GenCon Australia 2009
This is my GenCon Australia experience. It's a long, rambling entry, so I've put most of it behind this cut. Scroll all the way to the bottom if you want to skip my personal day-by-day experiences and get right to my feedback.
TUESDAY NIGHT
Late on Tuesday I packe dmy duffel with everything that I might need over the convention - plenty of clothes, my Radiance scenario notes and character sheets, the REIGN rulebook, some HeroClix, the Battlestar Galactica boardgame, toiletries, and so on. What then followed was an hour-long fruitless earch for a padlock to secure my duffel. I have a padlock that I've owned for about twenty years, and I was sure that I had it in my room somewhere. Turning my bedroom upside down and searching in every conceivable location utterly failed to locate the damn thing. Tired and slightly demoralised, I went to bed...
... and immediately remembered that the padlock is connected to my work bag. That I use almost every day. Gah. Jumped out of bed to grab the damn thing before I forgot again, and then went to sleep.
WEDNESDAY
I left home at 1pm, got to the airport by 1.30, checked my bag and went through security pretty fast because I'd already done the online check-in, and walked straight to the departure area. We basically got straight on to the plane at 1.45, took off on time, and got to Brisbane a little early. The pilot was a darn chirpy fellow: "It's a beautiful day for flying and we're making great time!"
I had time to kill so I went for the airport train rather than a taxi. I'ne never used QR before so wasn't sure where to change trains or which station to use, but fortunately I picked the right ones. The fare was a bit steep, and on Sunday night I intended to share a cab, but the trains were okay.
I had a little trouble once I reached South Brisbane because although I had a vague knowledge of the area, I don't know the street names... and I'd printed everything I might need except a map. The initial directions I got sent me one direction, I walked for half an hour (with my 10kg bag), then found some council workers who turned me around, and I found the hotel. It's actually very close to the convention centre and the station - about eight minutes walk - and I'd just been sent the long way.
Anyway, I checked in, changed, and went to meet up with my old friend Veronica, who lives about 20 mins away by bus. I haven't seen Ronnie in a couple of years, so we caught up, went to a vegan cafe, and walked around a bit. After I said goodbye to Ronnie I walked along Boundary Road, which is a lot like King St except I didn't see any supermarkets or hairdressers. I caved and bought supplies from 7-11... only to curse as I discovered a Coles one block from my hotel.
The Sapphire Resort was nice enough, clean rooms with a TV, bathroom, kitchen sideboard & sink (no cooking facilities), and minifridge. There's wireless internet but I was without a laptop and thus had no way to use it. It would feel a bit strange all week to be watching commercial television but not have internet access - a lot like being trapped in the early 90s!
THURSDAY
I took it easy on Thursday morning, showering and getting ready for the day at an unhurried pace (the maid knocked at about 10.00 to ask if I wanted to change my towel. "Uh, no," I replied. "I'm currently wearing it."). I eventually left the hotel at about 11.30 to run into Queen St Mall in the city to have a druink and lunch with illdrinn and her peeps. This is when I started to realise just how close many places in Brisbane are - rather than mess around with the trains, it would have been faster to simply walk across the river and right up Queen St. Brisbane reminds me a bit of a larger version of Parramatta - I walked everywhere for the rest of the weekend.
After lunch we caught a bus back to the convention centre (which was probably five minutes faster than walking but certainly less effort after lunch), picked up our weekend passes, and went into the convention hall. The retailer/display hall wasn't open on Thursday, but there were probably about a hundred people around playing D&D and Pathfinder, board gaming, or playing HeroClix. It certainly looked sparse, but the gaming area was very large. After we sat around gossipping, meeting a few gamers, and desultorily wondering what game we should play, illdrinn and most of her peeps went back to the pub to drink and play games there.
I decided to stay behind at the convention centre and meet up with some HeroClix players from Canberra. After they finished their game we pulled out some larger teams, and began a four-player, last-man-standing game that went from some time after 3pm to about 8.30pm. It was four times as big as any normal game and obviously took over four times as long! About halfway through I took a quick break to find a vending machine that would give me a Coke Zero. The convention centre is large, so you're options are to either take your sweet time getting from place to place, or get used to running if you want to be more punctual. I did a lot of running over the weekend.
Anyway, my shapeshifting Skrulls team performed very well and after a close endgame against Dr Strange and the Silver Surfer, I was victorious! I was also exceptionally tired. I went for a kebab on Boundary Rd, picked up some groceries at Coles, and retired to my hotel room.
FRIDAY
Up at 8am so that I could be at the convention centre in plenty of time to get started at 9am! I had to pick up my GM Information envelope in the morning before my first game session, which consisted entirely of paperwork that had to be filled out (ticket envelopes and a time sheet) and had no information about how many players I had booked into my game sessions or even which table my game sessions where supposed to be run. Chris Walker advised me to run out to the Customer Service booth to ask somebody there, and a man named Terry helpfully allowed me to copy down my session times and table numbers from his schedule. That solved my problem, but really - this is essential information that every GM running an event needs to have. One shouldn;t have to jump through hoops to get it.
The first game session of my event (Radiance: Lost Contact) was played by Warwick, Matt, Hugh, Elizabeth, and Wayne - all new faces at my gaming table. Most of these folks were from Brisbane (unsurprisingly; the majority of my sessions were like that) and it really was a novel experience to run a game for people I've never met before. That doesn't really happen in Sydney!
After the session I was briefly introduced to Steve D from RPG.net (d_fuses), but he was in the middle of something and we couldn't chat. This happened for pretty much the entire weekend - neither of us happened to have free time at the same time. I'd offered to buy him lunch but he was always gaming or in a seminar when I was free... I'll have to owe him for the next convention.
I had scheduled myself an hour break for lunch, in which I had a walk around the retailer area (bumping into lotusvine), and briefly talked to statichowl, falsely_accused, illdrinn, and others at the Reaper Paint and Take tables. Then it was a quick burger combo meal from the cafe area and back to the roleplaying tables.
The second game session of Lost Contact was played by Alex, David, Ian, Felix, and Samantha. We took awhile to get started because for some reason this session (and only this session) wasn't assigned a specific table number, so it was difficult for everybody to find where we were supposed to be sitting.
Afterwards statichowl, falsely_accused, and I walked over the river into the city fir dinner at the Pig and Whistle. An enormous cheeseburger and a pint of cider did the trick, although I thought that it was slightly more expensive than I'd expect to pay in Sydney. However, considering that I spent nothing in the retailer area of the convention, I thought I might as well have a decent meal.
SATURDAY
The crowds started in earnest on Saturday, understandably enough. Not a bother for me because I'd picked up my wristbands for the entire weekend on Thursday, and I felt quite happy to skip that line. The cosplayers had showed up in force, and there were the usual mix of costumes that made me laugh, costumes thatimpressed me, and costumes that were too weird to be normal clothing but were unrecognisable for a person who doesn't watch anime. Dude in the men's room with gigantic red cape and ridiculously bushy white wig, I'm sure you did a great job of costuming as whoeverthehellyou'resupposedtobe, but I'm afraid that I'm just not going to be properly appreciative.
My third game session of Lost Contact was played by Ken, lotusvine, Kevin, and Brendan - this was the first time I actually knew some of the faces seated around the table with me. Despite being one player short of the optimal five, the game ran fine - the only character required for the scenario to avoid falling flat was the "shady, unlikely to be trusted" character. I can guarantee that if you describe a character as shady, dodgy, and unlikely to be trusted, at least one of the gamers present will want to play that character. It's like a law of pregen characters.
During my lunch hour I found Hexy and her friend Elise in the cafe, costumed as the female Joker and Harley Quinn respectively. I've seen some photos online of the girls with their Sunday costumes, but none from Saturday.
My fourth session of Lost Contact was played by Simon, Pat, Sherenne, and a James. They were rather good sports, and again we managed without a fifth player. Whereas the morning's group had decided to leave the corporate agent Kan Li-Hua out, these guys passed over the athletic civilian lawyer/manager, Tosin Abasi.
In the evening I ran a pick-up session of REIGN for the iGOD (Indy Games On Demand) area, with Ken and David rolling up a couple of small-town deputies who went looking for a boy lost down a hole in the ground, found an underground train station with a fundamentalist cleaning robot, and had a bloody battle to the death with a mobster named Fat Tony and his inhuman sidekick Ca'Tak. The deputies both lived, rescued the lost kid, and got him back to town in time for one of them to be forced into a marriage proposal. Afterwards a bunch of iGOD people talked indy games for awhile and watched eclecticon run an Unknown Armies game for what looked like seven or eight people.
I went to grab spidercat, statichowl, and falsely_accused who were just escaping from the apparently horrendous freeform Flight of the Apollyon, and we had dinner at the Pig and Whistle again. A plate of lamb cutlets and a pint of cider made for a nice ending to the day!
SUNDAY
I checked out of my hotel at 8.30am after doing a quick walk around the room to check for forgotten items. Everything I'd brought was still in nice neat piles, so I am pretty confident that it all came home with me.
Sunday morning was my last game session of Lost Contact, played by Craig, Travis, statichowl and falsely_accused. The unchosen fifth character this session was the engineer Maxim Lebedev. From this I can discern that the most popular character choices over the weekend were the shady criminal and the android planetologist, so there you go.
We met up with falsely_accused's sister Alice, went to Subway for lunch, and then came back to the free board games area to play a bit of Battlestar Galactica. We didn't really have time to finish, but it was a good diversion. Unfortunately first-time player Alice was the Cylon and was a bit confused about how that should work, so she wasn't able to give us as much trouble as we pesky humans deserved.
I'd made arrangements with Hexy to share a taxi to the airport, so when she and Elise were about ready to leave I grabbed my bags and took a last-minute visit to the celebrity signing area. I only wanted a simple autograph from Kate Vernon, but every time I had gone past earlier in the weekend she'd been at lunch or in a seminar. Apparently she takes her lunch at the same time that I do. Unsurprisingly, Vernon seemed very tired at 4.30pm on the Sunday of a convention, but she was certainly friendly. I asked her to autograph my Ellen Tigh card from the BSG board game, and then I was off to meet up with the girls and begin the trip back home.
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FEEDBACK
I've got some positive things to say about the convention and some negative things. I'm going to preface them both by announcing that I had a good time at GenCon Australia and I don't regret the expense involved, but at least part of that is becaue I enjoyed having a holiday away from Sydney. While the convention was undoubtedly bigger and more impressive than southern roleplaying conventions, the amount of fun had in the game sessions wasn't significantly different. If you go to conventions primarily to play games, it might not be worth the trip for you.
One of the most positive things about GenCon Australia included a very large area given over to free, unscheduled gaming. If you'd come along to check things out, meet an author or an actor, and go shopping, you could spend the rest of your day playing one of at least fifty board games that had been brought in by a local club, or something that you'd brought along yourself (this is what the HeroClix players from Canberra did). There was a giant Jenga set, free seminars and Q&As, the cosplay competition, and other things that you could do cheaply or at no cost beyond your day pass.
Another positive is that the cosplay seemed to go well - I saw a lot of happy looking people in that area, and folks in the cosplay area of the GenCon forums sound like they had a great time. This is great even if you don't costume yourself, as it adds a lot of interest and colour to the convention.
I can't really fault the venue much, either - it's conveniently located, quite large, has adequate toilet facilities for the people there (constantly in use but never crowded), and the air conditioning was set at a decent level. Despite the 29 degree days outside and the reputation that convention-goers have for body odour, it was generally fairly pleasant in most areas. (Some of the folks in costumes might have been feeling rather too warm, but I wasn't standing close to them!)
In terms of game availability, it was really great to see Andrew Smith organising Indy Games on Demand, and I saw a lot of activity on those tables. People do want to play something new that they haven't tried before, and iGOD helped to ake up for the lack of detail and sheer difficulty of using the online registration. Games other than standard Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy were definitely represented... illdrinn bemoaned the lack of horror games, but given the gaming environment (open tables, with the attendant noise levels and distractions) I wouldn't try to run horror at GenCon Australia except with the perfect scenario. Unknown Armies seemed to go well, but that was a session of Jailbreak (one of the best one-shot UA scenarios ever written) and it was an evening session, after most of the crowd had gone home. I'll probably stick to science fiction, and steampunk seems extremely popular among players.
I do have negatives. As briefly mentioned above, the support provided to game masters running roleplaying events was minimal; just how exactly we were supposed to know where to run events is unclear to me. Every player had the table number printed on their event ticket, but this information could not be provided to game masters? Seems poorly organised. My Game Master envelope had ticket envelopes and a timesheet(!) in it, but nothing personalised at all.
As a game master my only contact with the convention organisers was handing my ticket envelopes and timesheet in to the Customer Service desk. If I'd forgotten to bring my game and just played whist with the players instead, I'm not sure that the organisers would ever know!
There was also less information available during the convention than last year, regarding what roleplaying events had room for additional players. At the point that pre-registrations closed my five sessions were almost entirely full, and I suspect that the only reason I didn't pick up additional players during the convention is the difficulty people had finding out what games had spare slots. It wasn't a big deal for me (the events all ran fine), but last year there was a screen at the Customer Service counter to let people know what sessions were coming up and where there was room for additional players.
Other criticisms that I've personally heard from other attendees included misleading information about what was happening on the Thursday, people who came in on Thursday to buy a weekend pass being turned away, a very confusing registration system on the website, outdated information on the website (rules that applied in 2008 but were changed for 2009), no ability to download a list of games from the website, no map of the convention site available, a lack of site maps, and uninformed volunteers. Some of these are issues that existed last year, and really should be addressed.
I think that a number of the retailers at GenCon Australia could have been a lot smarter about what products they brought up for their stalls. There were some specialty vendors including Campaign Coins (high-quality fantasy metal coins for use as treasure), a fantasy weapons company, a high-quality costumes and mask company, a deluxe gaming table company, fiction publishers, and so on, who I hope got their money's worth from increased profile. (It was also cool to see a university among the vendors.) However, a lot of vendors were selling old roleplaying books (at no particular discount) that their target audience probably already own. People who are interested in playing D&D 3.5 or 4th edition will have bought the books they want already. Those few vendors who sold independant, rare, or out-of-print games seemed to do better business from them. The same goes for vendors who ran demos - showing people how to play a game and how much fun it is leads directly to sales.
Anyway, that will do for now. If I think of anything else I'll add it in the comments. :)