming DIE DIE DIE while stabbing him in the face with a dagger. I missed. He slammed me in to the wall. Did I mention I only had 1 HP? I should have taken that in to account beforehand. Oops. My son was standing in line with me, on his phone, while some guys were discussing one of the puzzle rooms they were in that had just killed them. My son ended up in the same room but, because he wasn't paying attention, had no idea about the solution.  My wife had played the funnel the day before with one of her old girlfriends was declared The Best Thief Ever by Harley. Nice!

Shadows of Esteren is really expensive
Yeah, as Zack pointed out the books are gorgeous. But the adventure, which I was going to pick up to review, was something like $35 or $50 for around 40 pages. I try not to be cost-conscious or "get my lawn" old-man-a-tude, but the cost per page was REALLY high. I ended up not buying it. I waffled a lot on Mirkwood but then decided in the end to not grab it.

That T-shirt booth Zack showed ...
Is actually Chimera Games. They do the "Buy 1 get 3 free" RPG book thing and also have a MASSIVE collection of dead CCG's. I picked up a complete set of that pog-game Doomtown Range Wars for $15 to mess around with. Something like 16 boxes (8 factions and 1 expansion for each faction.)


There is A LOT to do at GenCon. My wife volunteered in the SPA open-crafting room. I kept her company making a necklace of skulls to track my kills. That one small non-RPG area is MASSIVE, both with open crafting and with other craft events. There is an absurd number of boardgaming, card gaming, CCG and RPG events at GenCon. Where else will you find a room with 6 full tables of people playing 13th Age, for 12 hours every day for three-four days? The Pathfinder room was MASSIVE and ALWAYS full.

The 2014 program guide is available online.


And to you people complaining about the kids & cosplayers: heh. Old guy is old.

Well written.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;781293And to you people complaining about the kids & cosplayers: heh. Old guy is old.

I loved the kids and cosplayers. It shows their passion.

And the Training Grounds were packed. Means the future of the hobby is there before us, as long as we don't fuck it up.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;781293The official D&D EPIC sucked shit.
Saturday night my wife and I played in the D&D Battle Interactive. It was the second worst game at the con for me and I was very disappointed. My wife enjoyed it more, but still stayed up in bed several nights trying to figure out how to 'fix' D&D. We both really love D&D and are sad to see it mismanaged. The problem is Baldman Games, the group that runs the games at the cons. They suck. They don't get the adventures to the DM's on time so the DM's are unprepared. Plus, the DM crew is not the greatest. They need to fill tables so the standards for a DM are pretty low, then they work them to death. Our guy was on hours 12-16 or running that day. Notably, if you pay a shit ton of money, you are guaranteed a good DM. But not if you pay $12 for the 3 hour BI. Note that that ticket cost if roughly FOUR TIMES GREATER than a normal game would be. We got assigned a table and DM very quickly. Good job Baldman! We then sat there and sat there, not knowing what to do. The DM was reading and resisting questions. He then wanted to start the game. But we didn't have characters. Then we needed factions. WTF are factions? Then he says "Ok, you can go look for missing trade goods, or talk to some fey, or kill some kultists. What do you want to do?" That's the fucking intro for the game. And the entire game was like that. "Ok, some wolves attack. They are corrupted." or "Ok, you get attacked some by some owls and eagles. Roll for init." No fucking life at all. No flavor. No excitement. No D&D. "The dragon makes some attacks but they are all disrupted by the elf ghost." That was supposed to be one of the big climactic portions. The quality level of these games is below "Piss Poor." Late adventures, overworked DM's, bad DM's, DM's in a tactical mini's mindset. Fucking. Lame. We finished WAY early, because I played to win. Some wandering DM kept dropping by our table to have the dragon attack. While we were sitting there shooting the shit. No one gave a shit what she was saying. We just sat there, a look of apathy on all our faces. Kill me. Who cares. She wasn't in to it at all.

GMing that badly like that would take actual effort for me. Was the GM sedated?, half asleep?

Quote from: bryce0lynch;781293The official D&D EPIC sucked shit.
Saturday night my wife and I played in the D&D Battle Interactive. It was the second worst game at the con for me and I was very disappointed. My wife enjoyed it more, but still stayed up in bed several nights trying to figure out how to 'fix' D&D. We both really love D&D and are sad to see it mismanaged. The problem is Baldman Games, the group that runs the games at the cons. They suck. They don't get the adventures to the DM's on time so the DM's are unprepared. Plus, the DM crew is not the greatest. They need to fill tables so the standards for a DM are pretty low, then they work them to death. Our guy was on hours 12-16 or running that day. Notably, if you pay a shit ton of money, you are guaranteed a good DM. But not if you pay $12 for the 3 hour BI. Note that that ticket cost if roughly FOUR TIMES GREATER than a normal game would be. We got assigned a table and DM very quickly. Good job Baldman! We then sat there and sat there, not knowing what to do. The DM was reading and resisting questions. He then wanted to start the game. But we didn't have characters. Then we needed factions. WTF are factions? Then he says "Ok, you can go look for missing trade goods, or talk to some fey, or kill some kultists. What do you want to do?" That's the fucking intro for the game. And the entire game was like that. "Ok, some wolves attack. They are corrupted." or "Ok, you get attacked some by some owls and eagles. Roll for init." No fucking life at all. No flavor. No excitement. No D&D. "The dragon makes some attacks but they are all disrupted by the elf ghost." That was supposed to be one of the big climactic portions. The quality level of these games is below "Piss Poor." Late adventures, overworked DM's, bad DM's, DM's in a tactical mini's mindset. Fucking. Lame. We finished WAY early, because I played to win. Some wandering DM kept dropping by our table to have the dragon attack. While we were sitting there shooting the shit. No one gave a shit what she was saying. We just sat there, a look of apathy on all our faces. Kill me. Who cares. She wasn't in to it at all.

This is why I have NEVER paid to play an rpg and never will.  I have played in con games at sci-fi gatherings and had a great time and it didn't cost one penny beyond the price of the con badge.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;781474This is why I have NEVER paid to play an rpg and never will.  I have played in con games at sci-fi gatherings and had a great time and it didn't cost one penny beyond the price of the con badge.

Well, that works fine if you can manage it, but it's pretty similar to saying "This is why I have NEVER paid to buy a sandwich and never will.  I've had free sandwiches at picnics and had a great time and it didn't cost one penny beyond the price of the bowl of macaroni salad I brought."  You can make your own sandwich, and be sure it's pretty good, out of your own materials, or you can let your friend make you a sandwich while you've visiting.  But it's sometimes fun to go out to eat with a whole bunch of people at an event, or to try a type of sandwich you don't want to buy the ingredients for.

I've paid for a number of games to play both at national conventions and at local gaming conventions here in Denver, and it's usually a lot of fun. (Or, I can offer to run a bunch of games and get free game tickets in exchange, which is what I used to do before my daughter was born.)  But yeah, sometimes you get a dud.

Quote from: Zachary The First;781139EDIT: The 500 is huge, but it's also on the west side of town, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has a lot of campers and single-day attendees.


To give an idea of just how massive the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is, by the way, here's just some of the stuff you could fit inside:

Fair enough I thought it would be more like the Grand Prix.
When that comes to town (Singapore and the pit lane is opposite this room I am typing from though of course they surround the whole place in a temporary stadium so you can't see without paying ) the whole thing lasts for 3 days 2 days of time trial stuff to determine starting grid. There are pop concerts every night etc etc . Anyway it attracts tens of thousands and the hotels fill to the brim.
Would have thought the 500 was an even bigger deal after all there are dozens of grand prixs but only 1 Indy 500.

Over 16,000 views at this point! Gen Con likes us to send examples of coverage of the event (believe it or not, some "press" don't do much covering at all). I'll definitely be sending this to them, along with a couple of interviews/reviews that came out of the convention period, too. Thanks again, everyone!

Quote from: Zachary The First;782464Over 16,000 views at this point! Gen Con likes us to send examples of coverage of the event (believe it or not, some "press" don't do much covering at all). I'll definitely be sending this to them, along with a couple of interviews/reviews that came out of the convention period, too. Thanks again, everyone!

I have to agree about the occasional (lack of) coverage at Gen Con. It's as if the "geek quota" was filled up by SDCC, and news outlets have to recharge for a month or two.

Hey, maybe they'll get you a press pass.

Quote from: Zachary The First;782464Over 16,000 views at this point! Gen Con likes us to send examples of coverage of the event (believe it or not, some "press" don't do much covering at all). I'll definitely be sending this to them, along with a couple of interviews/reviews that came out of the convention period, too. Thanks again, everyone!

Thanks for dropping back at the C7 stand, Zach.  I know it's a hellishly busy time for you trying to get round everything.  Good to meet you.

Thank you again Zack. Wonderful work.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;781474This is why I have NEVER paid to play an rpg and never will.  I have played in con games at sci-fi gatherings and had a great time and it didn't cost one penny beyond the price of the con badge.

If you paid for the con badge, your per game fee was already weaved into the cost so you already have paid to play an RPG. I've been on boards to decide con prices and we calculate table usage per hour as part of the total con ticket cost.

The pay-per-game model is much less common today, especially regionally. Back in the 80s, it was remarkably standard, but hey even Disneyland used to have a per ride ticket model. (AKA, the E-Ticket Ride)

I'm not a fan at all of that model because its nickel and diming the audience. I would rather GenCon just add $30 to their 4 day ticket price and be done with it. Of course knowing GenCon, they would just raise the price and give you nothing in exchange.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;782479I have to agree about the occasional (lack of) coverage at Gen Con. It's as if the "geek quota" was filled up by SDCC, and news outlets have to recharge for a month or two.

Hey, maybe they'll get you a press pass.

I usually attend on a press pass, although I feel a bit silly using the term. The one big bonus it adds for me is a bit of ease in breaking the ice sometimes, and getting into the hall an hour early Thursday to get photos before everything goes nuts.

Quote from: Hodgson;782513Thanks for dropping back at the C7 stand, Zach.  I know it's a hellishly busy time for you trying to get round everything.  Good to meet you.

No, thank you! I know you were quite busy--I appreciate the grand tour I received!

Thank you (belatedly) for your coverage of GenCon 2014!  I have been traveling, and I very much enjoyed reading this thread.  I joined theRPGSite to thank you.

Quote from: CharlesDM;785691Thank you (belatedly) for your coverage of GenCon 2014!  I have been traveling, and I very much enjoyed reading this thread.  I joined theRPGSite to thank you.

Welcome aboard, Charles!

Quote from: CharlesDM;785691Thank you (belatedly) for your coverage of GenCon 2014!  I have been traveling, and I very much enjoyed reading this thread.  I joined theRPGSite to thank you.

I want to extend my gratitude too.

I've been lurking around here since 2006 at least, and may have even been coming for a few years before that (my memory is a little hazy on that), but have only just started posting here.

I always look forward to Zack's coverage of Gen Con and it was those threads that led, over the years, to me becoming a regular lurker round these parts. In fact, Zack's coverage is my primary source of info on the Con these days.