D&D 5E So what happened at GenCon with relation to 5th edition?

[Majoru Oakheart]

Thus... WotC is now playing to both cons strengths. You can't really fault them for it. And we only have ourselves to blame if we never went to the panels on D&D WotC held at GenCon in years past.

I can tell you from experience that every panel WOTC has ever run at GenCon has been completely sold out. People went to them. But they always schedule them in extremely small rooms. Most of the people who manage to get in are Bloggers/Game Journalists and the contents of the panels are them put on every website on the internet.

But I tried for years to get into their panels and they were always sold out by the beginning of the show.

WOTC really appears to be pulling back from EVERYTHING. Baldman Game is now entirely in charge of GenCon with basically no support at all from WOTC.

 

[Queer Venger]

From the Mearls interview it was clear that he liked Pax better. More people show up for him there.

PAX may be my D&D con next year, seems that its really becoming the Con-home of Wizards. This makes sense, after all, Paizo is starting their own con: Paizocon. So I think that Gencon is way too big to really appeal to everyone's tastes.

So basically they did not have a presence at the most iconic convention where it all started.


Real class.

Not a very well informed comment. Mearls reported on a podcast that Wizards is focusing on the game stores, not conventions. This is a very smart move, as the D&D brand does not need sales to be entirely supported via conventions. 5e is the #1 seller on just about every single online retailer, they are not hurting for sales at Gencon. What I do see them focusing on is offering more games, which is exactly what I want, not to stand for 2 hours in line at the Paizo booth to buy 1 book, (which comes out online the week after).

 

[TerraDave]

PAX may be my D&D con next year, seems that its really becoming the Con-home of Wizards. This makes sense, after all, Paizo is starting their own con: Paizocon. So I think that Gencon is way too big to really appeal to everyone's tastes.

I was just thinking about this. Gencon was of course the TSR con. It transferred to WotC, who then spun it off. Winter Fantasy, the other TSR con, for a time became D&D eXPerience and was the main venue for announcements. I got to demo 4E at one, and watch the VTT keep crashing.

I know that D&DXP has also been deemphasized. Mearls did touch on the possible reason for the changes. They want to support stores. So its more important that organized play is in stores, and people buy from stores. (TSR use to do direct sales and sold stuff at cons, including smaller regional ones, but their where lots of RPG focused stores at that time). There is now the interweb for announcements, and Gencon seems to mostly be a board game/minis con at this point.

PAX, on the other hand, brings in more people, and is in Seattle, and better aligns with their "not just the tabletop" strategy.

I guess their ultimate goal would be to make Comic Con their main venue. They are not quite there yet.

 

[DEFCON 1]

PAX may be my D&D con next year, seems that its really becoming the Con-home of Wizards.

Don't get too far head of yourself here. You might find more D&D panels at PAX that you do now at GenCon (plus of course the AI live-game) but it's not as though the panels they do have are chock-full of special insight. I've gone to the panels at PAX East for many years, and invariably they consist of the "hype" panel of upcoming projects that us EN Worlders already know about going in... and your typical Q&A "Ask The Expert DMs" panel for ideas to help your campaigns.

Now maybe PAX Prime is different than PAX East... but if you are a consistent EN Worlder or WotC Board goer... you're not getting anything at PAX you didn't already know. And when you couple that with the fact that (at least at PAX East) WotC no longer even runs D&D gaming at the con anymore... you'd never get the impression that PAX is some D&D haven.

If you want to play a crapload of D&D at a convention, stick to GenCon . If you want to hear your prototypical Q&A type panels plus watch the Penny Arcade guys play D&D live, come to PAX. But if you want to keep up on all of the latest and greatest information about the D&D game... stick with coming to EN World every day.

 

[Neptune]

An update from BMG about the all-access was posted on their site:

....I tried to post the URL but I'm not high enough level to do so yet

Here it is, just take out the spaces!

baldmangames.com / 2015 / 08 / gen-con-2015-all-access-update /

It includes the otherwise invisible swag plus a promise to make things more transparent going forward. It's fair to criticize when things go poorly but to not praise when they make things right would be wrong. So, thank you Dave for making it right!

 

[Jeremy German]

I can tell you from experience that every panel WOTC has ever run at GenCon has been completely sold out. People went to them. But they always schedule them in extremely small rooms. Most of the people who manage to get in are Bloggers/Game Journalists and the contents of the panels are them put on every website on the internet.

But I tried for years to get into their panels and they were always sold out by the beginning of the show.

WOTC really appears to be pulling back from EVERYTHING. Baldman Game is now entirely in charge of GenCon with basically no support at all from WOTC.

I can't speak for the 5e seminars since I never tried to attend one, but I would go during the 4e era and it's the only seminar where having a ticket actually mattered. People would sit on the floor, hang out in the doorways, etc. Definitely packed.

It was fun too, to see new stuff previewed there. It's a shame.

 

[Shasarak]

I can't speak for the 5e seminars since I never tried to attend one, but I would go during the 4e era and it's the only seminar where having a ticket actually mattered. People would sit on the floor, hang out in the doorways, etc. Definitely packed.

It was fun too, to see new stuff previewed there. It's a shame.

So were the Seminars packed out, or did not many people go to the Seminars?

Seems like we are getting a mixed message.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

So were the Seminars packed out, or did not many people go to the Seminars?

Seems like we are getting a mixed message.

Honestly, I have no idea where this "No one went to the Seminars" thing came from other than wild guessing.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Honestly, I have no idea where this "No one went to the Seminars" thing came from other than wild guessing.

Mike Mearls himself said it. Can't remember if it was a tweet or from his Tome Show interview or what. He said they got many more people to attend D&D seminars at PAX than they did at GenCon, so they're focusing on PAX for seminars.

Which I definitely can understand if we're looking at it from the point of view of level of involvement in D&D plus the intensity level of said panel. And what I mean by that is this: the D&D panels I've seen at PAX East have been usually one of two types-- either it's the "hype" panel for the upcoming game/story, *or* it's the "Help me with my game!" Q&A panel for Dungeon Masters. In both of these cases, they have seen and felt like "introductory" type panels. Panels for people who don't already have a big hand in the game. The stuff in the hype panels were things I already knew about just from coming to the WotC site and EN World... and the DM-info Q&A was the panelists giving out tips that most of us "experienced" players already know or have heard before.

So why did these panels do so well at PAX? If I had to guess, it's because most PAX attendees are *not* D&D focused by any stretch. Or heck, not RPG focused by any stretch. So there are a lot more gamers out there for whom these types of introductory type panels might actually be interesting and useful. And considering that PAX does not have "continuous" gaming all weekend long (unless you sit in the personal game area just pulling games from the lending library and play with a couple friends), there is plenty of time to take in a panel for D&D that doesn't disrupt the rest of your weekend. Thus, they show up. But at GenCon? Perhaps these panels are just too "low-level" to get most of the D&D community to come over from the game tables to attend, and most of the non D&D or non-RPG players have enough other stuff to occupy their time to carve out space for a panel about a game they might not have any real interest in.

I think that's what they mean when they say that GenCon is for playing games, and PAX is for learning about games. At GenCon, there is always a game to play if you want, so a panel has to be *really* interesting for you to pull yourself away from the game tables to do so. But if the panels the D&D department for WotC can put together just really aren't all that in-depth or interesting to hardercore D&D players, why bother trying? I mean, sure, if they held back all their "upcoming information" of new products for a panel at GenCon, that panel would probably be packed to the gills. But does doing that, rather than giving out the information on their website/Twitter whenever it is ready, really garner them anything tangible in the long-run? I'm not so sure.

 

[Morrus]

Honestly, I have no idea where this "No one went to the Seminars" thing came from other than wild guessing.

No wild guessing at all. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford both said that in separate interviews at Gen Con this year.