NPA Sampler--suggestions and demos wanted

[Michael S. Miller]

This is likely in the wrong place because the supposed NPA forum isn't up yet. This seemed the second best place.

Here's the deal: I've signed up to run an event called "No Press Anthology Sampler" at Ubercon IV this coming weekend. I plan to let the players choose 2 games and I'll run each game for 2 hours. I'm going to hand out a very short synopsis of each game for them to choose from. The proposed synopsis is below. If any of the other authors, or interested parties, has suggestions, corrections, or critiques, please feel free to offer them up.

ALSO, particularly for the low-improv games: Pagoda, Pretender, and The Agency, if anyone has demos that they've run, I love to take a look at them. I know Andy was running Pagoda at GenCon, but I didn't get to play.

Here's the working text of the handout:

Snowball: Roll end credits. Wait, what happened before that? We'll play it and see, going from the end of a story all the way back to the beginning.

Discernment: Many scholars hold one subject in their power. Everything he experiences and remembers is at their whim. Will they discern the nature of his soul before he wins his freedom?

Pretender: Supernatural beings still exist, pretending to be regular people. To what lengths will they go to fulfill their personal agendas?

WTF?: Multiple GMs vie for the attention of a single capricious player by making their storyline more interesting than their rivals.

The Agency:  British agents hunt supernatural threats in the swinging '60s. Sean Connery-era James Bond meets the X-Files.

Pagoda: A wuxia-themed RPG of melodramatic Chinese martial arts. Fight kung fu duels on rooftops to protect the celestial emperor!

Cell Gamma: You wake up in a prison cell with no memory of how you got there, or even who you are. What secrets lie in the heart of Cell Gamma?

Over the Bar: The world's first role-playing drinking game! How much are you willing to drink to get what you want?

[Valamir]

Will you actually be able to play Over the Bar at the Con?

[Ben Lehman]

Over the Bar can be played with a bag of M&Ms, a few 2-liters of soda (or even just water), and the Teetotaler rules.

Also, OtB has surprisingly less improv than you might expect.  I would suggest going in with a few premade characteres and a short scenario designed to hit on a lot of things that they can't do.

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben Lehman]

Like, say, the accountancy staff of a Fortune 500 company in a dungeon crawl.

yrs--
--Ben

[xiombarg]

Hmmmm, I'm sorry I missed this thread when it was relevant, but for the record...

Pretender has more improv than you think, if you remain focused. I've run it on IRC with like a half-hour's notice. If you leave a lot of details to be developed in play, it's surprising how little you really need to establish ahead of time. The mechanic encourages details to be "discovered" as you go along.

Accordingly, you could easily have a "high ignorance" game. The pregen PCs are all high-school friends who get in a terrible car wreck. They should be dead from their wounds, but they're not. What the heck is going on? I see heavy use of Discovery and Ripple.