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I wasn't bad-mouthing WotC or Hasbro for making money.  I heard they brought Monte Cook in to help them fix the disaster that was 4.0.  But regardless, I'm happy when ANY game company is doing well enough to put out new product.  If they make money, all the better--maybe they'll inspire some board game and war game enthusiasts to start producing.  My only gripe with whoever owns D&D now is the way they treated they're 3.5 and miniatures' game customers.  We got pretty short shrift.  And while I don't expect them to support long out of print games, it wouldn't have killed them to save the archives (or as they called them, "web enhancements") on they're website.  I bought many adventures, splat books, and magazines in the 3.5 era, only to read that I could get "the rest" of the product as a web enhancement online.  Epic Handbook was a memorable snafu.  Of course I called to tell them that not all of us are computer savvy, and a few of us don't use computers at all, or despise using them, and they shouldn't sell incomplete products.  When they were in Washington (and no, I don't know if they still have offices there or not), they were very accommodating.  They mailed me the web enhancements.  Customer Service was something they did a fine job on.  But all this is off point, and I do not like to hijack threads.  Just wanted to clear up the misconception that I have anything against capitalism.   I am thrilled that GenCon was successful and that there appears to be a more diverse group than ever hat are into role-playing games.  

On Wednesday, August 10, 2016 at 3:00:46 AM UTC-4, M. Alan Thomas II wrote:

Today on Facebook I ran across an encouraging anecdote / testimonial from GenCon. The author is Rusty Zimmerman, who's freelanced for Catalyst Game Labs (which features in the story), among other RPG-related activities. Here's the pull quote, insofar as the piece relates to us:

It's just a little swag. It's just a small thing. It's just a few more boxes of GenCon loot going home with four happy geeks, but it -- no joke -- it almost chokes me up. Thinking about how far the hobby has come that we've got teachers doing afterschool programs, thinking about how far from Satanic Panic we've gotten that a rural community will all pitch in to send two of their kids off to a gaming convention, and thinking about how small and tightknit the gaming community still is, even amidst the corporate displays and ad banners and professionalism of GenCon, that we could hook these guys up with some swag (what little swag they were certain would fit in their overpacked car). 

I love this hobby. I love how time has changed it, smoothed over the rough edges, normalized it. I love how many female gamers I saw, how many rainbow ribbons I saw on badges, how many "gaymer" tshirts I saw. I love that a major US city gets turned into a geek mecca for the better part of a week, and that Indianapolis welcomes us back home every year.

(A PDF is attached for archival purposes.)

—Alan