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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eridanis" data-source="post: 4430807" data-attributes="member: 275">My GenCon experience this year was colored enhanced by the fact that I didn’t know I was going until a week beforehand. A change of employer this spring meant I had no vacation days available to use, so I was resigned to not going for the first time since 1999. But when I found out my brother had just happened to take Friday and Monday off, and my daughter was set to spend part of the weekend with my parents, and I started thinking that maybe I could leave work mid-afternoon Friday, drive the 12 hours to Indy, spend Saturday there, and come back Sunday. A few hours of planning and one thumb’s-up from the missus, and I was ready to roll!The drive out Friday night was fun. I love to drive, and it was good to spend some one-on-one time with my brother. Unfortunately, the car he rented did not have an Aux jack, so instead of listening to an iPod full of Gamers with Jobs podcasts, we enjoyed picking up eight different baseball games on AM radio as we sped through the night in Pennsylvania and Ohio. We got in at 2:30am, sacked out for a few hours, and got down to the convention center around 8:15am to get our badges… only to find not a trace of a long line. We were in and out in five minutes. I think most people didn’t know that the registration opened at 7am, not 9am, so we were the lucky beneficiaries. Thank you, GenCon, for making it easy!What to do with nearly two hours to kill before the dealer room opened? Well, we walked back to our car to drop off the book I didn’t need for a long line wait, and then we walked over to the new football stadium, Lucas Oil Stadium, that was having its opening ceremony that morning. A sea of blue and white, the Colts’ team colors, spilled down the steps from the camera-packed podium. I’m happy for the city of Indianapolis, but the exterior of the stadium didn’t strike me as very interesting. It led me to think about the place of public architecture in American life in the early 21st century, and how we don’t seem to make Great Buildings any more; you’d not see an impressive building like the Empire State Building any more, but you still see expressions of greatness in our public coliseums, like Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, PNC Park, and the like. I tend to think of these places as exciting-looking, someplace that you know interesting things happen. I recall, as a boy, driving through Indianapolis on my way home from visiting my grandparents in St. Louis. I could see the RCA Dome on the Indy skyline, and say to myself, “Cool! Football games take place there!” The new stadium does not cry out as a place where interesting things happen; it mumbles something about being a converted warehouse, nothing special, and it’s just trying to blend in. Very sad for a brand new building that cost hundreds of millions of dollars! I’m sure it will be beautiful inside, with its retractable roof and side windows, but I was severely underwhelmed. Perhaps it will age well. We’ll certainly enjoy the extra space given by the demolished Dome if GenCon stays in Indy after 2010!After mulling around, we headed back to the Con. After waiting on line to enter the dealer hall, and listening to the speech about “don’t run to the WotC booth or we’ll take away your badge,” I was disappointed to see many people running into the hall. I wish security has stood by their threat. I suggest that they have a tripwire installed for next time, so those not following directions will find themselves flat on their fac. Gamers don’t tend to have ranks in Find Traps. Hee hee.We wandered the hall for two hours, and decamped to Steak n Shake for lunch (just in the nick of time; after sat down, the line to get in quickly grew). After lunch was Rel’s Sky Galleons of Mars game. Don’t let anyone fool you; Rel is an excellent game master and a very creative man. We had a lot of fun searching for the survivors of the RMS Titanic, lost in the polar region of Mars. I got to meet Pielorinho in person for the very first time, and saw that he’s a great gamer as well as a great guy. I was very happy to game with Kid Charlemagne again, as we’d played together in Wulf Ratbane’s Lazy Days D&D 3.5 campaign when I lived in Chicagoland. Piratecat is always a wonderful player, choosing a distinctive character voice to set the mood. Hypersmurf was in fine form, and knowing that he may not make it back to these shores again for a few years was a deciding factor in my going to this year’s GenCon. His battle cries filled the third floor of the Hyatt, and there was no denying the Gamers Were In The House. And it was good to game with my brother for the first time in years. Lots of fun all around.The break before out next game was largely spent waiting on line at the Hyatt McDonalds. The Subway there was closed (“back in a hour – we ran out of bread.” !!!!!), so we had to make do with Big Macs and Chicken Nuggets. Meh.The evening game was Piratecat running a Mutants and Masterminds game he’d outlined on the plane flight to Indy. As one would expect, it was fun, interesting, and full of action, comedy and drama. We spent the evening trying to figure out if the dastardly Professor Peril has truly had a change of heart, and was trying to become a Good Guy (Doctor Benjamin Factor – a.k.a. Benny Factor) or if it was just a Twisted Plot. Never having played MnM before, I had no fear, as PC is the undisputed master of making game rules transparent and letting everyone concentrate on having fun in the game. I got to meet Quartermoon, who is delightful and a great gamer. Coyote6 did a great job as Valiant, and Wizardru was a pleasure to meet and game with. I had met keryn (aka Sandie Law) before but had never had a chance to spend any time with her; for someone who was obviously tired and had to keep track of her young son (who could not have been better behaved), she more than held her own in the game, and was a lot of fun. My brother did a fine job as my character’s sidekick, with silly voice and all, and even got to be the McGuffin that drove the end of the plot. Hypersmurf stole the show though, and stunned Piratecat to silence with his plot-changing speech to the bad guy at the end of the game. Not something I’ve ever seen before, or expect to see again any time soon!After that game wrapped up at 12:30am, it was back to our hotel room to page through new swag for a few minutes before our bodies turned off of their own volition. Sunday morning found me very groggy, but breakfast at Denny’s (alas, no Bob Evans nearby) helped perk me up a bit. We spent two more hours in the dealer hall, and would have spent more, but we had a twelve hour drive ahead of us; into the car and off on I-70 East to return to our ordinary lives. Got home around 12:45am, and now I’m at work, wondering what my name is and why I can’t go back to sleep.I had a lot of fun, and I hope we can go again next year (all of us: wife and three kids). Time will tell!</blockquote>

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