TOPIC: General feedback from a Origins (TD) Volunteer

Matt wrote: A suggestion that Andrew brought up I agree very much with would be to either the night or morning before scheduled runs start do a pair of runs for the volunteers as both a thank you and shake down before we really get going. Do 1 side for half the volunteers then flip it so everyone gets at least one run and again serves as shakedown.

For Origins that would've been deeperdark does run for Vols working Beholder and then flip so Beholder staff does run for Deeperdark staff. Not a perfect solution but would at least be an improvement for some volunteers and TD itself gets bonus of a final check before real runs begin.

I was actually envisioning having the Deeperdark volunteers run Deeperdark, and Beholder volunteers run Beholder. Seven DMs, two coaches, a trainer and an epilogue room person make a slightly overfull group of eleven, but this is offset by the fact that one of the eleven will step out of the party to run their room as the party gets to it. This lets you run all dungeons simultaneously, but leaves NPCs, bluehands and admin staff without a run.

If you have the time, running the dungeons sequentially lets you run two groups through each, giving more room in the groups. Using Origins' schedule, maybe run Deeperdark on Wednesday night after build is done, and Beholder on Thursday morning around 9:00. That gives you an hour after the volunteer run ends before the first scheduled run begins. Then again, this leaves an entire dungeon's worth of volunteers stuck for two hours, just to have two groups run.

Here's an even crazier thought I just had - start Deeperdark runs two hours earlier than Beholder runs, and run Beholder two hours later than Deeperdark. Then give the first Deeperdark run and the last Beholder run to volunteers from the opposite dungeon. It gives up on the idea of the volunteer run as a playtest, though.

Jon Cook wrote: Also, fat lot of good it does you now, but we have a box of gloves for handling cave wall.

All of the gloves in that box were too small for me. I ended up just bare handing the cave wall. If I'm ever on build crew again, I'm bringing my own gloves.

Raven wrote: Thanks for sharing this! It brings back memories of GenCon SoCal (the only time I was a full-time Vol and worked the Build as well as the dungeon)

There's a special magic in taking the contents of a Semi-trailer and turning it into a whole world - living in that world for 4 days - and then taking it all down again.

Super huge shout-out to ALL the volunteers who worked Origins! I wish I could have been there to help, but from what I keep hearing from folks who attended, you put on an amazing show. You Rock!!!

This experience actually reminded me a lot of Gen Con So Cal volunteering. There's been a lot of turnover in the volunteers since then, though.

When they packed up the trucks (2) on Sunday, it was hard to believe they'd gotten it all there on just one.

Origins was a great event. I'm glad I was able to volunteer for it.

jon wrote:
When gencon was in SoCal did TD come too?

Gen Con So Cal ran from 2003 to 2006, starting the same year that TD started in Indy. TD was at every GC So Cal event. (I volunteered for TD there in 2004 and 2005, and for Dragon Dice in 2003). The 2003 So Cal event was where they introduced tokens for the first time. (And, that's when my token addiction started.) True Dungeon was a lot smaller back then, so, it was probably just one truck. It was still a heck of a drive, I'm sure. Because of the expense, we had a fairly small crew for the whole thing - not much different from Origins, in that way, but probably even smaller.