[Spien Essen] Demoing Universalis

[Eero Tuovinen]

So I heard from Ralph that Universalis doesn't traditionally have a very elaborate demo, and usually he just does a bit of tenets and a first scene as a demo. What I want to do is try something a bit more specific; although you lose the feel of "any story, any time" if you fix the demo into one particular situation, I think the audience is smart enough to understand if I just explain that while the game itself is completely universal, my demo just takes one possible idea and runs with it. This way I can prepare a significant amount of props for the demo, and perhaps give a better idea of how the game looks after it's been played a while.

To that purpose, here's my demo materials. The demo starts in medias res with the story of king Arthur at the battle of Camlann, where he was slain by Mordred, his son. You know the score to that, I'm sure. The idea is to have a number of premade, laminated components to play with, as well as empty cards that can be used to make any new components as necessary. I figure that I'll start the demo with a short explanation of what has gone before (relying heavily on the audience having some familiarity with the matter of Britain), and then take the first turn myself, framing the beginning of the battle itself. The battle should give an opportunity for a complication or two, and if time permits, we can have another scene about the consequences. At the end of the demo the players can have any component cards created during play (I'll put some pertinent product info into the card backs).

What I'm going to make yet: I'll compile a one-page summation of the tenets and what has been played so far, just to give a sense of how the game could progress to this particular scene. Probably also write down the frame for the first scene, as well as some ideas for how to drive complications between the different components. I'll test the demo during the coming weekend, make the rest of the stuff after that.

What I need: if somebody with lots of Uni-experience wants to vet my components, all the better. The game is rather difficult to break, but if I've done something that could be done in a more interesting manner, point it out.

[Valamir]

Hey, you're really breaking new ground here.

I'll be extremely interested in how effective this method is at fitting a Uni demo into a brief time period.  I did very little (read: none) demoing at GenCon this year because my usual method of running a Uni demo, which is fabulous with a 30-45min time slot) doesn't work at all in a 15 min time slot.


The other method I thought of came from our earlier PM discussion.

Starting  with the Tenets phase, but prime the game with the first main Tenet already chosen, and then a list of standard questions to steer the rest of the Tenets.

Frex: 
Tenet #1:  "This game is about an Alien invasion of Earth"
Tenet #2 question for first player:  "What do the Alien's want with Earth"
Tenet #3 question for the next player:  "Is Earth aware of the Alien menace?"
Tenet #4 question for the next player:  "Is this a military invasion or a covert infiltration"
Tenet #5 question for the next player:  "Who on Earth may be coorperating with the Aliens?"

Etc.

And then plan to play out a single scene to demo the mechanics. 

That might be worth experiementing with as well.


On your cards, did you mean to have 3 identical Knight Master Components for ease of reference, or were they supposed to represent 3 different kinds of Knight.  They're all called "Knight Master Component" but they're not all identical, so not sure if that was intentional.

It does give me a neat idea of coming up with several cards representing the Archtypical knights "Chivalrous Knight", "Pagan Knight", "Fey Knight", "Robber Knight", "Christian Knight", etc.

[Eero Tuovinen]

That tenet-question system seems pretty efficient, actually. I'll have to try it next Wednesday at my Essen-prep session.

And yeah, I just made several of that one component for ease of reference. I'm picturing it so that whenever a knight is brought to play one of those cards is put nearby to remind the players that the knight has those traits, too.

... now that I'm looking at it, you're right, they're not identical. Should be. Good catch.

I don't know if it's emblematic of my not really getting Universalis before, but fiddling with the Arthurian mythos in this manner has kinda made me want to play the game again. It'd be cool to get something like this out of it. I never got anything this interesting from the game in actual play, though, it was all very chaotic and superficial. I dunno.

[Valamir]

Well I will say, our initial plan while we were still putting together the first print run was to release a series of "genre splats" where a number of components and rules gimmicks were already predefined.  I probably still have somewhere on one of my computers my initial draft of "Universalis Old West" with its Saloon, and Sheriff's Office, and Wide Dusty Street locations; its Sheriff, Deputy, Saloon Girl, and Shop Keep characters; and its Shootout and Out of Ammo Gimmicks. 

Very similar idea to what you've done here only you've drilled down even further to a specific situation...the battle of Camlann rather than just overall generic Arthurian. 

I set aside that idea because it wound up not really being necessary, and a couple of people who've expressed interest in doing up a genre book never got further with it.  But, depending on how this goes for you it might be an idea worth revisiting.  Maybe a series of $5 Universalis "Adventure Modules" which start in media res and have the players then "finish the story".

Hmmmm.....