I have played D&D on and off for over 20 years. Ironically I grew up in Indianapolis when Gen-Con was in Wisconsin. Now I live in New York, Gen Con is in Indy. Until last year I had never been to a Con of significant size. I decided to combine a trip home to visit family with a brief stop at GenCon. I played in the 1st round of the D&D Open, and shopped a little over part of a day and that was it.
This year I was determined to experience the full thing, signing up for numerous events, meeting up with friends, and dedicating the bulk of 3+ days to the convention.
What I write here might be uninteresting to many of you, but I'd like to give my impressions and summary of my time at the Con. I would think it would be very useful for those who have never gone and are interested in going.
Prep:
I waited until June-July to register events, and discovered that many close very early. I still managed to dig around and register for a number of different things, though not always at the time slots I wanted. I recommend to those who are going for the first time to register for events as soon as they go online, especially if you can eat the cost of a ticket if you decide against attending an event later. But as I discovered later, with most larger, organized events (such as the various RPGA events), you can show up with generic tickets and have a very good shot of getting in.
Rather than breaking this down chronologically I'll just describe the different parts of the Con I experienced:
Vendor Exhibition Hall:
This is truly one of the highlights of the Con, especially if you have money to spend. While most RPG merchendise is available on the web, strolling all these booths in person, and casually interacting with the designers, editors, artists and programmers that make all this happen is fantastic. At the Paizo booth I realized I was talking to James Jacobs and got my Dragon 150 signed. Wayne Reynolds was there selling the originals of his best work. The developers for RPGXplorer and Campaign Cartographer were there and willing to give you their time, etc...
I was very impressed with many of the electronic gaming set ups. Games like the Witcher, the NWN2 expansion, the Conan MMORPG and others had their programmers and designers on hand to describe their titles, answer questions and give demos. Dell had a gaming area setup where you could play the yet-to-be-released Crysis on a top-end machine and Blizzard had a dozen fully-playable Starcraft 2 stations.
The overall experience and enjoyableness of the Hall resulted in me dropping quite a bit of $$$, but I came out feeling good about the experience.
Ganeral Gaming:
I played in 2 games before the D&D Open. The first, an introductory Star Wars RPGA adventure (Dawn of Defiance) was a decent introduction to the new Saga edition rules. Also, this was a case where I joined a game I did not have a ticket, even though it was 'full' by using generic tickets. Unfortuantely, the module was tremendously short. Even after the DM intentionally dragged the action out, and with numerous interruptions we finished an hour earlier than the supposed session length.
The second event was the 'Shargon's Rage' Xendrick Expeditions adventure. It was a little overwehlming building a 7th Xendrick character with the extensive requirements list, but me and my 3 gamer friends managed to be ready, playing with two other pickup players. Our DM was quite good, but the gaming experience was totally underwhelming. The adventure was incredibly easy and simple for a group of 7th level PCs, and much of the plot logic made little sense. There was a sequence near the end that lasted near an hour where the party is bombarding enemies and siege engines from the air, where the targets on the ground have essentially no way of fighting back. During the adventure we were all healed once fully and allowed to rest another time, even though we could have easily completed the adventure without such assistance. It was utterly pointless and we came out feeling that Xendrick was not something we wanted to play further.
The 4th edition announcement:
Most of us had plenty of warning what the big '4d' announcement would be, and since it was held in the same place as the D&D Open event we would be playing in a little later, most of us managed to attend. I know this has been discussed endlessly here on the boards but here were our impressions of the announcement:
1) One of the biggest things to stick out was the incredibly awkward and amateur way the annoucement was handled. The presentation itself was as dry as the worst corporate powerpoint I have witnessed, and the speakers seemed nervous and lacked confidence. It really felt like a) they had little faith in what they were presenting and b) they were rushed to prepare for the announcement.
2) The audience reaction was very muted. The few applause lines (electronic versions of your products available to you), were quickly deadened when reality set in (subscription fee required to access any of this). The final applause was mild and mixed with a solid amount of boos.
3) The concensus amongst many I talked to was a) While they wouldn't mind 4e if the changes were along the lines of Star Wars Saga edition, they felt no burning desire for a new edition of the game b) there seemed to be this overwehlming feeling from Wizards that D&D had to be made more like World of Warcraft, which seemed to say that these guys have no idea why people play D&D
4) The demos of the new electronic apps that were to be the core of 4e (the virtual dungeon and character designer) looked primative and underwhelming to an audience used to CRPG gaming.
To summarize, everything felt rushed and incomplete, including the timelines for 4e release. My own personal opinion is that is seemed to me like they were really targeting 4e for 2009 (which would give them time to playtest and actually develop good online properties), and that there was pressure from the business side to release early.
The D&D Open:
For the open, we came in reasonably well prepared, as two of us had played together last year, and myself and 3 friends had played together regularly for several years. We had spent time planning how we would play the horribly designed pregen PCs and we got lucky and picked up two solid players to fill out or group.
Without going into extensive detail, we made it deep into the final battle of the first round without suffering a character death when time expired. We felt we did well but did not have high hopes of making round two. Playing late on Friday, we had to wait until past 12:30 before discovering if we advanced (um, maybe posting the results online would be a good idea?). When the results were posted, we discovered we had not advanced.
The following day we were planning an evening reunion game of our old home campaign when one of our players discovered that the advancement list had been ammendend (sometime around 2-3pm saturday, a bit last minute for a 7pm kickoff). We had made the second round. This was met with much consternation as we had already made plans for the evening but we couldn't see ourselves not playing having advanced. We managed to reunite the group and were ready for round 2.
Round 2 started with a disappointment as our PCs were still 6th level, despite plowing through some insanely high EL encounters in round one. Our PCs were identical in equipment, including disposable items. Round 1 was exclusively a straightforward dungeon crawl, and Round 2 seemingly started the same way, but soon turned into a crushing disappointment. Not obvious at first, we discovered after several rounds that the first encounter was a gimmicky 'guess what the designer was thinking' scenario. The encounter spawned endless swarms of challenging CR 4 or 5 opponents with unusual special abilities, and gave no information as to why they were spawning or how to stop them (or even that they were 'spawning' rather than just arriving from off map, until it was too late). We learned afterwards that the two methods of success were 1) killing an invisible sorceror (of whom we had no way to detect his presence unless he chose to reveal himselfm and who was clearly not powerful enough to spawn endless powerful opponents) or 2) running through the exit, where like a videogame the monsters wouldn't follow you.
We struggled on as well as we could but eventually suffered the inevitible TPK. Several other groups had already wiped. We noticed that one of the groups who had made it further just happened to be DM'd by the designer of the adventure. Hmmm, might it be that the designer had a better idea of what clues to drop to help us move on? Even so, the scenario in no way resembled D&D as I see it. We cared little that we had been wiped out. In fact we saw it as a chance to move on and play our reunion home game as planned, but we were all disappointed at how bad and arbitrary the encounter had been. I have big doubts about playing the Open again after this.
Side gaming:
Maybe the most fun I had in any gaming event was our reunion game. We grabbed a table in the Hyatt and played into the wee hours of Sunday morning. Myself and my 3 friends are all hoping I think to make this an anual event (our old DM moved away, so this is our only chance to play in that campaign again).
In summary:
I had a good experience at GenCon, though I think in the future I need to figure out a better way of determining what will be good events, as I was on average underwhelmed. I may plan on limiting my visits to 2 days in the future unless I see a compelling reason otherwise. It's definitely an experience worth having if you've never been and are any kind of serious gamer, especially if you have some disposable income.
This year I was determined to experience the full thing, signing up for numerous events, meeting up with friends, and dedicating the bulk of 3+ days to the convention.
What I write here might be uninteresting to many of you, but I'd like to give my impressions and summary of my time at the Con. I would think it would be very useful for those who have never gone and are interested in going.
Prep:
I waited until June-July to register events, and discovered that many close very early. I still managed to dig around and register for a number of different things, though not always at the time slots I wanted. I recommend to those who are going for the first time to register for events as soon as they go online, especially if you can eat the cost of a ticket if you decide against attending an event later. But as I discovered later, with most larger, organized events (such as the various RPGA events), you can show up with generic tickets and have a very good shot of getting in.
Rather than breaking this down chronologically I'll just describe the different parts of the Con I experienced:
Vendor Exhibition Hall:
This is truly one of the highlights of the Con, especially if you have money to spend. While most RPG merchendise is available on the web, strolling all these booths in person, and casually interacting with the designers, editors, artists and programmers that make all this happen is fantastic. At the Paizo booth I realized I was talking to James Jacobs and got my Dragon 150 signed. Wayne Reynolds was there selling the originals of his best work. The developers for RPGXplorer and Campaign Cartographer were there and willing to give you their time, etc...
I was very impressed with many of the electronic gaming set ups. Games like the Witcher, the NWN2 expansion, the Conan MMORPG and others had their programmers and designers on hand to describe their titles, answer questions and give demos. Dell had a gaming area setup where you could play the yet-to-be-released Crysis on a top-end machine and Blizzard had a dozen fully-playable Starcraft 2 stations.
The overall experience and enjoyableness of the Hall resulted in me dropping quite a bit of $$$, but I came out feeling good about the experience.
Ganeral Gaming:
I played in 2 games before the D&D Open. The first, an introductory Star Wars RPGA adventure (Dawn of Defiance) was a decent introduction to the new Saga edition rules. Also, this was a case where I joined a game I did not have a ticket, even though it was 'full' by using generic tickets. Unfortuantely, the module was tremendously short. Even after the DM intentionally dragged the action out, and with numerous interruptions we finished an hour earlier than the supposed session length.
The second event was the 'Shargon's Rage' Xendrick Expeditions adventure. It was a little overwehlming building a 7th Xendrick character with the extensive requirements list, but me and my 3 gamer friends managed to be ready, playing with two other pickup players. Our DM was quite good, but the gaming experience was totally underwhelming. The adventure was incredibly easy and simple for a group of 7th level PCs, and much of the plot logic made little sense. There was a sequence near the end that lasted near an hour where the party is bombarding enemies and siege engines from the air, where the targets on the ground have essentially no way of fighting back. During the adventure we were all healed once fully and allowed to rest another time, even though we could have easily completed the adventure without such assistance. It was utterly pointless and we came out feeling that Xendrick was not something we wanted to play further.
The 4th edition announcement:
Most of us had plenty of warning what the big '4d' announcement would be, and since it was held in the same place as the D&D Open event we would be playing in a little later, most of us managed to attend. I know this has been discussed endlessly here on the boards but here were our impressions of the announcement:
1) One of the biggest things to stick out was the incredibly awkward and amateur way the annoucement was handled. The presentation itself was as dry as the worst corporate powerpoint I have witnessed, and the speakers seemed nervous and lacked confidence. It really felt like a) they had little faith in what they were presenting and b) they were rushed to prepare for the announcement.
2) The audience reaction was very muted. The few applause lines (electronic versions of your products available to you), were quickly deadened when reality set in (subscription fee required to access any of this). The final applause was mild and mixed with a solid amount of boos.
3) The concensus amongst many I talked to was a) While they wouldn't mind 4e if the changes were along the lines of Star Wars Saga edition, they felt no burning desire for a new edition of the game b) there seemed to be this overwehlming feeling from Wizards that D&D had to be made more like World of Warcraft, which seemed to say that these guys have no idea why people play D&D
4) The demos of the new electronic apps that were to be the core of 4e (the virtual dungeon and character designer) looked primative and underwhelming to an audience used to CRPG gaming.
To summarize, everything felt rushed and incomplete, including the timelines for 4e release. My own personal opinion is that is seemed to me like they were really targeting 4e for 2009 (which would give them time to playtest and actually develop good online properties), and that there was pressure from the business side to release early.
The D&D Open:
For the open, we came in reasonably well prepared, as two of us had played together last year, and myself and 3 friends had played together regularly for several years. We had spent time planning how we would play the horribly designed pregen PCs and we got lucky and picked up two solid players to fill out or group.
Without going into extensive detail, we made it deep into the final battle of the first round without suffering a character death when time expired. We felt we did well but did not have high hopes of making round two. Playing late on Friday, we had to wait until past 12:30 before discovering if we advanced (um, maybe posting the results online would be a good idea?). When the results were posted, we discovered we had not advanced.
The following day we were planning an evening reunion game of our old home campaign when one of our players discovered that the advancement list had been ammendend (sometime around 2-3pm saturday, a bit last minute for a 7pm kickoff). We had made the second round. This was met with much consternation as we had already made plans for the evening but we couldn't see ourselves not playing having advanced. We managed to reunite the group and were ready for round 2.
Round 2 started with a disappointment as our PCs were still 6th level, despite plowing through some insanely high EL encounters in round one. Our PCs were identical in equipment, including disposable items. Round 1 was exclusively a straightforward dungeon crawl, and Round 2 seemingly started the same way, but soon turned into a crushing disappointment. Not obvious at first, we discovered after several rounds that the first encounter was a gimmicky 'guess what the designer was thinking' scenario. The encounter spawned endless swarms of challenging CR 4 or 5 opponents with unusual special abilities, and gave no information as to why they were spawning or how to stop them (or even that they were 'spawning' rather than just arriving from off map, until it was too late). We learned afterwards that the two methods of success were 1) killing an invisible sorceror (of whom we had no way to detect his presence unless he chose to reveal himselfm and who was clearly not powerful enough to spawn endless powerful opponents) or 2) running through the exit, where like a videogame the monsters wouldn't follow you.
We struggled on as well as we could but eventually suffered the inevitible TPK. Several other groups had already wiped. We noticed that one of the groups who had made it further just happened to be DM'd by the designer of the adventure. Hmmm, might it be that the designer had a better idea of what clues to drop to help us move on? Even so, the scenario in no way resembled D&D as I see it. We cared little that we had been wiped out. In fact we saw it as a chance to move on and play our reunion home game as planned, but we were all disappointed at how bad and arbitrary the encounter had been. I have big doubts about playing the Open again after this.
Side gaming:
Maybe the most fun I had in any gaming event was our reunion game. We grabbed a table in the Hyatt and played into the wee hours of Sunday morning. Myself and my 3 friends are all hoping I think to make this an anual event (our old DM moved away, so this is our only chance to play in that campaign again).
In summary:
I had a good experience at GenCon, though I think in the future I need to figure out a better way of determining what will be good events, as I was on average underwhelmed. I may plan on limiting my visits to 2 days in the future unless I see a compelling reason otherwise. It's definitely an experience worth having if you've never been and are any kind of serious gamer, especially if you have some disposable income.
) was the ONLY team (I think) that actually finished the entire adventure in the time alloted. Some of us got close -- our group (3rd place) was one of (I think) 4 that made it to the final room, but when time ran out we were a few rounds away from finishing -- and that's assuming we could have survived -- and that is by no means something I can say with confidence was going to happen. We were about as tapped out as we could be, had nothing left, and actually finishing that scene successfully would have been a major feat. 
