Thoughts on Gen Con

I think I need to re-evalutate my opinion of Gen Con. I used to hate it with a passion because it seemed that they would do some pretty stupid stuff. One year they were so paranoid that there were people who were inside the convention centre, not the hall or a game, that in order to walk around they were checking badges at chokepoints every like 15 metres. I got so annoyed because you had to line up every so often as a security guard who give you a dirty look and then squint at your badge.

Bad customer experience right there.

Then there's the time when everything was somewhere else. I don't know why, but apparently there was a push to expand things into more hotels and so unless you had your own room nothing was where it said it was in the guide. Seriously, nothing. I missed so many games because I was at one place, the HQ was closed and my game was at another place. They needed to make up for it by having longer hours to make up for the fact that if you didn't have the mysterious piece of papers that told you where things were or an HQ open when you went to the Hotel chances are you were in the wrong spot. What was frustrating was that it wasn't as if the rooms they moved you from were being used. I was moved from an empty room once, completely empty.

Bad volunteer experience right there.

This year was different. Surprisingly different. First of all the GM badge getting was phenominally awesome. It was smooth, well organized and quick. Seriously, there was a line up and the line up was continuously moving because they had planned for people being part of groups picking up their badges and moved those to a special line to get them out of the way of us stand alone folk. Serious hats off to them all for that.

As per normal my stuff went off on Thursday and then the rest of the con people were busy playing actual games. That doesn't really bother me that much anymore. It used it, it used to hurt a lot actually because I always wondered why people wouldn't show up. I'm a little older, a little wiser and I get why they don't show up.

That's getting a head though. Wednesday was when I helped out at the Red Dragon Inn. That's right, there was a whole restaurant inside the Mariott that had turned into the Red Dragon Inn. It was pretty sweet and there are lots of pictures of the place. It was lots of fun hanging out there.

Friday there was more helping out at the Smirk and Dagger booth, because I can only get by with a little help from my friends, and much of the same thing on Saturday.

The good news from the con is that I got a project almost accepted. Not that it didn't make it, it's just not finalized so I'm not going to talk about it just yet. I'm excited about it and can't wait to actually get to work on it.

I know I'm not going into as much detail as other people, but you know what it's been a while and I'm pretty boring at Gen Con. I didn't do crazy things but there was a lot of personal stuff that went on and a lot of good times were had but isn't really that what a convention is all about?

CyberGeneration Webcomic

Hey everyone, there's a group of awesome people who have waded through the hazards of the RPG industry and have gotten the rights to do a CyberGeneration Webcomic.

I though I'd help them out with some editing and they've got the first page up and going.

Go check it out now! Now! I command it!

Convention

There are two things that I think need to post here because they need to be widely disseminated.

The first is the Back Up - The Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project and of course, the Gentlemen's Auxiliary. Basically, it can be boiled down into the following pledge:

f your situation looks dangerous enough I can't help on my own, I will call over friends or, if it's a situation in which I think the cops would be on your side, I will call the cops. If you're being harassed by a guy, you can say so to me, even if you don't know me. I pledge I will distract him so you can get away, or I will tell him that he needs to leave, or whatever I can do to the best of my ability. I pledge that yes, actually, because you are a woman I will give you the benefit of the doubt. If you tell me that a guy just did something shitty to you I will not refuse to look at any evidence and tell you that I know him and he's a great guy and you must have been imagining things. I have great loyalty to my male friends but I will not allow that to blind me to the fact that none of us are saints and even my best friends can screw up and may need to be called on it. I pledge that I will walk you to your car if you don't feel safe walking alone at night, and then you can drive me to mine. Yes, even at Wiscon. I pledge that even if I don't know you, if there is a creepy guy following you around, you can say so, and I will not say to you go hide in your room; I will say to him go find another party, or if necessary, go home. I will come with you if you need to talk to the con organizers. I will not make you feel like your right to control over your own body is not a big deal.

The second one is the Con Anti-Harassment Project which I have yet to follow up on but probably will tonight during the wilds of my work. Conventions should be fun for everyone, not just the creep dude getting off on trying to "get with the ladies."

So keep this stuff in mind when you head out for Gen Con soon. I know I'm going to try my best to do what I can for the auxillary!

Voting for the ENnies

Hey there folks.

A friend of mine has something up for an ENnie again, she's particularly awesome. So go vote for it! Even if you haven't checked it out, I have an it's awesome and we all know whatever I say goes, right? Right?

It's called the Rose-Bride's Plight and it's up for Best Adventure.

The URL for voting is here. Go vote for other stuff too, but make sure you give that nod to the Rose-Bride's Plight! Hurry up, voting closes August 1st!

Dex Con

DexCon. What can I say about DexCon other than I love this place. It's where I get to see a lot of people I only get to see twice a year and hang out with them for several hours at a time.

The biggest thing I'm going to talk about here though is the CyberGen LARP that I run. Seriously, it's amazing amounts of fun. I don't know how this managed to get as big as it has over the past little bit but apparently people like it. We had 30 people doing stuff and the most I can remember about what happened was that things happened. I think there was a hospital break out. I think possibly a bus got tipped or something but ultimately it was awesome because the players made it so.

I might go into more detail later about Dex Con and the LARP but I just wanted to get that out there.

DCG - Alpha 3 - Project Updates

The good thing about this Alpha is that we haven't found a whole series of problems that requires me to print up a whole bunch of different cards. This is feeling to be closer and closer to an actual Beta set which means that I might just release it as Beta and then start working on making it better through general public Beta and then release it as a full game in a year or so of Beta testing, or a couple of months of solid beta testing.

That way we can make some extra cards and then start releasing the services that I think will make some money for us and the artists.

Changes made after Dex Con:

1. Combat rules have changed. I didn't like the whole "army" thing and made it like "magic" attacking. Except that instead of the player, you attack cards. Kind of like how they're doing it with planeswalkers.

2. Splitting up the Deck. I think I may go with a two deck format where you have 35 cards in each deck. That number is arbitrary, but it's what I'm going with right now. One deck is Effect Deck (placeholder name) which has nothing but fast effects. One deck is the Resource deck which is filled with everything else. When you want to draw a card you may draw a card from either deck. I may change the number of cards drawn, but right now that's what we've got.

3. Command skill. Changed what it does because there were no longer any teams. Now it allows you to draw look at X cards in the fast effect deck and use them for the combat.

4. Turns. I may have it so that turns are at the same time. More in an Allegiance style because the my turn, your turn didn't work out so well. First player again got way too much of an advantage. The other thing is that this will help with multiplayer games.

Origins

It's been a little behind but this is basically my run down of Origins.

First of all I love Origins. If given the choice between Origins and Gen Con I'll take Origins everytime. The people are friendlier, the gamers are a little bit more fun and you're able to get to see what people are developing because they have those games. Heck, that's what they're tryign to do. They're trying to sit down and come up with really interesting ways to get people to come to Origins.

The other one is the day pass. You can pay 3 bucks and show up and walk around the dealer's room for the whole day. This is great, if I lived in Columbus I would so show up every single day and play games. That's like 12 bucks for a full day of gaming for four days because you can hop from table to table and just play games all weekend. Best idea ever.

What's happening though is that for some reason Origins was a lot smaller this year. I can understand some reasons. The economy sucks, it's still too close to Gen Con in both location and time frame (though the time frame is getting better), no one has anything new to sell at Origins, etc. At the same time, I don't get it because to me Origins is a much better playing experience. I've had a great time at Origins and I have yet to have a great time running at Gen Con.

We still run at Gen Con. You need to be where all the people go, I just think we'd all be better served if more people went to Origins instead.