Is Origins going downhill?
Jolly_Blackburn
First Post
heirodule said:
Was stange not being in the shadow of one of those mega booths that are usually at Origins.
We've basically had the same size booth for the last 6 years or so at Origins (An 8 table/booth endcap). We may drop down to a six table island next year. I honstely don't think anyone would notice with with all the mega booths at the show being gone.
Sabathius42 said:
Reaper was there; they had a pretty big booth, in fact, in the southern end of the exhibit hall.
My guess is WotC will be back next year. RPGA HQ didn't go last year, either, and they made a late decision to come back this year.
This was my 2nd time at Origins (went last year, too), and I had a great time. But, my experience is likely colored by what I played: primarily RPGA (the Living Death finale) and several non-RPGA Living-style games, run by "The Gathering" (primarily Paradigm Concepts, I believe). Had a lot of fun playing Living Arcanis, Legends of the Shining Jewel, and Fellowship of the White Star. Origins seems to be growing in importance for the non-RPGA campaigns; Living Arcanis ran a Battle Interactive with over 240 players.
I *like* the fact that it's not as big as GenCon, which, to me, has gotten *too* big. I like having a nice hotel room that only runs the four of us $500 for four nights. I like being only a 2-minute walk from my hotel to the RPG area. I only wish it was a 3-hour drive from home, like Indy is, rather than a 6-hour drive.
For the record, I also had a good time at Origins this year. Being a teacher, I'm a big fan of Origins' "Teacher Hall Pass" program, which allows us educators to get in for free. As long as I can continue getting into Origins for free, I'd have to be a sucker to pay to get into GenCon. So count me as another big fan of Origins.
Moon-Lancer
First Post
heirodule said:
I'm sorry that origins presented itself as family friendly. However hot babes in chainmail are almost inseparable to fantasy and rpgs.
If your not worried about you kids seeing a rpg that promotes killing of one another (or monsters) for experience (or advancement), but you are worried about scantly clad ladies, I'm sorry but i must chuckle at the irony of how far American views of violence good/no opinion, sex bad has traveled.
*edit*
I don't represent origins, but i will defend hot babes to the end.
its a con, boobs happen.
Mystaros
First Post
Steel_Wind said:
Unfortunately, Origins was just not in our con budget this year. Gaming Report/Scrye shares a convention budget with several other magazines, so there has to be give and take every year, and this year we had to simply give, as we went the prior two years (though we did not have Gaming Report then). Hopefully next year. This is only the second time I've missed Origins since it moved to Columbus...
In fact, the only consumer show we'll be at this year officially is Gen Con, where we will be doing reports from the floor (hopefully, literally at the booths of those we are interviewing as we go... we shall see what the wireless situation is actually like on the ground). With us it is always either "Gen Con and Origins" or "Gen Con alone." Next year, ideally, it will be both.
Glyfair
Explorer
Sabathius42 said:
Interesting. I have been associated with them in the past (working Wizard World Philly for them for a few years running) and I'm surprised. I expect that all the Wizard Worl's (which they pretty much have to support with Heroclix being such a major line) have drawn much of their resources and some convention had to get the cut.
Crothian said:
Chris Pramas stated on his blog that he didn't attend Origins because it was cheaper to let the Green Ronin east coast staff handle it. Money issues seem to be a big theme overall.
Edit: Robin Laws posted on his blog that he wasn't at Origins because he "couldn't justify it as a business expense."
Set said:
Xen'drik seems open to more variety in gameplay than I've heard other RPGA campaigns, because each faction has their own theme. I recently heard it described as:
Play in Blackwheel Company if you like fighting things.
Play in Covenant of Light if you like talking to things.
Play in Crimson Codex if you like solving puzzles.
Play in Cabal of Shadows if you like interparty conflict.
Last edited:
SoccerRef73
First Post
Greetings...
As the Senior GM for "The Gathering" I have an interesting and probably unique perspective on Origins from 2006 to 2007. I have been attending Origins for some years now, but in 2006, Wizards of the Coast and the RPGA did not attend Origins, so Paradigm Concepts worked with GAMA (particularly Sean Patrick Fannon) to come up with the concept of "The Gathering" and organize all of the RPGA and non-RPGA games under a single umbrella. As the guy in charge of Living Arcanis I also somehow managed to end up in charge of The Gathering as a whole.
In 2006 we ended up sending out around 600 tables total for the show, including a ton of the RPGA's Xen'drik Expeditions (which was brand-new) as well as the ever-reliable Living Greyhawk and our own Living Arcanis. (Origins is the "home show" for Living Arcanis, so we will always be sending out a baseline of 25-30 tables per slot no matter what. This is the main reason we stepped up to organize The Gathering last year, since we already bring a large infrastructure and staff to Origins for the Living Arcanis events regardless of what else is going on.)
Note for those who are not familiar with RPGA terminology: When I say "table" I mean "4-6 players and a GM playing a single scenario that typically lasts about 4 hours." While in RPGA games 6 players is a hard ceiling, some of the non-RPGA campaigns do allow tables with more than 6 players per GM, and 4-player tables happen a lot outside of the big conventions, but I think 6 players and a GM is definitely the norm at Origins because nearly all our events go out full. It's hard to find enough GMs (and enough physical space) to get away with running 4-player tables at Origins, but there are usually enough that you don't have to run 8-player tables.
Our understanding from GAMA after last year was that the 2006 turnout for The Gathering was the highest turnout ever for "organized play" tabletop roleplaying games in the history of Origins by at least 20%. Of course I do not have access to attendance numbers for the convention as a whole so I do not know what percentage of the total attendees played our events (I imagine it is not a huge percentage since Origins seems to have a lot more board games, war games, and miniatures games than it does tabletop RPGs, but the numbers that I heard being thrown around on various message boards for the total 2006 Origins attendance were in the 12-15k range, so we saw probably somewhere between 1/10 and 1/8 of the total attendees at least once).
This year, although WotC did not have a booth in the dealer room, the RPGA was back, so the 2007 edition of The Gathering did not organize any of the Living Greyhawk (apart from the traditional Wednesday regional/metaregional games), Living Kingdoms of Kalamar, or Xen'drik Expeditions. All three of those had posted excellent numbers for us in 2006 (Living Greyhawk in particular being the 800-pound gorilla of organized play). So, I was expecting our total table count to be down, and it was -- but even without the RPGA campaigns, The Gathering still sent out roughly 500 tables this year (about 530 if you include the slot zero tables that ran before the show so that judges could play the events before judging them).
Certainly it was the biggest convention ever for Living Arcanis, including the largest LARP (about 180 players and 25 NPCs) and Battle Interactive we've ever had (over 240 players with 40 GMs ... all playing the same scenario at the same time with the encounters modified on the fly based on the PCs' success or failure).
I would imagine that the RPGA must have sent out at least 250 tables of their own campaigns (10 slots, Thursday-Sunday) because their room was usually pretty crowded when I went by to chat. I know both the RPGA staff and our Gathering staff were busily commandeering tables in our respective hallways to make sure we would not have to turn away players (or seat them in the food court). So, putting The Gathering's non-RPGA numbers together with what I would "guesstimate" for the RPGA numbers I am certain that between the two groups we sent out at least 750 tables over the course of the convention. Even if they only sent out 200 tables for an aggregate of 700, that would still easily top the total number from 2006 by a significant margin. And for all I know, I am under-estimating their actual table count... I was only in the RPGA room a couple of times, but it seemed to me that they could fit at least 40 tables in there so if they sent out 25 per slot that would be 250 for the convention.
Since (as I've already mentioned) 2006 had the highest turnout in the history of Origins, that means (as far as I can tell from my pseudo-insider perspective) 2007 was the "best year ever" for the second year in a row -- at least for organized-play tabletop roleplaying games. Other areas might or might not have been up or down; I almost never get to leave our area because things are so hectic, so I wouldn't know.
Our 500 Gathering tables represent about 3,500 participant slots (remember, 6 players and 1 GM per table). We had a total of roughly 150 staff members (GMs, marshals / campaign staff, and HQ volunteers). Since the most a single player or volunteer can possibly do at The Gathering is 13 games (3/day Wednesday - Saturday and 1 Sunday) that means we probably had at least 1,000 unique participants and more likely around 1,500 - 1,750 (the vast majority of participants do not spend their entire convention strictly with us; I would say playing or GMing 4-7 slots is probably most common because there is so much to do at the show and most people do need to sleep sometime).
Adding in the RPGA (my guess of 250 tables = another 1,750 participant slots, with at least 75-80 GMs / volunteers, etc.) most likely puts the total unique-participant count in the 2,250 - 2,500 range and perhaps even higher if there were a lot of players who were only with us for one or two games. (It's hard for us to know because although we distinguish between "real" tickets and "generic" tickets, we don't even attempt to track or identify unique players, and the same player is likely to play some events with real tickets and other events with generics. The RPGA could figure out a count of unique players since they have membership IDs and do track such things, but for the non-RPGA games, we don't.)
Also, as an event organizer, I can tell you that the GAMA folks are really easy to work with. Their website might leave something to be desired, but the people are great. They go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that our needs are met as much as possible. We had the usual expected headaches that occur at any big show, along with some unexpected issues that cropped up this year (primarily space-related due to the loss of several of the larger rooms in the convention center). Everybody in the GAMA chain of command -- in particular, John Ramsey, Andrew Lockwood, Jodie Panzeri, Trey Reilly, and Anthony Gallela -- went out of their way on multiple occasions to pull a rabbit out of the hat when we needed them.
Speaking only for myself and in the context of The Gathering, I thought Origins was a huge success, and we expect 2008 to be even bigger than 2007.
Talk to you later --
Sean
----
M. Sean Molley (Senior GM, "The Gathering" - Origins 2006, 2007; Campaign Director, Living Arcanis)
sean [at] basementsoftware [dot] com
As the Senior GM for "The Gathering" I have an interesting and probably unique perspective on Origins from 2006 to 2007. I have been attending Origins for some years now, but in 2006, Wizards of the Coast and the RPGA did not attend Origins, so Paradigm Concepts worked with GAMA (particularly Sean Patrick Fannon) to come up with the concept of "The Gathering" and organize all of the RPGA and non-RPGA games under a single umbrella. As the guy in charge of Living Arcanis I also somehow managed to end up in charge of The Gathering as a whole.
In 2006 we ended up sending out around 600 tables total for the show, including a ton of the RPGA's Xen'drik Expeditions (which was brand-new) as well as the ever-reliable Living Greyhawk and our own Living Arcanis. (Origins is the "home show" for Living Arcanis, so we will always be sending out a baseline of 25-30 tables per slot no matter what. This is the main reason we stepped up to organize The Gathering last year, since we already bring a large infrastructure and staff to Origins for the Living Arcanis events regardless of what else is going on.)
Note for those who are not familiar with RPGA terminology: When I say "table" I mean "4-6 players and a GM playing a single scenario that typically lasts about 4 hours." While in RPGA games 6 players is a hard ceiling, some of the non-RPGA campaigns do allow tables with more than 6 players per GM, and 4-player tables happen a lot outside of the big conventions, but I think 6 players and a GM is definitely the norm at Origins because nearly all our events go out full. It's hard to find enough GMs (and enough physical space) to get away with running 4-player tables at Origins, but there are usually enough that you don't have to run 8-player tables.
Our understanding from GAMA after last year was that the 2006 turnout for The Gathering was the highest turnout ever for "organized play" tabletop roleplaying games in the history of Origins by at least 20%. Of course I do not have access to attendance numbers for the convention as a whole so I do not know what percentage of the total attendees played our events (I imagine it is not a huge percentage since Origins seems to have a lot more board games, war games, and miniatures games than it does tabletop RPGs, but the numbers that I heard being thrown around on various message boards for the total 2006 Origins attendance were in the 12-15k range, so we saw probably somewhere between 1/10 and 1/8 of the total attendees at least once).
This year, although WotC did not have a booth in the dealer room, the RPGA was back, so the 2007 edition of The Gathering did not organize any of the Living Greyhawk (apart from the traditional Wednesday regional/metaregional games), Living Kingdoms of Kalamar, or Xen'drik Expeditions. All three of those had posted excellent numbers for us in 2006 (Living Greyhawk in particular being the 800-pound gorilla of organized play). So, I was expecting our total table count to be down, and it was -- but even without the RPGA campaigns, The Gathering still sent out roughly 500 tables this year (about 530 if you include the slot zero tables that ran before the show so that judges could play the events before judging them).
Certainly it was the biggest convention ever for Living Arcanis, including the largest LARP (about 180 players and 25 NPCs) and Battle Interactive we've ever had (over 240 players with 40 GMs ... all playing the same scenario at the same time with the encounters modified on the fly based on the PCs' success or failure).
I would imagine that the RPGA must have sent out at least 250 tables of their own campaigns (10 slots, Thursday-Sunday) because their room was usually pretty crowded when I went by to chat. I know both the RPGA staff and our Gathering staff were busily commandeering tables in our respective hallways to make sure we would not have to turn away players (or seat them in the food court).
So, putting The Gathering's non-RPGA numbers together with what I would "guesstimate" for the RPGA numbers I am certain that between the two groups we sent out at least 750 tables over the course of the convention. Even if they only sent out 200 tables for an aggregate of 700, that would still easily top the total number from 2006 by a significant margin. And for all I know, I am under-estimating their actual table count... I was only in the RPGA room a couple of times, but it seemed to me that they could fit at least 40 tables in there so if they sent out 25 per slot that would be 250 for the convention. Since (as I've already mentioned) 2006 had the highest turnout in the history of Origins, that means (as far as I can tell from my pseudo-insider perspective) 2007 was the "best year ever" for the second year in a row -- at least for organized-play tabletop roleplaying games. Other areas might or might not have been up or down; I almost never get to leave our area because things are so hectic, so I wouldn't know.
Our 500 Gathering tables represent about 3,500 participant slots (remember, 6 players and 1 GM per table). We had a total of roughly 150 staff members (GMs, marshals / campaign staff, and HQ volunteers). Since the most a single player or volunteer can possibly do at The Gathering is 13 games (3/day Wednesday - Saturday and 1 Sunday) that means we probably had at least 1,000 unique participants and more likely around 1,500 - 1,750 (the vast majority of participants do not spend their entire convention strictly with us; I would say playing or GMing 4-7 slots is probably most common because there is so much to do at the show and most people do need to sleep sometime).
Adding in the RPGA (my guess of 250 tables = another 1,750 participant slots, with at least 75-80 GMs / volunteers, etc.) most likely puts the total unique-participant count in the 2,250 - 2,500 range and perhaps even higher if there were a lot of players who were only with us for one or two games. (It's hard for us to know because although we distinguish between "real" tickets and "generic" tickets, we don't even attempt to track or identify unique players, and the same player is likely to play some events with real tickets and other events with generics. The RPGA could figure out a count of unique players since they have membership IDs and do track such things, but for the non-RPGA games, we don't.)
Also, as an event organizer, I can tell you that the GAMA folks are really easy to work with. Their website might leave something to be desired, but the people are great. They go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that our needs are met as much as possible. We had the usual expected headaches that occur at any big show, along with some unexpected issues that cropped up this year (primarily space-related due to the loss of several of the larger rooms in the convention center). Everybody in the GAMA chain of command -- in particular, John Ramsey, Andrew Lockwood, Jodie Panzeri, Trey Reilly, and Anthony Gallela -- went out of their way on multiple occasions to pull a rabbit out of the hat when we needed them.
Speaking only for myself and in the context of The Gathering, I thought Origins was a huge success, and we expect 2008 to be even bigger than 2007.
Talk to you later --
Sean
----
M. Sean Molley (Senior GM, "The Gathering" - Origins 2006, 2007; Campaign Director, Living Arcanis)
sean [at] basementsoftware [dot] com
