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PAX Prime Volunteers Still Needed

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Paul
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PAX Prime Volunteers Still Needed

Greetings awesome people!

We currently have all of the volunteers we need for Gen Con, but are a few volunteers short for PAX Prime. If you or anyone you know is interested in volunteering, here's what we offer:

  • You work 50% of the expo hours (which run 10-6 Friday through Monday) running GTG games
  • We get you:
    • an exhibitor badge
    • a tshirt
    • dinner and drinks Thursday evening

Feel free to cross-post!


“Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” ~Obi-Wan Kenobi

Donner
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My brother is interested in volunteering.


"Deja-fu? You've heard of that?"
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Paul
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Great! Have him send me an email! (paul@greaterthangames.com)

Also, if anyone knows any other places where people might be interested in volunteering for us, please feel free to repost this! For PAX East, I think someone posted us on reddit or something, and we got a lot of response from external channels.


“Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” ~Obi-Wan Kenobi

Deimir
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Next year. Definitely next year.

Rabit
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Glad you came by Deimir - great to meet you! laugh


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HikariStarshine
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Pre-emptively volunteering for PAX Prime 2015.

Fingers crossed for a room of our own next year, like what Fantasy Flight does...  The Gigabyte booth was ridiculously annoying.

Donner
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So hard to demo a game with 50 voices all yelling at once at a nearby booth.


"Deja-fu? You've heard of that?"
- Lu Tze, Sweeper, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

Rabit
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*sigh* Yeah... frown


"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal

Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)

Matchstickman
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I see no other place to post this so... I've only found the one video of PAX Panels involving our heroes, this one here

PAX Prime 2014 - How to Love and Hate Tabletop Games, with Christopher.


Stop lurking, it makes you look like a villain target
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all

Temporary image until an H emoticon is added!

HikariStarshine
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Rabit
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*sigh*

That comes down to the facilitator (as I responded). Sounds like the facilitator took liberties with the demo setup, for starters, which took the entire demo down the wrong path - and then they didn't help the players recover from it. sad

Unfortunately, it happens. Some facilitators are better than others, as we've probably all experienced. wink


"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal

Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)

Ronway
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Rabit wrote:

Some facilitators are better than others, as we've probably all experienced. wink

I haven't.

Rabit
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Ronway wrote:

Rabit wrote:
 

Some facilitators are better than others, as we've probably all experienced. wink

 

I haven't.

Yes, but you're always breaking the rules... wink


"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal

Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)

Ronway
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Rabit wrote:

Yes, but you're always breaking the rules... wink

Reducing my own HP to 0 is totally not against the rules.

Edit: Also! Only 5 heroes do not kill themselves by either dealing themself damage, redirecting damage to themself, or increasing damage dealt to them. Those heroes are The Wraith, Expatriette, Omnitron-X, Parse, and Unity. And Unity gained a promo that is all about killing herself to do things, so really there are only 4 heroes who do not have card that do such a thing. So killing yourself is totally encouraged! Woo!

Pydro
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"Suicde is painless..."


Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
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Donner
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This makes me sad. :(. We were improving our demoing as we went along.  (For example, initially all heroes started on the edge of the map, then move to the center, but Bunker would often get to the fight late.  So I let them deploy anywhere in their hex section after that.). But there was also a strategic element here they didn't take into account.  You can see everyone's move distance and should probably stick near your teammates if you don't want to be ovewhelmed.  

And we demoers are learning more as we go.  We aren't perfect out of the box either.

Personally, I think they should play a game a few times before reviewing.  Especially if they had a bad start like this.


"Deja-fu? You've heard of that?"
- Lu Tze, Sweeper, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

Rabit
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Donner wrote:
This makes me sad. :(

Me, too - especially since I should have caught and corrected it. frown

Donner wrote:
We were improving our demoing as we went along. (For example, initially all heroes started on the edge of the map, then move to the center, but Bunker would often get to the fight late. So I let them deploy anywhere in their hex section after that.).

This is really great, Donner. The original intention of the demo was for exactly what you ended up doing! We made a call before the con to try to reduce choices by limiting them to the far edge of the hex, but it looks like that created some additional issues that you resolved with your changes. That kind of change is great and clearly improves gameplay - that's the kind of feedback GTG needs to get.

Honestly, I wish we'd asked everyone for feedback before they left each day and then disseminated it before each shift. sad (I'll bring that up to Paul for future consideration.)

Ah, well. Next time things will be better. cool

On that note, anyone who demoed at PAX, if you have any feedback on how things went or thoughts on ways to improve the demos or the process around them, please send me or Paul a note. It really is greatly appreciated - even if it's "Don't let Rabit coordinate anything ever again!"

Seriously, let us know.

Donner wrote:
And we demoers are learning more as we go. We aren't perfect out of the box either.

Definitely! It takes practice to run a good demo. It also takes other skills, but I think most people can learn how to run a demo, with sufficient practice and feedback.

Of course, that practice should probably be in situations where newcomers won't be traumatized... wink

Donner wrote:
Personally, I think they should play a game a few times before reviewing. Especially if they had a bad start like this.

That I completely agree with. If I based my opinion of Pandemic on the last game I played (in which we lost before the first player even finished their first turn) and wrote a review of it... Well, that'd be ridiculous. angry

But yeah, I agree. A review based on a game or two just doesn't generally do it - for good or bad.


"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal

Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)

Braithwhite
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From the perspective of someone who played, and then later introduced people to the game...

While playing the demo:

One of the big things that struck me is that the skirmish style really doesn't do the game justice.  I ended up playing several skirmishes where the entire thing would be dominated by one hero/villain, like Tachyon utterly demolishing everyone and taking two turns back to back, or Bunker blowing people away with a grenade launcher, or the baron pulling off a massive AoE because eveyone had been stockpiling tokens.  This led to anyone who didn't play that particular hero/villain to have a bad reaction immediately, because the person they got to test out didn't really have a time to shine.

The other big thing is that the game itself is designed so that incaps aren't supposed to be gamestoppers.  There are a few scenarios that revolve around incapping someone X number of times, but that someone always has advantages that make them more dangerous.  Theres a give and take- you hav eto take risk to get the incap, but that leaves you exposed for retaliation, which might give the bad guy a bonus...  In a skirmish, incaps are everything.  With the end condition being "first team to two incaps", theres a lot of hesitancy to commit.  All it takes is one good attack to win things, or lose them, and once that first incap is reached, everyone backed WAY off and started hesitating.  

 

Post-game:

After the demos I participated in, I took some of the people who were very vocal about their dislike or the OP nature of X hero, and let them play against me in the Tabletop section in the first baron Blade scenario.  In each case, the scenario highlighted the great aspects of the game, and the push-pull nature of the incaps started to shine.  It came down to the wire each time, and they all said that they had changed their mind on the game and were going to get it.  It was 3 games, with 3 different people, so its not a statistically significant sample. And each play session took an extended amount of time.  So I can't say that this will be reproducible with everyone!

 

In terms of things that could be done...

Concoct a scenario specifically for demo purposes.  I had the idea for a king of the hill thing with citizen Dawn- One player gets Dawn and  one or two citizens, and the other players are trying to knock her off the hill.  5 rounds, whichever team controls the mountain for the most time wins.  Maybe add in some lava for clever players to exploit!  

Craig
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I believe I heard a rumour that Kevin was writing a con scenario.


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