The GenCon Demo of MLWM

[Silent Tamatama]

Hey Paul,


I got a question about your GenCon demo that I meant to ask you, while we were at the Con on Sunday.  In your notes on how to run the demo you mentioned that one of the minions self loathing score was high enough to probably trigger the Horror Revealed mechanic and that if it was triggered then to use the Horror Revealed scene as a good way to end the demo.  In my four demos of the game the "Horror Revealed" mechanic was never triggered and had me wondering whether I had messed up the rules somehow.  When Otto (the high Self-Loathing characters name if I recall) made Love Overtures he always succeeded and when he did Violence/Villainy he failed, there was only one attempt at Villainy by this characters player in one demo.  Consulting the chart in back of the demo I thought for sure that I was having them roll correctly, but I may have confused a minus or plus on the quick chart.  One thing that may have affected the outcome greatly was the bonus dice in three Overtures in three separate demos made by Otto.  I think all the players grasped the ideas of Intimacy/Desperation/Sincerity bonus dice quite well and two of the made sure to role-play it up a bit when they went for Intimacy and the other one in his demo of the game came off as so Sincere in his Overture there was no way I was not going to give him that die.  Had you planned on the players grasping the idea of the bonus dice so quickly or had you not thought about them getting the bonus dice?  In your demos did you get to use the Horror Revealed mechanic?  If you did how did it go with ending the demo at that point?

I was really satisfied with the demo you had prepared for the Con it really covered a lot of in game mechanics without overly complicating it with a lot of information or making it too difficult for me to run with too little information.  Thanks for letting me demo it for you at the booth, it resparked my interest in gaming.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Tom,

No...thank you for running it. I ran four demos, and didn't produce a sale from any of them. You ran a demo for Ed Heil that prompted him to run the game for his friends that evening, and then one of them came to the booth to buy the game the next day.

Of course, the "iron will" sales award goes to Gordon Landis, who ran a forty-five minute long demo for a single player late on Sunday, who then bought the game. By that point of the convention I would not have been able to work that hard for a single sale. I was too fried.

As far as Otto is concerned, in every demo I ran the player either performed an act of violence or villainy, or failed the roll when making an overture to a connection. The "Horror Revealed" I remember best was whole pieces of snakes and snake heads turning up in the food.

Paul