From: Allan Goodall <agoodall@a...>
Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2002 09:12:28 -0500
Subject: [OT] GenCon (was Re: GenCon Plans Anyone?)
On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 03:32:22 -0500, Scott Siebold <gamers@ameritech.net> wrote: > I started roleplaying with something called Dungeons and Dragons when I > was in service (a It was a 16K Commodore Pet for me. Started playing D&D in 1977, two years after playing my first wargame (_Panzer Leader_, got it for my 13th birthday). > The reason I stopped was that the people that I regularly > seemed to have > gold pieces You should have played with the _Call of Cthulhu_ crowd. *L* CoC didn't come around until something like 1981 or 1982, but it's been popular ever since. In fact, it is quite possibly _best_ played at conventions, as it really suits one-off adventures. > I signed up to put on events (I think it was two games That system has changed. It hasn't been in place for a number of years now. > I was at the formation meeting for HMGS in the midwest. There were Ah, okay. One of the HMGS-East executives said, on Usenet, that the formation of HMGS was due to Origins refusing to give a handful of people free entrance to the con to put on games. That's a paraphrase, but that's what was said. Thank you for the clarification! > Strangely enough the midwest chapter never had the total anti SciFi I haven't been to Historicon, just Fall In. I remember seeing the PEL from a couple of years ago and reading that they put a cap at 10% non-historical. There are a lot of guys in HMGS-East's executive who don't care for playing anything other than historicals. > As a side point a Leonardo game, that I played in, was fully allowed at > Historicon where everything *L* Well, that _is_ history... of a sort. *L* Some folks just don't get the difference. > They didn't want the convention overrun by Oh, that definitely would be true. I meant that the reason for the continued ban is Warhammer. Some of them are getting somewhat peeved at Warhammer Ancient Battles and Warhammer ECW games, but those _are_ historical games and can't actually be banned. > I didn't see any ban on "Nuclear Destruction" game (yes it is a card That would be either "Nuclear War" or "Nuclear Escalation", I bet. I recently sold NE on eBay. It was the sequel to NW, though also a stand alone game. Quite popular for a while. It's interesting to see how people categorize certain games. > I will go to Historicon (about 750 miles for four days) because I can > see what's new. I will not go That makes sense. Since I like playing CoC, and Stargrunt, and FT I will probably end up going to GenCon or Origins. I will also try to hit one or two historical miniatures conventions that are only 5 hours away rather than 12. > A message was sent out by the president of HMGS midwest to get members That isn't how it works, unless HMGS is paying out of pocket for you. The rule at GenCon since at least 1996 (and probably a good deal earlier than that) was that you registered as a judge and submitted your games. You got a judge's badge. If you ran 16 hours worth of events, you got your registration fee back. You got the fee right there at the convention. There was a sheet you got as a judge that you had signed by the guys at Miniatures HQ (I also signed the sheets for the GZG judges who asked me to; apparently there was no way of actually checking if it was a valid signature or not). They paid you right there, before you left the convention. The problem with asking for historical games at GenCon was that he asked well after the deadline for getting the events into the pre-registration book. A lot of folks won't bother running games if it isn't in the pre-reg book, because it's hard to fill up the slots. I can't remember if I saw the first posting before or after the date that GenCon was open for pre-registering. If you don't pre-reg right away, due to Milwaukee's housing bureau system, you may not get a convenient hotel. I don't know, though, if the guy doing the organizing was going through GenCon's judge co-ordinator. If you did, as I did the last two times I ran the GZG events, you got preferential treatment in getting a room. No special rate other than the con rate, but you did get a better hotel. Historical miniatures at GenCon has been on a steady decline at least since 1995 (that year the number of historical games was actually quite good for a generic convention). I think a number of people just threw up their hands and made other plans. A posting in Usenet and some Yahoo groups isn't going to make many people change their minds. It's too bad, because one of the reasons I stopped going to GenCon was a dearth of historical games. > [quoted text omitted]