Charlie! Have you been up all night surfing Gen Con websites?

Pat tossed me a couple of pitches for this entry, but they're both right decent pitches to hit and they tie together well, so I'll see if I can't get hold of both of them. Before I can talk about what we're finding in the To Do At Gen Con category, though, I've got to back up and tell you the story of a friend of ours. I'll call him Franklin.

Franklin was a high school friend of Pat's and a college chum of mine. He was one of those guys who combined a deep need to be impressive and cool and a casual relationship with honesty, which made his stories things of legend. Franklin was a guy who'd come back from the bathroom and tell you how Harrison Ford had walked in while he was taking care of business, asked him to be in the new Indiana Jones movie, offered him a box of the new super secret Cadbury's Cream Eggs, and flown out the window. A man who'd cheerfully tell you about the week he spent working as a blimp pilot, only to be cast from the flying blimp when it was revealed that he had no experience or credentials. And more insidiously, a man who'd randomly lie about stupid little stuff that was harder to catch. He'd say he'd eaten a hamburger for lunch when it had really been a taco - little, meaningless, weird weird crap like that.

I mention this because up until the last few days, almost all the information Pat and I had about what constitutes the Gen Con experience came from Franklin. Franklin's been going for years, and he'd tell Pat about it and Pat would tell me - always prefaced with the ubiquitous I'm-retelling-a-Franklin-story-here word "apparently..."

So when we started to look at what there was to do, we were pessimistic. We'd heard stories of randomly running into the authors that created the literary worlds of our childhood and stories of "full-sized" role playing - running around a room solving puzzles and finding traps - and stories of vats of dice and so on. And we'd never bothered to question them, because we wanted to believe Gen Con was really that cool. And frustrating though Franklin's talent for spontaneous improvisation can be, the man can spin a tale, so we let him go on.

Early this week, though, was different. We were registered, we had a room, and it was time to start tackling the question of exactly what we were going to do for two days in Indianapolis come mid-August. Several questions needed to be answered, but the three main ones were these:

1. What is there to do, really? What does a gaming convention offer? Will we be able to sit down and play role-playing games? To watch presentations on new developments and offerings? To play board games? To buy - and even have a chance to win, or receive free in some promotional way - new games? To play CCG card games? All sorts of other cool stuff? Perhaps most importantly, is there in fact a Vat of Dice?


2. How much does it cost? The basic registration fee we've already paid gets us in, but individual events have some extra $$ associated with them - is that where Gen Con makes their money? What's the price for the extra stuff that's the meat of the event?


3. What's the schedule? What time do things start in the morning and finish at night? The last bus that runs from downtown to our hotel leaves the convention center at 6:40; will things be wrapped up by then?

To the Internet I went to try to answer some of these questions. I found several My-Trip-To-Gen-Con blogs (although, in all modesty, nothing like what this one's shaping up to be in terms of completeness and sheer volume of blathering) which gave me some strong hints about the answers to those questions, and then found the mother lode with this site. That link will take you to a complete list of the events at Gen Con 2007. When they happened, what they were, how much they cost. Lo, our three main questions were answered. I'll break the answers down in list form, too (ordinal structure R us!).

1. So much to do I can't even start to list it all. All of those things and more and more and more. here's the site again if you didn't click on the link the first time it went by. There are role playing sessions of every RPG system I've ever heard of and quite a few I haven't, there are MTG tournaments, there are workshops on everything from belly dancing and chain mail making to being a better DM and getting published as a fantasy author, there are board game sessions and tournaments (including some old chestnuts from my youth like Kingmaker and Rail Baron!), and on and on. And there is indeed a Vat of Dice! Franklin understated things, if anything. Which, as anyone out there who knows him will agree, is weird.


2. Surprisingly cheap! Most events are an extra $1.50 per 2 hour block. The big ones are a little more, but they're definitely not the soaking I feared they'd be.


3. Things are happening 24 hours a day. Which is why the hotels right next to the Convention Center sell out within hours. Looking at rates for some of those hotels, I'm seeing that they're $300/night (though maybe there's a reduced rate for people who register through Gen Con) instead of the $40/night we're paying Sherry and her Merry Men, but they're connected to the Convention Center by skywalks. And things are happening 24 hours a day.
   
   Now, not to misrepresent myself or seem like I'm second-guessing us - I still think we totally made the right decision. Adjoining building-level convenience isn't worth $750 for us, I don't think. But we're just first-level (as we're called) Gen Conners; as much as anything we're going to see what this whole thing is really about. We can take a bus downtown in the morning - it'll take 40 minutes but only cost $1.50 and we'll get to see some of Indianapolis - and take a cab back for $20 (only $10 each) whenever we're done with our day. And maybe one of the days we'll even be ready to head back about suppertime - neither Pat nor I are really big, noisy crowds sorts of people. It depends on what we decide to register to do, I suppose. And that won't be decided until Event Registration opens on April 20.

So there are some questions answered and from them spring new ones. Which is good, because if this week is any indication Pat and I are going to squeeze every drop of juice out of any possible thing-related-to-Gen-Con conversation topic, and the more new topics the better, and it gives us more to blog about. So here's a topic for you, Pat, that I'd be interested in reading about - what are your thoughts on these things-to-do possibilities? What's highest on your really-really-wanna list?

I hope we see Franklin there. Maybe he'll even be (pardon the inside joke, Readership Multitudes) "buying textbooks."