[GenCon 2008] Second thread, random details and questions

[tonyd]

Woo hoo! I'm so glad you guys are doing this.

Now for my dumb questions:

First, I am a loser. I registered for Gen Con. But I want to be in the booth! Is this a problem I should take up with the convention? I'm not worried if my screwup means I lose some money somewhere, but I don't want to cuase more headaches for you.

So I have this game I'd like to bring, but it's not really a role-playing game. Or some people things it's an RPG, but I'm not sure. Can I sell it in the booth?

And I have this dungeon map / art book I'm putting together. Is that kosher for the booth?

And my RPG might not be done at Gen Con. Can I sell an ashcan in the Forge booth?

[Blankshield]

Hi Tony,

Did you just create a login for the online system, or did you actually register for the Con and buy a badge?

If the former, it's not a problem.  If the later, umm, yes, it's a mess - not a money mess, which is a minor irritant on the scale of things, but a paperwork nightmare for all involved.  The *simplest* solution is for you to cancel your badge:

http://www.gencon.com/2008/indy/attendees/refund.aspx#Pre

It will cost you their admin fee, which is $10, as long as you do it before mid-June.
--

Regarding what is or isn't OK to have at the booth, Ron is the voice of final authority, but I can tell you for sure that the line isn't "RPG or not RPG" or "finished/ashcan" or whatever.  The cutoff is "indie/not indie", as the forge defines such things.

thanks,

James

[tonyd]

Awesome, thanks James,

So the next question is, what about my hotel room? Do you know if I can transfer it to someone else?

T

(and PS thanks for the "you can publish" pep talk you gave me at GPNW last year. I don't know if I ever said that. It meant a lot)

[Blankshield]

Hmm.  Hotel bookings complicate the matter...

I can tell you what Raven and I do, every year for the past 3 or so.  As soon as we know the date for next year's Con - usually sometime in September - we book directly with one of the con hotels.

When the booking system opens, Raven buys her badge in the first nanosecond they are available, and sits like a hawk on the computer when the hotel booking system opens, trying to book us into the attendee block at one of our couple hotels of choice.  If this works, we cancel our direct booking.

When I know if I'm being an exhibitor or not, and if I have access to the exhibitor block code, I hand it to Raven, and she tries to book again.  If this works, we cancel our general attendee booking.

This usually gets us into our first couple choices of hotel, with our first couple choices of room type.

If you're going with someone else, see if they can book the kind of room/hotel combo you want.  If so - yay!  Cancel your booking (there shouldn't be any penalty, or at least, hasn't been in the past) and badge.  If no... sit tight for a while.  You've still got a month before decisions are final.

James

(ps: you're welcome!)

[Eero Tuovinen]

I was thinking of asking about this in PM from experienced folks, but no reason not to ask in public, either. So here's my newbie question set. The situation is, I'm publishing some English-language games and want to go to Gencon with the Forge booth. I'm just now looking into the logistics of travelling to the US and all that. Here's questions:

• My two brothers Markku and Jari are my co-publishers. The exact plan is still up in the air, but it seems that we're all interested in coming to Gencon and selling games. I'm the designer of the team, but we're all well-versed in the product set and important participants in the production process. Should all of us register via Ron, or should some of us get audience badges? Is it even reasonable for all of us to come work at the Forge booth, or should some of us just go as audience?
• As a variant question, are there rules about people with audience badges operating sales in the convention? Gencon rules or Forge booth rules, of course.
• Another variant is, of course, on pricing: I understand that Ron's $125 booth fee is per publisher (which, in our case, is pretty much all three of us), not per person. Is that correct? So a three-person publishing team pays $125 plus three badge fees, not everything three times?
• The original question that inspired me to start asking about this now is on accomodations, as it seems that there's some advantage for normal audience members in getting hotel rooms compared to publishers. I've followed the Gencon preparations during previous years, but I can't say that I'd have memorized any details. Could somebody give me a bird's eye view on the whole accomodation situation? And I mean on a pretty basic level, too, as I'm from a rather non-urbanized country and have little experience with big-city procedures. In Finnish conventions I find accomodation on somebody's couch without fail, they're small enough for that. Could I just find a hotel in Indianapolis and reserve a room? What's the "Gencon deal" on hotels? Is it legal to share a room with non-official partners? Could I just pitch a tent somewhere? (Probably not, but better ask.) What would you recommend as a procedure for a stranger in a strange land as far as reserving accomodations goes?
• If you have any other advice about something that isn't often mentioned because it's so obvious to Americans, I'm all ears. I'm going to figure out the passport stuff etc. myself at some point, but who knows what other strangeness lurks in the heart of America...

[Matt Machell]

Eero, from the point of view of a somebody coming from Europe, the big issues are shipping your stock and getting there on time.

You'll need to coordinate with somebody on the ground to send your stock to and get it to the Con. That might be shipping to your Hotel or a friend who's also going to be there.

Transatlantic flights, especially cheap ones, can play merry hell with scheduling of any kind. It's well worth building in lots of redundancy for issues like missed connecting flights (Indy isn't great for Direct flights), getting through US Immigration and so on.

-Matt

[Eero Tuovinen]

That's a good point, Matt. My printing plans are still shifting, so it's not a given, but I'm hoping to print the stock in the US - the currency is favorable and shipping will be a relative non-issue. I'll have to discuss things with Brennan at IPR to see if they'll stock the stuff for me, but we'll see. If I end up printing in Europe (would be because US has more primitive boardgame production facilities), then shipping the stock would add a wrinkle to be sure.

[Steve Segedy]

• My two brothers Markku and Jari are my co-publishers. The exact plan is still up in the air, but it seems that we're all interested in coming to Gencon and selling games.

That's great, Eero!  It would be great to finally meet all of you.  I'll offer some answers based on past experience, but hopefully Ron or others can correct if my advice goes astray.

Should all of us register via Ron, or should some of us get audience badges? Is it even reasonable for all of us to come work at the Forge booth, or should some of us just go as audience?

I believe you could all register your badges through Ron and be "exhibitors", and then spend the con working at the booth.  In that case, each of you would be committing to working about half of each day at the work, including with some time at the beginning and ending of each day.  This would also include set-up and tear-down time at the start and end of the con.

Keep in mind, working the booth won't leave a lot of time for playing scheduled games or checking out other parts of the convention.  If you guys are all into doing that, I think the booth would be glad to have you.

As a variant question, are there rules about people with audience badges operating sales in the convention? Gencon rules or Forge booth rules, of course.

Regular attendees will have limited access to the convention hall outside of regular hours, which makes it difficult to work the booth.  As far as other sales (like walking around selling out of a backpack or something) I believe that's against GC rules.

Another variant is, of course, on pricing: I understand that Ron's $125 booth fee is per publisher (which, in our case, is pretty much all three of us), not per person. Is that correct? So a three-person publishing team pays $125 plus three badge fees, not everything three times?

Correct.

The original question that inspired me to start asking about this now is on accomodations, as it seems that there's some advantage for normal audience members in getting hotel rooms compared to publishers. I've followed the Gencon preparations during previous years, but I can't say that I'd have memorized any details. Could somebody give me a bird's eye view on the whole accomodation situation? And I mean on a pretty basic level, too, as I'm from a rather non-urbanized country and have little experience with big-city procedures. In Finnish conventions I find accomodation on somebody's couch without fail, they're small enough for that. Could I just find a hotel in Indianapolis and reserve a room? What's the "Gencon deal" on hotels? Is it legal to share a room with non-official partners? Could I just pitch a tent somewhere? (Probably not, but better ask.) What would you recommend as a procedure for a stranger in a strange land as far as reserving accomodations goes?

See James' strategy above- I think that works for other folks.  There's a good chance you can find someone who has a couch to spare, or even an extra bed, but if there are three of you, it might be smart to have one register as a regular attendee and try to get a room through non-exhibitor channels.  You can certainly share rooms, but I think a tent is likely to get the attention of the police... 

[Eero Tuovinen]

Thanks for the info, Steve. We decided to have my brother Markku register an attendee badge for now, to see what the hotel registration system is like. Apparently we'll save around hundred bucks by getting accomodation that way. The "hotel tax" is pretty weird, though;  I guess all countries have their crosses to bear, insofar as weird taxes are concerned.

Here are more questions:

• How long are days at the convention; when do they start and end? The Gencon website is pretty unclear about it, and the days for exhibitors might anyway differ from the audience schedule.
• Is anybody coming in from Chicago? Recommendations for travel? It seems to me at this point that it'll be easiest for us to fly to Chicago (an international hub) and figure out some travel connection to Indianapolis from there - it's just a couple hundred miles. The ideal solution would be to find somebody who wants to drive with us there and back, and perhaps share a hotel room while we're at it.
• Continuing the same theme, anybody want to share a room? Matt? Markku reserved us an affordable four-person room at a Holiday Inn some seven miles from downtown Indianapolis. We're fun people to live with. It's a bonus if you have a car to use to get to the convention with, apparently the Americans are still to invent sidewalks. Having a wallet for sharing a taxi works, too.
• I might as well note here for preliminary purposes that me and Jari, adventurous bums that we are, will try to stay in the land of the free for a while after the convention. If somebody is going somewhere interesting after the convention and wants travel company, I'm open to suggestions.

[Blankshield]

Heya,

Can't speak to the other parts, but the Dealer's Hall is open from 10 AM to 6 PM, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and a little bit shorter on Sunday.  10-4?  10-5?  Can't recall exactly.

Registered events and other Gencon "stuff" runs from 8 AM to Midnight, more-or-less, with some things going around the clock.

Based on the last few years, the default schedule of forge-associated folk is: go to the Dealer's hall for 9:30 or so.  Spend half your day from 10-6 at the booth, the other half doing... whatever.  Be back in the Dealer's hall for 6-6:30.  Go get food with a handful of other folk.  Go to the Embassy Suites for gaming.  Sleep, repeat.

James

[Eero Tuovinen]

Continuing with basic questions, where are the Embassy Suites? Some hotel?

[Steve Segedy]

Yes, the Embassy Suites is one of the nearby hotels that has become the default meeting place for the indie gamer crowd.  You can see it on this map of "skywalk" connected locations:

http://www.indydt.com/skywalkmap.html

In other words, it's easy walking distance to the convention hall and many nearby hotels, but if your hotel is further out, you'll want to make sure you've got a way back to your bed after a long night of gaming.

[JustinB]

Eero, having stayed with friends away from the convention center before, I highly recommend that you try to get a hotel within walking distance of the convention. Because of storage issues and the amount of activity that goes on, its always good to be able to walk to your room for something you accidentally left there.

Also, you walk 7 miles a day in Finland? Damn, you must be in insane shape!

[Eero Tuovinen]

I appreciate the benefits of a nearby hotel, but I think we're going to count on disciplined organization of our personal matters to avoid annoying back-and-forth shuttling this time around. We don't need to store retail stock at the hotel or anything like that, do we? I'm not exactly planning to do anything but sleeping at the hotel, after all. Hopefully you guys don't get to laugh at my naivete at the convention, but based on my experiences at Essen in -06 a farther out hotel doesn't bother me, personally. (Of course I'll find out in Indianapolis that it resembles Bangladesh, with travel between the hotel and downtown taking 3 hours. Funny times ahead.)

And yes, I've been known to prefer walking as a mode of transportation, but apparently American cities are not built for that. Also, I've been warned that Americans are notably prissy about personal hygiene, so exercise before the convention combined with a lack of shover opportunities nearby wouldn't be that smart anyway. Better leave any exercise for afterhours, I guess. Also, my older brother Markku would probably break unrecoverably if he had to walk 20 kilometers a day, so some kind of transport arrangements would be in order anyway

[Ron Edwards]

A word of advice for the Nordics: Eero, do you remember the weather during our visit to Berlin? That's normal for an Indiana summer. Now imagine an immense hall filled with thousands of people, mostly in a state of excitement or anxiety or both. And now, put the two together ...

So I think you can see how important it is, for business purposes, for all of us to maintain a practice of showering before arriving at the booth.

Best, Ron