Knights & Knaves Alehouse

I floated the idea of a virtual convention over at the Dungeon Delver's forum a while ago. The special being offered by Goblinoid Games made me wonder if OSRIC isn't big enough to generate a web-based convention ... or at least a sales day that pulls people to take a look at some of the material that's being produced. Buy two, get one free, things like this, you know, one day only sorts of things.

We could do stuff to add to the spirit of it, too - produce a free pdf of an adventure, or schedule the release of one or two for-profit resources; try to get the publishers to release something on that date. I'm just mulling it over, but what do you guys think?

I like the idea. Being in Japan, it's about the only way that I could go to a con.

An interesting idea...

Assuming this would really be virtual...the only hitch is finding a time doable for the most people. I'm guessing a weekend night, at a time that would be past too many people's bedtimes...depending on where you are around the world.

If it's intended to stretch over a period of time... say a day... then that's not such a big problem.

You can count me in. I'll do anything I can to promote OSRIC.

Daniel Proctor wrote:You can count me in. I'll do anything I can to promote OSRIC.

Awesome! I'm still not clear on all the logistics of doing a con. Structuring any gaming would absolutely be the biggest challenge. In the absence of the ability to do gaming, we might need a different spin on what the event actually is. The objective is to be fun, promote OSRIC, get people to try out the products, introduce the publishers, and make enough profits for the publishers to continue to make 1e publishing a profitable venture. With these goals in mind, it's worth starting from scratch to build a plan for an internet event that meets these goals.

Profit to the publishers might sound like an odd goal for a fan effort, but the effort is centered upon creating 1e products. Clear thinking immediately directs that goal toward the publishers' incentive - and that's profit. We want to incentivize the publishers to keep making good products for us. The best way to grow the hobby is to build the product base so that the core system can break into traditional marketing venues.

Anyway, I'm rambling.

Myth, do such online events like this occur for other games or products? If so, it might be worthwhile taking a look at how they did it.

AxeMental wrote:Myth, do such online events like this occur for other games or products? If so, it might be worthwhile taking a look at how they did it.

Wizards does something. I don't know of any others. ENworld holds sales on d20 products; that's the only across-the-board sale on a single game by multiple publishers I know of.

We're in a different ball park, because we're tiny compared to the d20 market. It's going to take some outside the box thinking if we want this to be more than just a "sale day," although even that would be cool.

I haven't had any brilliant ideas since yesterday. So far here's all we've got:

1) get publishers to discount products on a particular day. This can be tied to a coupon number that you get at a specific site, just as Daniel did yesterday for Halloween.

2) tie the discounts to the releases of some new products as well.

Possible other thoughts:

3) take orders for a t-shirt or other commemorative item. With prepayments, there's no significant risk to the vendor. This might be a possibility for you to sell a t-shirt with the OSRIC painting, Axe. Problematic detail: cost depends on volume, and you don't know volume in advance.

4) gaming. If we figure this one out, we've created a new development on the net. Years of 3e attempts by huge numbers of people haven't figured out how to do a D&D game over the net in a fast and furious style. So, I don't think we can realistically expect to do gaming at this event. Huge obstacle for making this more than a sale.

We could do a tournament of one-on-one battles between magic users or fighters with a referee, I suppose. I don't think there'd be much interest.

If we had a grid arrangement on a pre-prepared map, we could do a battle tournament of small teams. An interesting map might make this work. Again, I see little interest.

I think the only game that would be of interest would be an actual adventure, and that would be beyond the scope of what's possible. I don't see hanging out on a computer for four hours of online gaming that moves really slowly. Enough others might disagree to make it work, but I don't see it without a phone connection. I know HALO players use a phone connection, but I don't know how it works.

I know this would be a great deal of work, but what about setting up an HTML based "choose your own adventure" thing? It would be a way to allow people to play at home with their own character. There could be different puzzles or hints at various points that grant people coupon numbers for discounted products. It would be like a combination of solo gaming/scavenger hunt. People could stop on any page they are at to do other things (i.e. use the rest room, feed the kids, etc.) and just pick up on the page they left off.

Combine this with a chat room in another page open at the same time where people can talk real time, and it might be the closest thing to a "convention" we can muster online.

Anyway, just an idea.

Dan

Could do some Q&A on the site of some harder to reach folks. Perhaps some of the original artists, or old TSR employees who don't normally post at Enworld or DF, as well as the regulars like Steve Marsh.

To generate traffic we could do some raffle give aways, or some competitions for something as a prize. Maybe a signed copy of OSRIC by Matt Finch would be cool.

This idea is brilliant. Matt, you're a f-ing genius.

To get that 'con' atmosphere going, we need chat -- ideally IRC-based chat with several chatrooms (one each for the games, one for hanging out in, one for auctions and adverts). This is way beyond my technical abilities so I have no idea how feasible it is.

Help! Is there a tech-nerd in the house?

I really like Daniel's solo adventure game idea, although I'm sure it would take a lot of hard work to pull off correctly.

Does anyone here know how to, or know anyone else that can, program in Flash? I've seen numerous Flash based RPG games and some are pretty darn good. Take a look at Adventure Quest (although I don't really care for the actual game play of AQ) or various games at Newgrounds for an example of how elaborate one can get with it.

Heck, if we can get somebody who knows how to use Flash then an official online OSRIC Flash game might be a worthy long-term project.

The easy part:

The trade show area could have a start page that's html, with "booths" that are banner links. Even I could program a page like that. A sponsor might buy a banner ad from K&KA.

Booths might be free, or might cost a nominal amount paid to K&KA (if enough people want booths, the size and the location over the fold might be the ones asked for a few bucks). "Price" might include product to be used as prizes for something. We want to encourage vendors to offer discounts or release new OSRIC modules, so these guys would probably pay no fee or automatically get good placement on the trade show page. Products that would make sense would be:

1. Obviously, all the OSRIC publishers offering their OSRIC stuff and whatever else they sell.
2. Garage sale stuff from regular posters who want to unload an old PHB or (on the other end of the scale) real D&D collectibles.
3. Dice
4. T-shirts and other stuff like coffee mugs or whatever they sell.
5. Whatever else.

This page would probably benefit from a "PA system" that's a rolling banner or announcement frame. Limited time specials and announcements about other things going on could be broadcast this way.

That's the easy stuff I can think of. Still working on how to do games. It seems like a Skype-based game would be possible, but it would require some preparation by the players ahead of time, a thus would almost need to be an informal game arranged ahead of time. How do do an actual "drop in" game is harder to figure out.