I know I'll have at least one friend coming along, but the others are iffy at best. Of the others that might have tagged along one is a 'spur of the moment' military assignment problem, one is broke, and the other is essentially just a cheapskate. The two of us are good splitting a $1200 (five night) hotel bill, so if others go along it's just a bonus. We actually considered paying for a two bedroom apartment about three blocks from the Con ($300 a night or $1400 a week). I like having a full on kitchen while traveling, but when I do GenCon I'm pretty much at the Con if I'm not sleeping or eating. I usually figure GenCon is going to run me at least $1500 between air ($500 coming from Seattle), hotel and food. The dangerous part is I'll probably spend that much in the merchant hall (assuming I find stuff I can't elsewhere) too. If it was closer I'd go more often, it's too bad the Cali one just didn't work out. I had thought a GenCon in the west would be a success.
I debated whether or not I want to run the event I did last time around, but I don't think I'm going to. The last three times I was there for someone else or running that event (six four hour sessions if I remember right - three feeding into two and those two feeding into the final). Even considering getting a game mat made for it (I'll probably still do that for our own purposes). But spending 15-20 hours running limited me on PLAYING in games and even from covering the merchant hall as much as I'd have liked.
I really should organize it better and make it available for Rolemaster GM's to run though. Very easy setup and the players seemed to enjoy themselves a lot - even had a couple show up just to watch later sessions. It's, simply described, a no holds barred chariot race using RMSS (although I doubt anyone, even most RMers, would be able to tell which version it originated with). Basically you pick a chariot, pick a pre-gen character type, pick a motivation, hand out the rules used (pretty simple one pager) then GM covers the basics on how to roll attacks and crits and you're up and going. I wrote up a chariot attack chart and two chariot crit tables for it (one for ramming, the other for wheel spikes). Gave out medals for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, most points earned, and most spectacular death.