GenCon 2020 Online (July 30th-August 2nd) is now open for badge registration.
Badges for GenCon 2020 Online are FREE. They are simply a way to get people registered so they can use the registration to participate in many of the online events. Event submission is still ongoing, but plans include lots of streaming shows and content, Exhibitor demos and live streams, Discord community activities and remote gaming.
I would assume a fill schedule of events, games, streams, etc. will be posted at the GenCon Online site sometime next week after event submission closes.
My GenCon Online schedule is just about as crazy as my actual schedule would have been IRL. Esp. given that the “gap” on Friday night is filled by a playtest game for Season 5 of RTR’s New Guard teen superheroes campaign I’m a GM for. . .
The Wishlist gods were kind to me this year (I never even got to see my queue number, I was processed so fast), though my ordering and huge amount of time-slot overlaps means I kinda randomed into an extremely Fate-heavy lineup. Though, it is my favorite RPG by a considerable margin, so I’m not exactly unhappy about that :)
Many of the Seminars are being streamed to twitch; not sure about the games themselves. Check the main GenConTV twitch channel and see what’s up, I’d say!
Something I’ve been amazed by: virtually every event I’ve done so far (which is half a dozen multi-hour RPGs) has used a discord server at least for organizing people if not also for voice chat, video calls, and dice rolling, via bots.
The event coordinators for every single one of the various groups setting up these servers for the various games cannot figure out how to create a permanent invite link, necessitating them to send out new invite links day by day as players trickle in ahead of the start date, over and over again.
This is mostly astounding because changing the expiration time on your server’s invite link is ABSURDLY simple and VERY obvious, yet over and over again, admins for games keep just recreating one-day links and apologizing for all the trouble.
It’s one very small gripe in the middle of a lot of complaints I have this weekend, but the consistency and persistence of this issue is almost comic by this point.
My main gripe with the event from watching panels and reveals point if view is that parsing the schedule is nigh on impossible. I honestly find it way too hard to make sense of what’s happening where and when. So I doubyt bother watching anything. Likely a me issue because of not liking in the right place though.
Heh, funnily enough, this has been the year I’ve gone hardest into Seminars. Which I don’t think covers some of the big “main stream” stuff, but I’ve never paid that a lot of mind. So this stuff may not be much interest! Unsure.
But the following is a link to a tweaked search for “seminars that haven’t happened yet or started yet,” sorted by day and start time.
It’s a big list, no doubt, but I find it relatively easy to navigate. Signing up for an event now, fairly late in the con, you’d want to go to the “Event Messaging” tab in the event tab after securing your ticket (still needed, even for the free events) to see if the host has sent out a Zoom/Discord/Twitch link you’ll need to follow.
Similarly, a search narrowed down to RPG events that haven’t happened yet, aren’t sold out, and are in game systems I like or am interested in:
Basically, the search is powerful, but takes some clicking. And, of course, better to look through the event schedule ahead of “wishlist day,” when all events are still active/listed/available; it’s a little bit of a graveyard now as everything has filled up, heh.
But all of that might be useless advice if you’re looking for the main stream schedule or something from GenCon proper. But I thought about that well after I typed a lot of stuff, so adding note to top and posting anyway ;-)
Discord plus Tabletopia/TTS was mostly a shitshow and I dunno if I would participate again next time. I did win a game of Bosk and learned Aquatica, but learning Acquatica over Discord from Russians… that was something else.
Well Gencon has passed. Tabletopia + Discord + newbies to both was a shitshow. I learned and won Bosk. I preordered and played Aquatica and liked it despite an awful teacher with language diffficulties speaking Russian to 4 others trying to teach in the same small room. I missed my Holi time slot cause I had to head in to work on my normal lunch hour :(
