Just thought i'd start trying to get this thread going again.
I'm in the middle of emailing people for ideas on running Games On Demand. I'd like to submit something more solid to GenCon Oz soon for the event if people are still interested in joining me.

I am still interested.  What are your thoughts - still a smorgasboard approach manned by those GM's willing to run whatever it is thye are familiar with?

Cheers
Nathan

Yep, definitely still keen.  Can you post a summary of your e-mail discussions here?  Just the salient points, if you've reached some kind of conclusion or if it'll help us get this thing together.

The above posts were split from [GenCon Oz 2008] and Games on Demand. Please continue here.

Best, Ron

Yes - was still thinking to have each GM who can make it design their own menu. I was thinking I'd be comfortable being able to run something like 8 - 10 potential different games.
I think we need to get the event submitted in soon to the GenCon Oz people.

I'm in.

I've got accomodation being booked for a week long road-trip each way...and depending on what happens over the next couple of weeks I should be displaying as an artist up there as well.

V

muddlepud wrote:
Yes - was still thinking to have each GM who can make it design their own menu. I was thinking I'd be comfortable being able to run something like 8 - 10 potential different games.
I think we need to get the event submitted in soon to the GenCon Oz people.

Just putting an email here that I got back from the GenCon people:

Hi Scott,

We’re still interested in having a “Games on Demand” section, but unfortunately it may be a bit beyond our capabilities for the 2008 event. While we’ve got plenty of empty tables open in the RPG event hall to run the games, finding the space for a HQ area for something like this is proving difficult. The official word from the organisers, at this point, is that they’d rather have the games in the Gen Con Australia schedule in advance for the first year and revisit having Games on Demand in 2009.

The options for running indy games, at this point, basically consists as follows:

1)      Get the people who were interested in running games to submit events individually using the event submission form. The upside of this option is that everyone can get access to the reimbursements available for GM’s coming to the con (covering Entry and Accommodation), but it means you lack the unity you were going for with the idea.
2)      Submit events under a communal title (along the lines of Indy Game Showcase) and a bio explaining the pick-your-system concept, and allow people to choose the game when they arrive for their session. I’ll do my best to make sure all your events run in the same set of tables or rooms, to give it unified feel, but people will have the options of pre-registering for the event or showing up on the day and taking up a spot using Generic Event Tickets. It’ll mean that you’ll have to do a short pitch and let players choose at the start of every session, rather than having a table where they can show up and ask, but it’s probably the closest we can do to your original idea.

If you head on over to the Event Organiser page on the website it should lead you to all the information you need to submit events and organise things if you’re running an event with multiple GMs involved. The Event Host Policy, in particular, will have a lot of information relevant to setting this up. If you’ve got any questions or you want to talk about other possible solutions, just e-mail or call on the number below.

The list of games I could put forward includes:

Primetime Adventures
Inspectres
Agon
Shooting the Moon
Spirit of the Century
Hero's Banner
My Life With Master
Cat
A Thousand And One Nights
Dread
With Great Power

I've got a few more than that, but they're the ones I feel I have a good grip on the rules. I'd probably slim that down to about 6 - 8 titles for my gaming menu.

muddlepud wrote:
Just putting an email here that I got back from the GenCon people:

The options for running indy games, at this point, basically consists as follows:

1)      Get the people who were interested in running games to submit events individually using the event submission form.
2)      Submit events under a communal title (along the lines of Indy Game Showcase) and a bio explaining the pick-your-system concept, and allow people to choose the game when they arrive for their session.

So which of the options are you going ahead with?

I've just put forward an entry to run a game at GenCon OZ...I wasn't sure what the rest of you guys were doing, so I thought I'd make sure and entry went up from me anyway.

If you need any help over the course of GenCon, I'll definitely be available to provide any assistance required.

V

Vulp - what's the entry you've put in?

Now that I've got Arcanacon out of the way I was going to look at getting something in myself. I was thinking the Indie Games Showcase idea would be relatively easy to get us working together.

Hey Scott,

The collective title that Michael S. Miller and Kat Miller use for the slate of registered indie game events at Gen Con and Origins in the U.S. is "Indie Games Explosion," if I recall correctly.

Paul

So what is the verdict?  Option one or two?  I am just as happy with option 1 as two, though the united front does suffer in that first scenario.

Cheers,
Nathan

Currentlly looking at something along the lines of Option 2 - Indie games showcase using the title Indie Games Explosion.

Andrew and I spoke the other day about what we'd like to try for the event and I'm emailing the GenCon Oz people about the proposal.

All good.  As I said in my PM, I am going to have to do a bit of the dodgy at work to get up to Brisbane for the whole con, but I am keen. 

With some further thought, as well as one of my own games (Space Rat, or my new project, perhaps) I could run Vs Monsters, maybe Esoterrorists or one of its variations and... mmm... the choices are too many.  I wouldn't mind doing a super-hero game, and a pulp game - just a matter of which ones.  Further suggestions are welcome!

My menu might look like;

Space Rat OR  My Kingdom for a Hero
Vs Monsters OR Trail of Cthulhu
Spirit of the Century OR Two Fisted Tales (any other pulpy suggestion?)
Earth AD OR Faery's Tale
Something super-hero-y (suggestion?)

Actually, I like the idea of a kiddy friendly game like Faery's Tale.  Any other suggestion for a game aimed at a younger audience?

- Nathan

I've put in my official entry to launch my game "The 8th Sea" at GenCon Oz...nothing like giving yourself a hard and fast deadline to make sure your work gets finished.

I submitted it a week ago, but haven't heard anything back yet.

But as I said, I'm definitely still up for helping out with any other Indy games...

V

Peril wrote:
Spirit of the Century OR Two Fisted Tales (any other pulpy suggestion?)
Something super-hero-y (suggestion?)

Vulpinoid wrote:
I've put in my official entry to launch my game "The 8th Sea" at GenCon Oz...nothing like giving yourself a hard and fast deadline to make sure your work gets finished.

OK, so the IGE event has been submitted (by Mr Muddlepud - thank you sir).  I'm going to write this from memory, so leap in and correct me if I start typing lies.

The basic format is that we intend to run three sessions (Friday night, and two during Saturday) with up to three GMs hosting indie games.  Players can come and collectively choose which game they want to play from the list of games offered by the GMs.  At least, that's the plan.  muddlepud tells me that he will be working on some clever looking menus for each GM involved, so it should look schmick.

Does that sound right to you, mud?

A slight correction:

3 sessions per day on the Friday and Saturday with 3 GMs available to run in each session. Sessions are 10am - 12pm, 1pm - 5pm, 6pm - 10pm for those days.

Once the game is confirmed, I'll collect the game list for the menus from our GMs and start working on something.

I also found some flyers/cards for IPR I'll be able to bring along to help push indie games. I grabbed them last year when I was at GenCon Indie.

Cool.  Thanks for the correction.  That looks like a nice, meaty set of sessions.

Andrew wrote:

What's your game about?

Swashbuckling time travellers?  Got to be good.  Every buckle needs a good swash now and then.

So it's been quite some time since any information about this was posted.  I just wanted to drop a line in to give a list of the games that will be available.

Primetime Adventures
Dust Devils
Cold City 
With Great Power
Hero's Journey 
Spirit of the Century
Don't Rest Your Head
Agon
Nobles - (just a playtest for my own game, really)

This is an incomplete list, however.  When I get final lists from the other GMs, I'll post them up here.

I will be offering;

InSpectres
Og
Vs Monsters / Vs Outlaws
Space Rat

(I think Scott has this list already)

I think the list of games is shaping up to offer a pretty good variety of games / genres and play styles.  Cool.

- Nathan

Just in case anyone is still watching this thread (with only three days left before the con), don't forget to check out a couple of seminars on indie games.  There's Steal This Trick on Thursday night, and another yet-to-be-announced seminar on publishing your games, tentatively scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

Now that Gencon Oz is over, I wanted to post a summary of sorts. Now, although most of this forum is accustomed to a Gencon that has tens of thousands of attendees and a programme guide thicker than a phone book, our version is nascent and our population is less than 10% that of America's - so please take this in the spirit of celebration it was intended.

Also, to save me some typing, I'm going to cross post this on a few forums.

The first Gencon Oz was, for indie games, a good experience. We had games from Australian designers being launched, we had seminars on indie game play and design, and we had full registrations for all tables of the Indie Games Explosion. Best of all, the organisers are enthusiastic about our contribution and are keen to give us more space for larger events in 2009.

And now for some details.

Seminars
There were two seminars for indie games across the four days. The first was on Thursday night, with a panel of Nathan Russell, Michael Wenman and Robin Laws (and I got to be MC for this illustrious group) and the topic was "Steal This Trick - The indie games you should play at least once". For an hour the panelists spoke on the topic and took questions from the audience.

The second one was in the last day of the con, and wasn't actually advertised in the programme, but we still managed to get people to come. It was intended to be a session on indie game design, primarily with the guys who were launching games, but we turned it into a Game Design Roundtable as was done at Dreamation. Two games were thrown on the table and dissected by the assembled group. Both of the designers set themselves goals to have ashcans ready in six months, in time for Melbourne's Arcanacon.

Indie Games Launched
Michael Wenman came up from Sydney to launch The Eighth Sea, his game about time-travelling pirates with a penchant for making money from temporal disturbances. He ran two or three sessions every day, and was fully booked (and over booked!) for each one. The pre-orders list grew quite well, I hear.

Nathan Russell decided to only run his game - Space Rat - through the IGE, and was handsomely rewarded. I sat in on an hour of one session and enjoyed it immensely. Due to a delay in printing from Lulu he didn't have any product to sell, but he handed out stacks of postcards and flyers. He generously left me with one of his few pre-release copies to add to my library. Thanks, Nathan!

Indie Games Explosion
According to the registration table, all sessions were fully booked and even though about 10-20% didn't turn up, we had gamer after gamer approaching us and ask about empty spaces at the table. We estimate that about half of them had never heard of any of the games, and were still keen to play. We also estimate that about two-thirds finished the games and asked, "Where can I buy this game?" Unfortunately, the only thing we could do was point them to the IPR online store. We hadn't really expected people to try and buy these games from us, but they were keen. I would have loved to point them towards one of the retailers, but none of them were carrying indie stock either.

In short, the indie gamer crowd had more demand than supply and the organisers noticed. I suspect that we left our mark partially through the registration database and partially through the periodic visits from Robin Laws, Peter Adkinson and the Gencon staff. I need to give a big thank you to Scott Vandervalk, Nathan Russell and Michael Wenman for bringing content to the con. I also need to point out the great support from Peter Ball and the rest of the con organisers for squeezing a non-standard event into the programme.

And now... go plan the next one.

The con was great, and the IGE reception was awesome.  So many people, so many games, so much fun!  I had a few highlights from the indie games point of view, including;

Running Og as Robin Laws watched on - we chatted later about the virtues of the game for con play.
Running the best game of Space Rat I have ever had in three years of play - expect an actual play soon!
Playing With Great Power, run by Scott (Muddlepud).  I wasn't sure about the system at first, but as the stakes grew it became intense and completely drew everyone in.  The adventure ended with our hero group disbanded and the characters scattered as they searched for ways to come to terms with their failures - and it was awesome!  The best super-hero adventure I have ever been in - and my character never even got into a physical conflict!

While GenCon Oz was tiny in comparison to the US cons, it still had a great buzz.  A bonus to this smaller size was that the special guests etc were very accessible.  I (first time game publisher) spoke on a panel with Robin Laws and chatted with him over coffee (and Andrew got to play Grey Ranks with Robin and Peter Adkison), I ran games for other designers and writers between their seminars and other commitments, and had plenty of chances to see most things (though I didn't get to sit down and demo a couple of intriguing board games).

Finally, Andrew Smith was far too modest in his previous post and failed to mention his contribution to the success of the IGE events.  His Spirit of the Century games were in high demand and all players left very satisfied, from what I witnessed; he worked hard to find local gamers that he could entice back for more indie game goodness in the not too distant future; he did an exceptional job as MC for the "Steal this trick"  seminar and asked some great questions that drew out some interesting responses and debate; and he had the coolest epilogue in With Great Power - will we see the return of Liberty Belle, or is she gone forever?! 

Everyone had a great time running and playing indie games at the con and I think we are all already looking forward to next time!

Thanks for the praise, Nathan.  It was invigorating to be part of it.

I also want to add the names of the folks who attended the game designers round table: Scott (muddlepud), Louise, Lon, Michael (Vulpinoid, and not to forget his plus one who patiently waited for us to finish our ramblings! - I'm sorry that I didn't get your name in my notes), Danica and Craig (who both came all the way from Perth for the con).  Thanks for your active contributions.  I think this was a valuable session and we should do it again next year.

I've gotta agree, GenCon Oz was a great experience.

I ran a total of fifty-four people through my system in several sessions (ranging from 5 to 8 players per session), their backgrounds stretched from history buffs who tried to pick apart continuity errors, through to those who tried to dismantle the games approach to quantum physics. From "Fed-with-a-spoon" D&D players through to a team with almost 60 years of Theatresports improvisational mayhem between the six of them.

I had players who enjoyed the game so much that they desperately wanted to play again, and a final session where a representative of a local retailer sat in on the session based on feedback she had heard from other participants.

Every session taught me something valuable about the game, and virtually every players gave me some insight about how it could be refined and improved through their play or through feedback once the game had been completed.

One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't get the chance to participate in some of the other indy games on offer.

We've already started to make plans for next year, as well as making plans to tour the Eighth Sea across the conventions all up and down Australia's eastern seaboard for the next year or so.

I've just come off a 1000km single day drive home, and I'm still hyped up on guarana at this stage...so I hope my enthusiasm for the past week is from the adrenaline and enjoyment of the con, and not the energy drinks in my veins.

V

Of course it's a high on Gen Con!  Today was the first time I could write down anything logical about the Space Rat games I ran - it has taken four days to come down from that buzz.  It sounds like things went really, really well for the Eigth Sea.  Way to go!

I was really happy with the reception of Space Rat.  While I didn't run anywhere near as many games as you did, I did come away feeling very pleased that it held up to the play of strangers as it did with the other groups I have run for.  And I really had a blast - after my last game on Friday night I was on such a rush I went on to game until 2.30am!  I even managed to get Space Rat noticed enough to sell it to people that weren't even at Gen Con! 

My only real dissappointment of the entire con (I have two actually) were (a) not playing Eigth Sea (shame on me!) and (b) missing the Sunday afternonn game design seminar.  That will teach me for booking flights so far ahead!  I think that we have really tapped something important, as far as Australian gaming and cons go, and look forward to building on this in future years.

Finally back from my trip to Queensland.

GenCon Oz - Fantastic! The event worked better than expected. It was my initial intent to just run some games, I guess, for people who had and had not played the particular ones I was interested in running. What surprised me though, because I didn't even think about it, was that some players were introduced to new ways of gaming and new ideas in playing and storytelling. So on top of having fun in the session - that's totally a win.

Thanks to Nathan and Andrew for being involved and all the work and effort that went in to the menu design and running the games. Special thanks to Lon and Louise who backed us up with other games on offer. My brain is swimming with ideas for next year, but we'll need a bigger team, because the potential is both exciting and daunting!

I didn't get a chance to play Eighth Sea or Space Rat which was a shame - only managed to fill in for a session of Cold City when I had nothing else to do.

The Statistics
So we had the Indie Games Explosion running on the Friday and Saturday. There were 3 sessions per day, with 3 GMs available at each session.

Out of 90 potential spots for players - we had 70 spots filled, with some repeat players, and others asking about spots after the first day (and if there was anything going on the Sunday, which there was not sadly).

A good number of players introduced to new games and new ideas in gaming.

At least one player per one of my sessions run asking where they could find the game (I could only point them to our menu and respective websites).

From the 5 sessions I ran, I managed to run Primetime Adventures x2, Dust Devils x1, With Great Power x1 and Cold City x1. Wish I had a chance to run Hero's Banner too since I'm eager to get into some more of that. My back up GMs, Lon and Louise ran a session of Cold City and Primetime Adventures respectively.

Mention of the Indie Games by a player in a seminar towards the end of the con about their experience.

Looking Into The Future
From the discussion we had, we're looking to expand the number of sessions, GM numbers and games available for next year.

We had the idea to look at a team of about 10 GMs.

So far, I've had offers from 3 GMs to be involved and 1 Minion (a non GM who can help do desk admin and all that).