Getting ready for a con: What does a good demo look like?

[Certified]

My question would be as to how you had the players focused on one another. The best character creation segments I've ever seen are the ones where the characters have quotes or opinions about the other players. Also, make sure you bring more than 5 characters to the session, no one likes the leftovers. More specific comments later, I need to reread the post and ensure I have it right.

daemonchild, In the case of the characters used in Scorched Earth they all shared a common origin. There were no built in opinions about other characters in this story. However, I have used background stories to build in conflict between characters before, particularly in a story set around characters being trapped. As for leftovers, normally we have at least six pre-generated characters since most Demos are prepared for Dragon*Con and they ask for GMs to be able to handle a table of six. In the last three years I've only had a full table about four or five times. That said if there's time before the con we still shoot for one or two back-ups. When getting ready for a Demo what we try and shoot for is avoiding other characters toes. How many interesting characters can we come up without overshadowing the other characters is the premise we normally use when creating the pre-gens. When starting a demo we normally go with one of two methods: Ask the players what type of characters they usually like to play, pass out characters according. This seems to work best for small groups. The other is just to pass them out at random. Rarely do we show the players what characters actual abilities are before they can claim one as 'their' character. This is mostly because it's an unknown system and letting the players go though all the characters means repeating a lot of information multiple times.

[Certified]

Tony, we are on the same page, if a player doesn't understand how his actions affect the story then they don't feel they have control. The purpose of my previous post was to show the elements of the Demo that weren't seen in the example of play. I think that there was a lot of value to your posts and I'm not trying to justify the demo, just show some of the things prepared for and missed in actual play.

Dave