D&D 5E Wizards not taking Gencon seriously?

[Umbran]

1. WOTC didn't bring any monetary support this year at all. Last year they didn't have a booth(except for a small one selling T-shirts and novels inside the D&D gaming area) but they brought some decorations with them to make the gaming area look nicer. Plus they contributed some money(I gather..not confirmed) to pay for the gaming space. They also donated books as prize support for the judges and All-Access Pass players.

This year, they didn't bring anything at all. No booth selling T-shirts, no decorations, no prize support, no money. This meant that Baldman did without some things they've had in the past; like a speaker and microphone. Which caused marshals to have to yell loudly to tell the DMs what do to. Some didn't hear and caused games to start up to an hour and a half late.

It looks like they are making some amends:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ames-amp-WotC-On-All-Access-Issues-At-Gen-Con

 

[Marshall]

From what I can tell is that the issues that happened this year are 3 fold and compounded on one another:

1. WOTC didn't bring any monetary support this year at all.

This is shocking! GenCon is the #1 venue for TTRPGs to connect with their market. D&D skipping GenCon is like Marvel skipping out on ComiCon. Its absurd. Further claiming that Pax is a better venue, for the RPG, is almost insulting. WotC has no budget at all if they cant support even a minor presence. Hell, there should have been a booth for Magic at lest with a side corner for the anemic D&D library.

2. Baldman games appears to have had some issues with DMs due to the number of complaints I've seen about DMs this year. I assume most of the DMs were good but a couple bad ones caused some problems.

I dont know exact details, but WotC pretty much abandoned Con support around essentials time which pissed off a lot of Baldmans DMs. The coming of 5e pissed off more. Actual 5e is so DM dependant, puts so much of the burden on DMs shoulders that Joe Average DM is likely to give a bad experience. Especially in con setting.

3. The Epic wasn't as good as some people would have liked. It wasn't as interactive as previous years and some people thought it was too easy or too boring.

Also, as an honourable mention, I'll add 4. The lights went off at midnight in the middle of the Epic due to an automatic timer that wasn't shut off and no one was able to get them turned back on so a bunch of people just gave up and left in the middle of the game.

Most of the issues weren't really Baldman's fault. But people have grown to expect a level of showmanship mostly created by WOTC in the past that was missing this year. I gather that Baldman expected WOTC to donate books as prizes for the All-Access pass people and WOTC changed their schedule to released their books too late to come out at Gen Con, leaving them without anything to give out.

Eh, 5e requires high quality DMs. There arent a lot of them out there. Epics require consistency from table to table, 5e is about anti-consistant as a game can get. Organized Play requires support from WotC which is slowly fading...

 

[Melfast]

The biggest problem we had with how the DND games were run at GenCon is that you had to have an AL character to play any games above the 1-4 level games. In previous years, I remember that you needed to get an RPGA number if you wanted to keep your character, etc but I thought they always had generics available at the right level. There were a lot of people who signed up for games like us who do not play AL but wanted to play DND at GenCon. That was a mess. We had to drop out of both the games we signed up for. Fortunately, the Baldman DM's were cool and let us roll up characters using one of the DM's autographed PHB, and we were able to use generics to play in two 1st level games instead. A lot of pain would have been avoided if folks had the option to play generics or AL characters.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

The biggest problem we had with how the DND games were run at GenCon is that you had to have an AL character to play any games above the 1-4 level games. In previous years, I remember that you needed to get an RPGA number if you wanted to keep your character, etc but I thought they always had generics available at the right level. There were a lot of people who signed up for games like us who do not play AL but wanted to play DND at GenCon. That was a mess. We had to drop out of both the games we signed up for. Fortunately, the Baldman DM's were cool and let us roll up characters using one of the DM's autographed PHB, and we were able to use generics to play in two 1st level games instead. A lot of pain would have been avoided if folks had the option to play generics or AL characters.

The only D&D games being run at GenCon are Adventurer's League games. In Adventurer's League you need to use AL characters. Which is fine because 1st level AL characters are simply ANY character you create using the PHB. The problem is that the rules are that you can't start above 1st level, so unless you've earned enough XP through play, you can't play in the 5-10 adventures.

This has always been the case at GenCon with some caveats. The only official play at GenCon has always been whichever Organized Play campaign was happening at the time. In 4e, that was Living Forgotten Realms. In 3e/3.5e, that was Living Greyhawk.

The campaign staff of each of those campaigns set the rules differently. In Living Greyhawk and in Adventurer's League you cannot start at a level higher than 1st level. In Living Forgotten Realms, you could start a character at level 1, 5, or 11. But that rule only got implemented 2 years into the campaign. Before that, you also had to start at 1st level. Also, the rule that you could start at higher levels did not go over well with the hardcore players who felt like there was no point scheduling regular LFR games at their gaming stores if anyone off the street could show up with the same level character they worked for.

At GenCon this year there were adventures for level 1-4 characters and ones for 5-10. New players can show up with generic 1st level characters and be perfectly legal playing the 1-4 adventures. It sounds like you were signed up for a 5-10 adventure that you didn't have a legal character for and they helped you make up some first level characters and put you into the 1-4 adventure instead. Which is the way it should work.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is shocking! GenCon is the #1 venue for TTRPGs to connect with their market. D&D skipping GenCon is like Marvel skipping out on ComiCon. Its absurd. Further claiming that Pax is a better venue, for the RPG, is almost insulting. WotC has no budget at all if they cant support even a minor presence. Hell, there should have been a booth for Magic at lest with a side corner for the anemic D&D library.

I can't speak for them, but I think WOTC feels that Baldman Games already is their "official" presence at GenCon and that people come to GenCon just to play games. They buy all their books and stuff at their local gaming store instead. So, having a place to play adventures all weekend is enough of a presence for their game.

If this is going to be their ONLY presence, I would have like to have seen more adventures being offered so if you are a D&D fanatic you could have a different adventure to play almost every slot all weekend. Which means at least another 2 or 3 adventures. But I've been told that more adventures is a logistical nightmare. Plus, I don't think they have enough volunteer DMs anymore. Maybe if we grow 5e's popularity slightly and more people are willing to DM, we can see a bigger play area with more diverse adventures.

But I really don't think WOTC needs a huge booth. Especially when you walk into the booth and they say "We have nothing to sell or announce at this time." I'd rather the Q&A sessions they did instead.

I dont know exact details, but WotC pretty much abandoned Con support around essentials time which pissed off a lot of Baldmans DMs. The coming of 5e pissed off more. Actual 5e is so DM dependant, puts so much of the burden on DMs shoulders that Joe Average DM is likely to give a bad experience. Especially in con setting.

No. None of that is really true. Running a 5e AL adventure doesn't really require much more out of a DM than running a LFR adventure did. IMHO, of course. You have to make a decision or two, but 95% of the work is done for you. The vast majority of the time the rules are fairly clear and don't require much interpretation.

Also, WOTC didn't abandon Con support. They stopped having a booth, but that was it. We got just as much support as ever. I know there were issues that people didn't like. Some people didn't like 4e at all. Some people didn't like the change in LFR rules that allowed players to create characters at higher levels. Some people just didn't like Essentials and felt it was an entirely new edition and got angry because of it. Whatever the reason, a bunch of people gave up on LFR and 4e and decided to volunteer for Paizo instead. Which left Baldman with a smaller supply of DMs.

I know that I played in some LFR 4e adventures at GenCon a couple of years ago and it was fairly apparent that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for people who would DM at GenCon. One of our DMs admitted that he hated 4e, he never ran it at home and barely understood the rules in the middle of our game. He was tasked with running the Special at GenCon for high level characters. He made so many rules mistakes that the experience was less than enjoyable.

Eh, 5e requires high quality DMs. There arent a lot of them out there. Epics require consistency from table to table, 5e is about anti-consistant as a game can get. Organized Play requires support from WotC which is slowly fading...

I don't think it "requires" high quality DMs. Bad DMs were just as capable of ruining 4e adventures. I saw it on a regular basis. 5e certainly is NOT anti-consistent. The rules are clear on all the things that matter: How many spells you can cast per day, what you can do in a round of combat, what damage things do, how to calculate and roll skill checks. The rest is often clearly written in the adventure or is so logical it doesn't require rules for. It requires a DM to make real rulings maybe 5% of the time. Don't get me wrong, I know a couple of DMs that are so used to running 3e/3.5e/4e/Pathfinder that when that 5% of the time comes up they choke and get really frustrated and confused because they don't know what to do when the rules don't handle something. I've been at the table where the DM went on a tirade about how much they think WOTC broke the game because they didn't include rules for casting spells while swimming in acid.

I've let first time DMs run AL adventures at our local store and it went fine.

Epics also don't require much consistency either. They just require having a fun experience and a little bit more understanding of the complicated "flow" the adventure has.

The only real issues I heard about the Epic was that DMs couldn't hear the cues to move on to the next part because of a lack of speaker and spent a lot of time waiting when they should have been playing.

 

[Melfast]

Majuro said: "The only D&D games being run at GenCon are Adventurer's League games. In Adventurer's League you need to use AL characters. Which is fine because 1st level AL characters are simply ANY character you create using the PHB. The problem is that the rules are that you can't start above 1st level, so unless you've earned enough XP through play, you can't play in the 5-10 adventures....At GenCon this year there were adventures for level 1-4 characters and ones for 5-10. New players can show up with generic 1st level characters and be perfectly legal playing the 1-4 adventures. It sounds like you were signed up for a 5-10 adventure that you didn't have a legal character for and they helped you make up some first level characters and put you into the 1-4 adventure instead. Which is the way it should work."

Fair enough. For someone who does not play AL, and who's only experience with GenCon/Origins/Dundracon games is with being able to create characters and/or having appropriately leveled generics available, it was certainly not clear to me as a casual player that we would not be able to play (I've played in GenCon games with above 5th level generic characters in previous years).

I went back and looked at the event write up, and it does say materials are not provided, but we thought this referred to things like dice, game rules, etc. and not pre-gens. (It says the same thing for the 1st level games, and they did have generics for 1st level play.) It would have been helpful if the short or long description of the game made it clear that you cannot play without a DCI and AL created and approved character (Shadowrun did this in their game descriptions, which is why we did not sign up for their games). The fact that the modules are based on AL games did not make it obvious that there is no way to play in them without actually running an AL approved character.

Some of the DM's were even confused, telling us that there was an area in the play area to go online to create characters, and then it was not actually set-up or available.

The bottom line, though, from the WOTC/Baldman Games image/fan support is that there were a lot of unhappy people we observed, who either signed up for games or expected to be able to use generics to play and couldn't play in the games/at the times they wanted to. It would seem to be in their best interest to create an opportunity for as many people to play as possible and to make it as easy as possible regardless of whether you come to the Con already playing AL. Clearer game descriptions, a character generation area, generics at each level of play (it's a Con, who cares if your hard-leveled character has to play with one just generated -- don't let the generic character become an official character that can carry experience or stuff from game to game), etc. would go a long way to making sure their fans have the best Con experience.

 

[default_entry]

I'm not particularly torn up about a lack of a booth, but the fact that there's so little buzz or activity -period- concerns me. Why make the big fuss about a new edition last year, if they aren't going to keep up the enthusiasm? Stir up the community! Push it forward! Encourage others to do so!

How does one become a GM for them? If info like that was more available, we could probably fill shortages much faster.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

How does one become a GM for them? If info like that was more available, we could probably fill shortages much faster.

In order to volunteer just go to the Baldman Games website. They have an open call a couple of months before the con, which they'll often make a post here announcing along with announcing on their twitter feed. Then you just go to their website and fill out a form asking to help and saying how much time you are willing to volunteer.

 

[cmad1977]

Although with their decreasing presence at Gen Con despite Gen Con's increasing attendance, you might wonder which is the cart and which is the horse. Do they put more effort into PAX because it's a better venue, or is it a better venue because they put more effort into it?

They put more effort into Pax because it is more highly attended and has a much larger retinue of press.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It would have been helpful if the short or long description of the game made it clear that you cannot play without a DCI and AL created and approved character (Shadowrun did this in their game descriptions, which is why we did not sign up for their games). The fact that the modules are based on AL games did not make it obvious that there is no way to play in them without actually running an AL approved character.

I agree that this should be made clearer. It's kind of always been like this. It appears that Baldman just kind of assumes that when someone looks at the event description and sees that the game is Adventurer's League that they'll know what that means or they'll look up the rules for Adventurer's League online and then show up with appropriate characters. I think they assume a little too much. Though, having DMed in previous years, the number of people who show up completely confused as to how Organized Play works is an extremely small number and they try their best to accommodate people by finding places for them in the low level tables.

My guess is that they don't want to turn away possible players by confusing them with talk of Adventurer's League and "legal" characters when any character created out of the PHB(with a couple of small caveats) is a "legal" AL character. Plus, they'll have precon characters for anyone who shows up without a character.

Some of the DM's were even confused, telling us that there was an area in the play area to go online to create characters, and then it was not actually set-up or available.

That IS strange. There hasn't been an area to go online and create characters for 2 years, since we were running LFR in 4e and the character builder existed. In previous years there has been a table set up to help new players create characters and give them a basic instruction on how to play. But I know they were having issues because there was a DM sitting around waiting to give new players tutorials for the whole con and very few people were asking for the service so they had a DM sitting around doing nothing.

I don't know what they did this year since this is the first year I haven't been to GenCon in the last 10. But it sounds like some DMs were just assuming the same thing happens every year without asking anyone at HQ.

The bottom line, though, from the WOTC/Baldman Games image/fan support is that there were a lot of unhappy people we observed, who either signed up for games or expected to be able to use generics to play and couldn't play in the games/at the times they wanted to. It would seem to be in their best interest to create an opportunity for as many people to play as possible and to make it as easy as possible regardless of whether you come to the Con already playing AL. Clearer game descriptions, a character generation area, generics at each level of play (it's a Con, who cares if your hard-leveled character has to play with one just generated -- don't let the generic character become an official character that can carry experience or stuff from game to game), etc. would go a long way to making sure their fans have the best Con experience.

I agree that things could be made better. Play at GenCon though is heavily slanted towards people who already play AL at their local stores on a regular basis. There are new players who come to play at GenCon but they are in the minority. The vast majority of people preregister with Paid Tickets for a specific event they want. Each year Dave Christ tries to warn everyone that people who preregister in advance for an event have the absolutely highest priority. He plans his DMs around the number of people who preregistered for an event and he TRIES to have extra DMs available so that people show with generic tickets can play but he tries his best to warn everyone that it isn't guaranteed.

Baldman Games' goal is to make sure the people who want to play have the best experience possible but he has to follow the rules of AL just like everyone else. He isn't in charge of Adventurer's League and doesn't create their rules. Their rules prevent people from showing up with a non-legal level 5 character, even temporarily. So, Baldman Games really has two choices: Don't offer any 5-10 adventures in order to make sure that anyone who shows up can play any adventure offered, which means possibly irritating the hardcore players who go to GenCon every year who have higher level characters and want to play them OR they can deal with any misunderstandings as they come up. They've chosen the latter.

I think the one thing they REALLY need to do is better clarify that you MUST have an AL character to play in AL games. And that all the games they are offering ARE AL games.