here and all

[demiurgically_m]

wandering around the internet, am trying to find something that will explain to me exactly what happens at Gencon and Origin. I hear bits and pieces, but I can't find anything that gives me a coherent picture.

bit grumpy making

Comments

[kingtheseus]

I've been to three. I was living in Indianapolis from 2005 -2007.

The structure is much like eyonwd suggests. I can add some colour.

The convention has a reasonably think book of session schedules, that sometimes have things every hour. The convention is spread over the main convention hall, plus five different hotels. (This thing is huge.)

There are a lot of professional game designers there, from small to large, and they will GM sessions. The ones of the well known names like White Wolf, are hard to get into, and are also very popular.

The roleplaying happens in large rooms, that can have up to twelve tables, about eight of these are being used at once. I walked out of one game, because I just couldn't hear the game at all. There are few high concept games in offer, they are almost all various forms of dungeon bash (from what I could see). (It's possible that I just didn't know how to find them yet.) Freeforms often have 50 people in them and seem understaffed. I gave up on GenCon for roleplaying after the first year.

The dealer's room is huge, and have a representation of all the major companies. There have huge collections of books. you might actually see the game company owners selling their stuff. I bought comics off Phil Foglio of Girl Genius personally, and also Rich Burlew of Order of the Stick.

I kept going to GenCon not for the roleplaying, but for all the side benefits. There are conferences of well known writers like Tracy Hickman on how to be a better roleplayer. Game Design Companies talk about what they are doing next. A talk from one of the first players of D&D who played with Gary Gygax. Who gave roleplaying advice such as 'name your +1 sword, so it will have more meaning to your character.' Some GM advice panels that are excellent, and some that are not.

There is one hotel floor that is dedicated to showing movies, especially animie. There are about four movies showing at any one time. There are also movies about roleplaying, usally with the name 'Gamers', of which there are about four different movies of the same title.

My favourite part was the Writing Panels, a group of about half a dozen fantasy writers, the most famous of these being Jean Rabe, who would give advice on how to be published, how to design characters, how to write books, how to design magic for your games. These were of fantastic value.

They also have actors - like some of the cast from Battlestar Galactica, Keven Sorbo, the Mythbusters, Richard Hatch and so on. Actors from Stan Lee's reality show 'So you Want to be a Superhero?'

There are signing booths where you can meet these stars and get stuff signed by them.

Rich Burlew gave panels talking about his webcomic Order of the Stick one year, and that was perhaps my favourite expereince within GenCon.

The costumes are often fantastic, and look true to life. Gaming chicks are sometimes walking around not wearing very much. Quite sexually provocative costumes.

There is a Living Dungeon, a real life roleplay of a Dungeon Bash, with monsters to kill and traps to solve.

Hope this is of help. If you have specific questions, I might be able to answer them too.

[kingtheseus]

Oh, one more thing. They tend to schedule things by the hour, not every four hours. The games run for four hours. So you might have one game starting at 12AM, which menas you couldn't make one that starts at 3PM. If you have one that starts at 4PM, you really have to hustle to make it - it could be three hotels away.

Most of the seminars last just one hour.

Also, White Wolf apparently hosts this big party, that if you talk to the right people can be invited to. I wasn't really intersted at the time, feeling much less social then than now, but i would go to it now.