I decided to break up my thoughts about Gen Con into multiple posts, because I have too many to share in just one. Here are a few final odds and ends from my weekend at Gen Con.

Arrival and Badge Pickup

Rather than flying into Indianapolis directly, I flew to Michigan, stayed with Erika and her family for a couple of days, then drove down to Gen Con together, about four hours of driving plus stops. We got in around noon on Thursday.

Now here’s where I admit that I screwed up. I had elected to have my badge mailed to me so that I wouldn’t have to pick it up at will call at the convention. Good thinking, except that I wasn’t at home to receive the package, which needed to be signed for, and I didn’t make it to the post office, so it got sent back to Gen Con headquarters. Fortunately, they’re ready for this sort of thing, and they said on their website that they’d have returned badges available at will call. No big deal.

What was a big deal was the ridiculous line for will call on early Thursday afternoon. The line stretched half the length of the convention center, out the door, and onto the sidewalk. I was in line for about an hour, causing us to miss our first event.

Two lessons learned: pick up your mail from the post office; and leave lots of time for will call if you must.

The Hotel

Months ago, the plan had been that Erika would book the hotel when registration opened up. Everyone who signs up to get a hotel through the Gen Con website gets a random assignment for when they can log in and reserve a hotel room, because the hotels near the convention are guaranteed to sell out.

But Erika’s spot in the lottery was several hours worse than mine, and early in the day when rooms started getting booked, she let me know that it might be better if I picked a room up instead. But I was also in the middle of a D&D session and not mentally or logistically well prepared for this. We ended up booking at the Candlewood Suites, I think for some combination of cost and proximity.

I did not realize that Candlewood Suites is more like an extended stay hotel. It’s a fully furnished one bedroom apartment. Had we known this earlier, we would have brought some food to cook our own breakfasts.

Speaking of which…

The Food

The food trucks this year were open for breakfast. I got lunch a couple of times last year at the food trucks, and wasn’t really stoked on the whole thing. I don’t generally like food trucks that much to begin with. They usually take just as long and cost just as much as going to a standard lunch place, and you don’t even have anywhere to sit down and relax comfortably while you eat. Nevertheless, breakfast on Friday and Sunday consisted of lackluster food truck breakfast sandwiches, just for the convenience.

It’s remarkable how narrow your scope tends to be for food when you’re at a convention. You may be in a bustling city with incredible food options, but if those options aren’t within two blocks of the convention center, they may as well not exist at all. Erika and I tried to defy this, and went just a little bit further for dinner on a couple of nights, and it was definitely worth it.

We also grabbed some beers on Thursday night that we only got about halfway through before the end of the weekend. I did manage to turn Erika on to Pacifico, my favorite cheap beer.

The Exhibitors Hall

My wanderings of the hall were pretty undirected. The only three places I really made sure to find were Skybound Games to say hello to my friends there, Paizo to get the new Pathfinder Playtest rulebook, and CritSuccess to get a counter ring. I briefly ogled some fancy dice from Crystal Caste and others, and I bought a random mug full of random dice from Chessex for Iron GM. I also bought a GM screen from Hammerdog Games.

It excited me to see Skybound of course promoting their upcoming game, Pitchstorm, which my good friend Ben created. The Kickstarter for it is over, but you should still check it out! I promise I’m not biased or anything.

Iron GM World Championship

I have just a couple of things to add regarding this event, which was the bulk of my Saturday. In fact, I didn’t do anything else at all at Gen Con that day. After the event, I fell asleep back at the hotel room until Erika got back from hanging with her cosplay friends, and we ordered pizza for dinner.

Later, I stayed up too late in the living room of our suite writing up my thoughts on Iron GM, finishing around 2:30 AM Indy time. Lou, the fellow in the orange suit at Iron GM, commented on that post, inviting me to email them to talk more about my experience at the event. Nice to be heard, right?

I haven’t heard back yet, but I’ll update if that changes.

Final Thoughts: Focus

My focus on Gen Con this year, if you’ve been keeping up, was clearly the tabletop RPGs. That’s what I spend the great majority of my gaming time doing, so that’s how I spent most of my time at the convention. I’m lucky that I had my con buddy Erika was up for all of that. The Iron GM event was also a nice long stretch of time for her to connect with some other cosplay friends of hers.

I focused so heavily on the TRPGs because last year was so overwhelming with the number of things going on that I accepted this year that there’d be no way to do all of it. This tweet (if you’ll forgive the second erroneous “creative” that should be “creating”) sums up that feeling for me:

So you just have to pick the thing (or small handful of things) you want to do, and ignore the inevitable FOMO. And I don’t regret any of it, not even the less-than-stellar Dungeon World game. There’s always next year and a new opportunity to make another scratch on the surface of these unfathomable depths.