On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Roger Burton West wrote: RBW>If at some point you find yourself travelling to the UK, there would be RBW>worse things to come over for. GenCon UK is rather bigger, but it's run RBW>by people who are still in the "tournament" mindset Here, I gather it's all "Living Greyhawk" mindset. RBW>Personally I thought the rot set in when they hired Jimmy Doohan. 1995, Maybe. Star Trek at least has a strong presence in roleplaying, though, so I'm not sure that was quite jumping the shark. 1994 was the only GenCon we ever went to, which was the (first) big year for MtG. You couldn't walk down a hallway without stepping on Magic games (literally; I gave up and walked on cards, which evidently the players were used to). RBW>I think. GenCon had always got along very nicely without non-gaming RBW>celebrities (I'd been going since 1988) - the authors they got in to do RBW>signings were at least people who'd written books related to gaming. RBW>That was the first explicitly non-game-related content that I came RBW>across, and at that point the doors were open for "anything we think the RBW>GenCon audience might enjoy". A certain amount of that is okay, I think, provided the "we think" is accurately guessed, and some modicum of taste is enforced. (There's certainly latitude; we *are* talking about a convention that involves actual chainmail bikinis.) RBW>I haven't been to a GenCon since before it left Milwaukee. In fact I RBW>think 1995's may have been the last one I got to. I suppose this means we were in a game together in 1994 and didn't know it (a la you and Tim last year)... -- Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
