timfire wrote: We're in the "Quiet Zone." From someone who's never been to GenCon, is that a good or bad thing?

The Quiet Zone is a great thing. An idea Peter Atkinson made work after calling for suggestions right here on the Forge. It means we won't be next to electronic amplification devices--NO Speakers to compete with, just other people. It saved my voice and my ears last year.

abzu wrote:
Does anyone know the deal with the vendors near us? For example, any ideas on how to get Rio Grande customers interested in the Forge stuff?

With boardgamers it's absolutely crucial to reprensent your game as an objective, thought out endeavour. I've interacted with lots of boardgamers in the Finnish Boardgame Society, and my general impression is that most boardgamers do not like roleplaying games because they feel arbitrary and foggy - lots of rules, no rhyme or reason to learning them, you won't get to play before spending an evening in preparation. Perhaps the crucial instance of play is this:
GM: What do you do?
Boardgamer: What are my options?
GM: You know... stuff... whatever you want to do! Freedom!
Boardgamer: Bleh.

So alluring boardgamers would work best with really tight demonstrations, I should think. Don't even try to address the differences between board and rp-games, rather emphasize the idea that these games are the next generation of roleplaying, with straight, fair rules amenable to reasonable people. The best games to push, I would think, would be those where you really can answer the question of "What are my options?"

An ideal conversation would perhaps take a game like WGP, MLwM, Dust Devils or some other formalistic game, and show concretely how the game has a structure and concrete player options. It doesn't have to be a gamist game, but it should be possible to play out something like this:
Boardgamer: What are my options?
GM: Well, you can activate either your "Righteousness" or "Mighty Mien", but then you can't use it before reactivation. And you have to explain how the activated trait helps Frank the Barbarian Paladin in reaching his goal.
Boardgamer: OK, let's pick Righteousness. It's an obvious choice, this being a law court situation.

With luck such an interaction would prove to the boardgamer that roleplaying is not just about arguing imaginary events between players, but that it has concrete and intricate resource management problems as well. When comparing traditional roleplaying with board games, I'm struck by how trad games focus on sequences of rules application with players making choices in a big tree of choices, while boardgames are all about resource management and exhange ratios between resources. A game with more boardgame-like rules could go through well.

Furthermore, it's all the better if you take whatever the boardgamer-lure game you choose, and convert everything possible to cards, boards and tokens. A surprising amount of play mechanics in these games can be concretized in that way, even more than the designer usually does (mostly because we want to sell books or PDFs, not game boxes). For demonstration purposes this could be cool, if perhaps slightly misleading. (I'm talking about stuff like putting the BW scripting options on cards the player gets to arrange into a series when scripting, instead of using a list, paper and pen, if it wasn't clear.)