My Dungeons and Dragons Dealer

In the fall of 1978, I had never heard of Dungeons and Dragons, even though I lived only 40 miles from Lake Geneva, WI where it had been created four years earlier. I spent a lot of time playing Avalon Hill and SPI wargames by myself. I had recently met a few new friends at my high school who seemed interested in games, but my older sister didn't know that. She met a young man at her local university who liked the same games I did and convinced him to spend an afternoon playing Third Reich with me.

While his little cardboard German army counters were marching across England, he asked if I had ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons. I hadn't. After we packed up, I went outside with him and he opened the trunk of his car. His Dungeons and Dragons supplies were back there - contraband in the late seventies and early eighties as conservative groups tried to blame the game for suicides and devil worship.

He had multiple, odd-sized books of cryptic charts and tables, bags of strangely-shaped dice, and a huge sheet of graph paper covered with a drawing of a complex dungeon his players had been exploring for months. I'd never heard of a role-playing game and was fascinated by the idea of playing the same character session after session. Here was a game that created story.

Later that week, I went to the small hobby shop in a local mall (it's now the ladies shoe department of JC Penny's) and bought the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (the Blue Box). I had never seen anyone play the game, but I figured out as much as I could. It wasn't the pages of rules that confused me - I had Avalon Hill games with just as many - it was the lack of any apparent structure. Did we take turns? Were the squares on the maps like game board spaces? How did I determine what the monsters did next? As the dungeon master, was I trying to win by killing the player's characters?

I created a simple dungeon and convinced my new friends to play. Our first session was surprisingly consistent with how we would roleplay together for years to come.

Our First Dungeon

I loved it, but I wasn't entirely sure if anyone else did. It was especially hard to read my friend Tim. He was tall, strong, and absolutely brilliant, but he didn't talk much or get too excited. He spotted me the next day at school, firmly pushed me against the lockers, held me there and said, "We're playing again tonight, right?"

We played that night and for our last two years of high school. Four of us went to college together in Madison and recruited new players there. We went to our first Gen Con in 1979 and I've been to thirty-six more since. I've written for Dungeon magazine and other roleplaying publications, and my sons have been playing D&D now for over twenty years.

I can trace it all back forty years to that one visit from my sister's friend, who took the time to play a game with her little brother and introduce him to a whole new world. I'm sad to say I don't remember his name, and neither does my sister. Maybe someday I'll find a way to track him down and thank him. Or play D&D with him. I'm sure he still plays.

10 Tips for Gen Con 2018

Gen Con 2018 will be my 37th Gen Con, and I have a few tips to pass along. Let me start by saying that my Gen Con experience might be different than yours, especially if you fly into Indy and are going to be by yourself. I drive down from Milwaukee and I have dozens of family members and friends there for pick-up games, so we don't do too many official gaming events. But please read on, as most of these tips will still apply.

HOTEL

Getting a downtown hotel is the greatest challenge of Gen Con. If you pre-purchase a badge before the hotel block registration opens, you'll receive an email with the earliest time you can log in on hotel registration day. These times are chosen by lottery. Note that downtown hotel space has become so scarce that, even with 8 time slots in our core Gen Con group, we have been unable to get a downtown hotel in the last two years. I suspect we've just been terribly unlucky. The only tip here is to make sure each person going buys their own badge and doesn't buy badges for anyone else, because only actual purchasers get a time slot. Note that there are some hotel rooms in downtown Indy that are not allocated to Gen Con (though not many). You'll pay a lot more for these, and you should reserve them at least 18 months in advance. Don't feel defeated if you don't get a downtown hotel - there are plenty on the outskirts of the city. They're generally cheaper, and they try hard to cater to the gamers that are stuck out there. You'll just have to drive into the city every day, which brings me to ...

PARKING

If you've never been to Gen Con before, you may not realize how important parking is. This is a game convention, so you'll probably have lots of games with you, or miniatures, or whatever. Chances are, even if you get a hotel downtown, you'll be a few blocks away. You're car may be the closest place to the convention center where you can store things. When we do manage to get a hotel downtown, we show up Wednesday night just as office workers are leaving, grab a spot in the parking structure right next to the convention center, and don't budge from that spot until Sunday. Surprisingly, it's probably cheaper than Valet parking at your hotel, and you can get to your car and its contents whenever you like. If you are driving in every day (as we are this year), finding a parking spot in the morning, especially on Thursday and Friday, can be frustrating. I always reserve a parking spot ahead of time. There are a few online sites that do this, but I use ParkWhiz. It'll cost you about the same ($20 a day) but you'll know there's a spot waiting for you.

FOOD

There are so many food options now at Gen Con that it's hardly worth giving any tips. At lunch time, the pedestrian mall outside the convention center is swarming with food trucks. There are dozens or restaurants (some cheap, some expensive), and there's always the food court at the mall. Prime time for lunch seems to be around 1-2pm, and the dinner rush starts at 6pm when the exhibit hall closes, so if you can stagger your eating schedule, your lines will be shorter. The last tip here is to find the elevated walkway shortcut from the Hyatt hotel mezzanine to the mall food court - you'll avoid traffic lights and crowds on the streets and stay in air conditioning the whole way.

WILL CALL VS MAIL

When you register for your badge and your events you can choose to have them mailed to you or you can pick them up at the Will Call window when you get there. Gen Con has become amazingly efficient at getting people through the Will Call line on Wednesday night, but it can still take as long as 45 minutes. If you're confident that you'll remember to bring your badge with you, having it mailed to you should save you some time.

EXHIBIT HALL OPENING

This is more of a recommendation than a tip. If you've never done it before, show up for the exhibit hall opening on Thursday morning. You should get there by 9:30 to get  decent view, especially if you want to watch from up on the balcony. The Gen Con opening ceremony is strange and sometimes dorky and maybe a little too long, but it's worth it to watch the sea of gamers flowing into the hall at ten o'clock.

COSTUME VIEWING

Costume watching is a fun and free part of Gen Con, and some of them are amazing. You'll see plenty of costumes as you move from event to event - you can't avoid it - but if you want to see the most, and best costumes in one place and take photos, show up in the big hallway outside the exhibit hall on Saturday, an hour or two before the costume parade starts. This is when attendees with the most elaborate costumes are sure to be suited up and available. There are designated areas in that main hallway where costumed attendees can pose for pictures without blocking traffic. Also note that you should normally ask permission before taking someone's photo, but if they're in the designated posing areas, or walking in the costume parade, you can assume you have  permission to take their photo.

PLAY BEFORE YOU PAY

All this logistics and atmosphere is great, but you've really come to Gen Con to play games, and probably to buy a few new games. Why not try them before you buy them?  Most game companies in the exhibit hall offer short demo sessions of their games, and sometimes they have a separate area in the board game hall to do longer demos. You could also check the game library to see if you can check out the game you're interested and play it with a couple friends.

OPEN GAMING SPACE

My biggest gripe with Gen Con before it left Milwaukee was that there were no open tables where my friends and I could play games. The move to Indy fixed that in a big way, but now the convention and hotel spaces are getting full again. One way to find a table is to search the adjoining hotels - they sometimes have some open space set aside in lobbies, mezzanines, or ballrooms. Stake out a table before the exhibit hall closes if you intend to play in the evening when demand is highest. Perhaps the easiest way to get a table is to go to one of the event coordination stations in the huge gaming halls and just ask for one, They usually have some tables that are currently unused. This always seems to work, but your time slot will be limited to a few hours and the halls can get pretty noisy.

FREE SEMINARS

Sometimes it's nice to take a short break from gaming. Gen Con has hundreds of free seminars you can sit in for an hour or so. These cover all different topics: release plans of game companies, advice for authors, use of games in therapy, and Q&A sessions with celebrities - This year I'm seeing authors James S. A. Corey (The Expanse) and David Brin (The Postman, Uplift).

WANDER

My final tip is to set aside some time to just wander around the convention hall and attached hotels. You may find a few interesting events you didn't know were happening, and at the very least, you'll get a sense of the amazing size of the convention. You're part of an invasion force of tabletop gamers, three times the size of all the combined armies at the Battle of Hastings, that have taken over a medium sized American city.