GenCon!  You're going, or else you wouldn't be reading this post.  Well let me tell you the place to be:  Booth 1332.  This is the legendary Forge Booth.  It's where I'll be, oh boy howdy yes.  And I will be playng Capes.  Period.  That's my life at a Con.  I teach and play Capes, except when there's nobody to play Capes with, at which point I learn and play other games of quality.

So here's what you do, to simply make your GenCon experience better.  First thing you figure out where Booth 1332 is.  You have to know.  Because it's going to be your pole star.  Whenever you come out of something, and don't know what to do at that precise minute, you start walking toward Booth 1332, while you discuss what to do next.  If you encounter or think of something incredibly cool (hey, I was there in 1989 when they had the first network of Battlemech simulators running combats... there is stuff that I will grudgingly admit is cool enough to pass up Capes for) then you stop walking toward the Booth.  But if you don't encounter anything then in a few minutes you're there, and we play for fifteen minutes while you continue to figure out your next move.

Now doesn't that sound better than sitting around in hallways, buffetted by crowds, playing "What do you wanna do?"  "I dunno... what do you wanna do?" with your friends?  That's a crummy ground-state to return to between events.  Pick a better ground-state.  Pick a pole star.  Pick Booth 1332.

Seriously, people, do this.  It's for your own good.  This has been my soft sell.  You do not want to see my hard sell.

Fifteen minutes?!?  That's it?!? 

I want more than fifteen minutes!  Pretty please?  I promise to hang around the booth and do food runs if you'll run something longer than that.

Good news and bad news.

Bad news:  I'm going to be making a conscious effort to look after the first fifteen minutes of demo and see whether there's anyone else I can push a demo on.  I've heard from some folks who were at DEXCON, wanted a demo, but couldn't across a table with me because I was running forever and ever with a group of folks I was having a ball with.  Which is terrific for me, roleplaying wise, but is not what I should be doing in order to discharge my duties to the customers.

Good news, Part #1:  If there's plainly nobody else to whom I have a duty then I'll run forever.

Good news, Part #2:  The game runs just fine without me.  At TerpCon I had a lovely little breeder reaction going, where our first table accumulated six players (which is just unwieldy), so I fissioned it off to two groups of three, with myself and the two novices at a new table.  Then that table started getting too big, and I could have split it off but it was late, so we just finished up and chatted instead.  I'm hoping, during some down-time periods, to head over to the hoped-for unofficial Forge annex at the nearby gaming tables, play some Capes, then be called back to the booth for demoing, but leave people happily playing in my absence.

Reminder to self:  Need to buy more poker chips.

Good news, Part #3:  There's a lot more games than Capes at the booth.  Get Ben Lehman to run you a mind-expanding (and possibly -altering) Polaris Demo, for instance.

Because people have expressed concern privately:  I will not be fissioning off Capes games in the Forge Booth.  There's no space.  There is, in fact, no space for even a long-running single demo.  It would cut into other people's business, which I do not want and will not do.  What will occur in the Forge Booth are fifteen minute demoes.  Anything else will be migrated somewhere nearby.

Hence my hopes for games to occur in the many suitable public spaces at some slight distance from the Forge Booth.