If you folks wish to get together and either co-exhibit or co-market on a more permanent basis:

Have you pondered putting together a one-page promo for all of your companies and games?

Might be useful for putting ads in program books, or just as a print flyer or mailer to stores and conventions.

Just a thought,
Trey

Trey, we have thought of and discussed all kinds of things, but there are some drawbacks to most of them.

The biggest is that there isn't an easy line to draw between who is part of this and who isn't.

Obviously, there are games that sprang out of theory discussions here at the Forge that are now in book form. At the risk of missing someone, I'm pretty sure Burning Wheel, My Life with Master, and Universalis are all solidly in that category--probably also Nicotine Girls, and there are others, but not a lot.

There are far more games that have benefited greatly from these discussions which have been or will be published--but not in book form. Legends of Alyria will soon be e-published, and I think several of us have been promoting it in large part because it is a great game. It won't be for sale on the table, but we're promoting it anyway. Still, probably every month someone makes a new game available through electronic publishing, and a lot of them are good, but they're not something you can put on the table.

Then there are people here who have published games who are independent publishers, but whose work did not spring from Forge connections, and it's difficult to know how to draw lines in the sand. My own Multiverser predates both The Forge and Ron's original publication of System Does Matter, and so gained nothing from it; Luke has kindly included it with other independent games on his distribution table as part of the Forge display, but I feel a bit like it's not really a Forge-inspired game (well, it isn't). On the other hand, Sorcerer pre-existed those articles and this site as well, but it clearly is included in the list. How do we decide what games get listed?

On a completely different tack, I see the problem you have with exhibitors not wanting independents to compete with them without paying for a table. However, I wonder whether there's a way that the convention staff could facilitate an alternative, particularly for independent game designers who either are running their games at the convention or arranging for someone else to run them. What I'm thinking is something like this. When I was at UNY-con, as soon as I arrived I looked around the exhibitor's hall and chose one vendor; I talked with him, and he agreed that he would put my books on his table, and reimburse me a pre-arranged amount for any copies that sold. In that particular case, the deal was that he could sell them for whatever price he wished, but I wanted 50% of the MSRP on each book sold when the convention ended. I don't know that every designer could do 50% (and frankly I'd have preferred 60% myself, but I was trying it out for the first time), but it struck me that if convention organizers included the possibility of connecting independent games presenters with dealers who have tables at the convention and are interested in stocking the games which are elsewhere being demoed on such an arrangement, that might get a lot of people past the problem of can't afford a table and can't staff it but need to sell games to justify being there.

For myself, for example, I'm frustrated by the fact that I can stay free in Bridgeton and I can stay free in Ramsey, and neither of those places is close enough to you to commute daily, so if I were going to do your con I'd have to lay out a couple hundred dollars to stay there which I'm probably not going to recoup on profits from sales even if I don't also have a table; then if I have a table, I either have to pay for someone else to stay there, too, to watch it, or I have to forego running any games. So I probably won't be there for a while yet, until I can figure out how to get around this complication.

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: ...but it struck me that if convention organizers included the possibility of connecting independent games presenters with dealers who have tables at the convention and are interested in stocking the games which are elsewhere being demoed on such an arrangement, that might get a lot of people past the problem of can't afford a table and can't staff it but need to sell games to justify being there.

M. J. Young wrote: For myself, for example, I'm frustrated by the fact that I can stay free in Bridgeton and I can stay free in Ramsey, and neither of those places is close enough to you to commute daily, so if I were going to do your con I'd have to lay out a couple hundred dollars to stay there which I'm probably not going to recoup on profits from sales even if I don't also have a table--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: The biggest is that there isn't an easy line to draw between who is part of this and who isn't.