Gen Con - Day 3

Saturday was one of those days I could not just get up late. 8 am was Revenge of the Iron Lich with @MilwaukeeJoe DMing, and was one of the scheduled games I had that I was not going to miss. I spent the night at my home, rather than the hotel so I could shave off about 40 minutes in travel time in the morning. As normal, 6 am saw me up and taking care of the dogs.

I'd not had any games in the Crowne Plaza yet, so I was a little concerned about finding my room. Union Station and the Crowne Plaza hotel have always confused me for some reason. I was happy to have a few minutes to find where I needed to be, even though I ended up heading right to the room without getting lost.

I was really surprised by the group that showed up for Iron Lich. 2 kids, one with his dad, a player who hadn't played any 4E, a more experienced player, and me.  This could have worked out well, had everyone been ready for a challenge and ready to work together. That's not how it played out though. I had not played that much 4E, and the pregens for Iron Lich were the highest level characters I'd worked with. I had a lot to sort out, and I knew this coming in. I think I might have done well if I had been able to focus on just what I needed to do for the party. I ended up, however, needing to babysit and try to help with coordination. The group just did not gel, and aside from me and Joe, I don't think anyone had a clue what fourthcore was about.

Right from the start, one of the kids got onery and elected to not share his rumor card. He also decided that he was just going to do his own things...usually stuff he thought was funny, and not really be a part of the party. His dad could have set him straight, but chose not to be involved at all. The other youngster was better, but had no clue how to play his character and had an unending stream of questions, most of which were of the "oh...should I use this power" variety. Since I was sitting next to that one, I got to field the questions. Please don't get me wrong, I think playing with younger players can be great, and I fully encourage them. I started as a young player. What I don't like is younger players that aren't there to play, or are there to disrupt. That has no place at a convention where each game is paid for.

I almost got up and left. I know I had that choice. I also know from playing in The Grind 4E Play-by-Post that @MilwaukeeJoe runs that he's a good DM, and knows his stuff. After a few rooms, I decided that we were not going to get very far, and so I might as well try to make the best of things and help where I could. I did my best to lure the obnoxious child back into playing the game with everyone. A combination of excluding him when he was being a jerk, and giving him the attention he craved when he decided to play with everyone else seemed to work to get him in the game. Helping the boy who did want to play, but was completely overwhelmed with the number of things his character could do seemed to really get him back in to the group and he seemed to legitimately appreciate someone taking the time to help him make decisions. The more experienced player helped the new to 4E player, and the dad was left to fend for himself, which he did sometimes, and others he just went off on his own. The end result was getting the party back to some level of functionality and bringing the enjoyment back to the game.

Our DM did what he could to involve everyone and try to solve these problems too, but as DM he had more than enough to do already. Sometimes it's up to you as a player to just sacrifice a bit of your fun and help run the game and manage unruly players. The reward for you is you turn a possible disaster into something that's at least a little enjoyable. Joe did a great job running the game, and I managed to have a good time, even with all the obstacles. We, of course, failed miserably in terms of scoring points and completing the adventure, but there was no getting around that.

After the game, @MilwaukeeJoe was kind enough to invite me to an invite only game later that night with some friends of his. I had nothing planned, so now I had a 9 pm game to go to. 

When Iron Lich was out of time, it was about noon, and so I had a Met RX bar for lunch, and dropped my backpack off in my room. My next event was at 1:00 pm, and since it was TerrorKore, I didn't want to be carrying too much.

Showing up at TerrorKore on time, which is to say early, I went through the signing of the waivers and waited around as the rest of  my group arrived. I have to admit, I was a bit nervous as I didn't really know what to expect from this one. I was fairly tentative, since I had no idea what I was doing, and still felt a little lost after the "training" videos. I don't think that was at all the fault of the game, more just that I was feeling a little overwhelmed. This is one that probably would have been better had I gone with a friend or two. I was issued the job of being the second team demolitions expert. I got the standard pellet gun and a detonator for explosives. The scenario was we were recovering data from a facility where cyborg zombies had run amok and taken control. Team two was the rear guard, which made me more comfortable. Just keep the zombies off our rear..no problem. TerrorKore is billed as a live action FPS. That's an apt description. I have to admit my adrenaline was certainly ramped up, and when we started getting actors (read: targets) coming at us, I got into it. It was fairly chaotic as one might expect, and it was fun, but ultimately not for me..at least not  at the price. I know some will (and do) love it, but I far preferred True Dungeon. Maybe someday TerrorKore will have the same budget as True Dungeon and the immersion level will go up, but I just wasn't feeling like I was there..True Dungeon gave me far more of that.

Once I got out of TerrorKore, I had some time on my hands. I also had a very old collection of M:tG cards that I'd been wanting to sell forever. What better place and time than GenCon in the dealer hall?  I hoofed back to my room, grabbed my collection, and headed in to see what I could do. Of course I wasn't going to be single minded about this..it's the dealer hall. I was also going to be doing recon so I knew where I most wanted to go when I got the chance to spend more time there.

Again..I can't express how huge and overwhelming the dealer hall can be. It's truly enormous, and stuffed to the gills with gaming goodness. You could easily spend all your time there and still miss out on many, many things that the hall has to offer. Walking in there, you pretty much have to stop, look around, and get your bearings before setting off in a direction. I did just that, concentrating on collectible card game vendors. Sure..there were many, many of them. I'm sure I missed a good deal, but really I just wanted to get some cash back. I had a non-sorted collection, and I knew that I couldn't really expect to get anything like maximum value since I had no idea what anything was worth. What took me by surprise was a lot of the vendors, after I patiently waited in line for my turn, looked through my cards and pronounced them "Too old."  Not in bad shape..just so old that they were irrelevant to the current players. Made sense when I thought about it for a second, but man it sucked. I finally did find a place that was happy to buy my cards. They very quickly sorted out the valuable ones, checked the condition thoroughly, and made me what seemed a very fair offer. I wish I remembered who I sold them to. They went so far as to let me know what they were going to sell the valuable cards for so I could see the markup. I had one card that was worth most of my collection. That one card got me $120. They offered me much smaller amounts on some less valuable cards, and then made a bulk offer on the remainder of the collection. $273 in total. I was more than happy with that and felt fairly treated. To be honest, I had expected to feel taken advantage of, but the dealers generally seemed to be very fair and forthright about how they did their business. I left the hall feeling good about my transaction, and having scoped out some booths I wanted to spend more time at.

At this point, it was time to drop my bag off and head over to the Westin for Obsidian Portal's panel. I had something I needed to get to @DreadGazeebo for all his help and encouragement in the past year. He hooked me up with one of those cool Obsidian portal badge ribbons and an action point counter. We agreed to meet for dinner later, and I headed out to wander around a bit. My girlfriend was going to come for dinner too, but got tied up, so she never made it. We ended up at Noodles and Company because downtown was totally jam packed with gamers, but we could get in after a reasonable wait. @Dreadpixee and @micahwedemeyer joined us as well, and it was a very pleasant meal. My dinner companions were headed off to the media party that evening, so I headed back over to the Crowne Plaza for my 9 pm game with @MilwaukeeJoe.

This proved to be a very enjoyable game. It was me and a very nice married couple that had been friends with Joe for a long time. The wife was very much a role player, so Joe ran Crucible of the Gods without the time limit for us. It was a very different experience, and we did manage to complete the adventure...barely. It wasn't like we did it fairly...our DM was very easy on us once or twice to keep this going as a very casual, fun game. It was an entirely different perspective on the adventure as well. One of the hallmarks of the fourthcore games I'd been in (very few) was the time limit. This makes for a high degree of challenge, but does tend to preclude role playing since there just isn't time. Playing the same adventure at a more casual pace was a very cool way to experience it, and my fellow players made this a very enjoyable game. Really, I have to hand it to @MilwaukeeJoe for being such a flexible DM. He can just go with events as they happen, and reacts on the fly really well. Versatility is a great boon for a DM.

We got out at some silly hour like 2 am. I hoofed it the few short blocks back to my room at the Westin, and crashed almost instantly. This had been a very full day.

The Gen Con Event Registration Process: A Few Observations

Today was the big day...event registration day for Gen Con.  At noon eastern time, the floodgates opened and everyone who really wanted to make sure they got their events descended on the registration servers en mass. Apparently there were some 3000 or more wishlists submitted right away, and I have to say that for the sudden load the process went fairly well overall.

This year, the wish list process was fine tuned quite a bit from my understanding.  I participated in the test, and while things looked promising there were certainly a few improvements to be made.  By the time the wish list function and event catalog went live last week, they fixed all of the issues I saw. While they certainly could use some more browsing options on the event catalog to make it more friendly and useful, I was able to find what I wanted in plenty of time and fine tune my wishlist.  The way scheduling occurred, when you submit your wishlist it was put in a queue in the order in which lists hit the registrations server(s).  One can argue about the fairness of this until the cows come home, but honestly someone is always going to feel that they got cheated due to their personal circumstances.  I, for instance, had to work today.  In order to submit my list at the correct time, I had to arrange with my supervisors to reschedule my lunch so I would be sure to get to an area I could access the internet in time to be ready to hit the button at noon (a Panera Bread in my case). I was lucky that I was able to do this. Do I think that this was unfair? No. It's just how things are, and it makes it fair for the widest possible group of people. One point to the Gen Con staff for the submission method...It meets the needs of most people.

Back to discussions of the wish list.  This year, instead of having the True Dungeon and TerrorWerks events scheduled first followed by everything else, everything was submitted at once. They decided this year they had a method and the capacity to handle the load.  True Dungeon is very clearly the most difficult event to get in to. While they are taking more people per run this year (and I believe they added runs) it's still way too popular to accommodate everyone.  This made organizing your wish list important if you wanted to get a True Dungeon event.  To create a wish list, you browse events in the catalog, and add events to the list by requesting tickets.  You can get tickets for yourself, or you and your friends.  You can chose to schedule the event with the most tickets you can get, or only if you can get all the tickets you request.  Also, if an item higher on the list conflicts in any way with a lower priority item, the lower priority item is not scheduled at all if you manage to get tickets for the high priority event.  The list is processed from top to bottom when it gets to the front of the queue.  Knowing all this, my strategy was to put all my True Dungeon events at the top.  I picked three different times I wanted (first choice on top).  Within these 3 time frames, I picked 2 combat, 2 puzzle, and 2 dragon runs because I could do this with them all overlapping. I sub ordered them combat, puzzle, dragon.  Doing it this way, when my list hit it would try to process all the TD items in my favorite time slot first, from most desirable to least desirable format. As soon as I got a ticket in that time, all the others past that would be rejected because of overlap.  It would then process my next favorite time slot the same way, and finally my least favorite time slot.  I figured this was the best way to get into a True Dungeon game.  I also made the first run in the whole show my first choice figuring some people would not even be at the con yet so I would have the least competition for that time.  Past my TD events, I placed a TerrorWerks run on my list, followed by 3 Pathfinder events that were a part of a series. The rest, I just ordered most desired to least, and had no overlap. I figured any time that I didn't get a desired event I could try for something later, or leave open for the exhibitors hall and open gaming.

When I hit my submit button at noon plus a second or three, it looked like it was proceeding, but did not return a place in the queue. I was too patient here. I should have resubmitted almost immediately, but I let my browser chug for 4 minutes instead. When I finally got smart and hit the button again, I was 1500th in line.  That's just how these things go. I was depressed, but what can you do?  The queue then seemed to freeze up at about 1471..PANIC! Thanks to Gen Con's responsiveness on twitter I was soon comfortable that even though my browser wasn't updating, my list was still in the queue. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes of trying to get a status back through the flood of requests to the server I was rewarded with a cart of tickets.  My strategy certainly paid off.  I got one True Dungeon game in every one of the time slots I'd tried for (2 puzzle, 1 combat).  I also got my TerrorWerks and everything else I wanted. The only thing I didn't get was the first game in the Pathfinder series. That was kind of a bummer, and a quick search showed me I wasn't going to get a replacement unless I wanted to play the games out of order. I'll just suffer through missing the first round. It's a small inconvenience for an otherwise flawless registration process. I had a huge hole in my schedule, so I went back later and added another event to partially fill the hole (Tower of Gygax...a classic I hear :) ). Now I have good times to visit the exhibitors hall, and for food, and open gaming. I'm happy with how it's turned out.  I had no issues with paying for my purchases within the two hours that my tickets were held in my cart. I rejected 2 of my True Dungeon tickets, deciding to free them so others would get a chance rather than me taking multiple runs.  Also, they're expensive so this saves me some money.

I really have to applaud the Gen Con staff for the way this went.  Overall it was pretty smooth.  There may or may not have been better ways to architect the solution for this registration, but what they did worked pretty well.  Now I just kick back, and try to wait for the next few months until Gen Con arrives.  I may go stir crazy. :)

Yes, I'm going to Gen Con

It's all done.  While I handled it very poorly, I did get the final item in line to go to GenCon.  I will be there this year, and staying at the Westin. I'm going to take Wednesday thru Sunday off work, so I will probably be hanging out at the RAM with KFG on Wednesday, and stopping in to get my badge and check into my hotel at some point that day.  I've got 10 events in my wish list, and those are going to keep me plenty busy during the day, with time to socialize at night.  Looks like I'm not going to get a lot of time in the dealer's hall if I land tickets for everything, but that's probably for the best financially anyway.  I've got some D&D, Pathfinder, Hollow Earth, and Star Wars Saga lined up, as well as True Dungeon and TerrorWerks.  I guess I'll know if I'm overplanning in about 100 days. I'm really looking forward to meeting a lot of my gaming twitter friends there, and hopefully getting some game time in with you fine folks. While I've plotted this for 2/3 of a year now, it's hard for me to believe I'm actually going to do it.  Childhood dream, here I come....