[Dreamation] Building a 10-Minute Demo [Long]

[Nathan P.]

So this was a learning experience

Hanging out with Brennan and Alexander on Saturday. Alexander talks me into trying to run a 15-minute demo of Timestream (keeping in mind that I don't have anything close to one prepared). Brennan is prepping for Bulldogs but says that he wants in, so I grab the character sheets for my 4-hour game. I flip through them, giving a one-sentence description of each. Alexanders eyes light up at "Shady time travelling doctor that harvests organs," and Brennan goes for "Good kid who doesn't understand his powers."

Event-wise, I aimed each character at their shared Anchor, the doctors kid daughter/the good kids love interest, and winged it from there. The doctor misdiagnosed his daughter with something, and went back to 1860s london to slash a prostitute and take her liver - we established that this guy from 2020 was the real Jack the Ripper. The good kid went on a date, talked the girl into ditching a rival, and then went to a club, where he used his time-shifting to get the leg up on some bullies and impress the girl.

And Alexander looks at his watch and goes "Well, this is fun, but its been 45 minutes." So the demo obviously needs some work.

Here I want to lay out the advice I got from Alexander, Brennan, TonyLB and Michael Miller, as well as some of my own thoughts, and end with a presentation of my new idea for a 10-minute demo. All credit here really lies with these guys, but hopefully this post will be helpful to others building a demo.

Important Stuff

Your demo needs to be about what gets you excited about the game. In 10 minutes, you aren't selling the game, you are selling your excitement.

For a game like mine, with a reward/reinforcement system that doesn't kick in until medium- or long-term play, trying to bring those into the demo is a waste of time. Jettison them.

The game you actually play in your demo does not need to be your game. That is, you can get across the feel of play without actually using the mechanics as written, and sometimes you have too.

The procedure should be along the lines of: sit down, get character, immediate situation that demands action, play play play, end demo with them wanting more, right before the climax/resolution of the scene, if possible.

Cut out the intro cruff. It's a demo, they don't need to know character history or reasons why the character is where they are. With Alexander, I started the doctor off in his office, getting a phone call from his estranged wife. We then played through him deciding to go, getting there, exchanging some words and getting to his daughters bedside. This is all cruff! We should have started with "You are at your 7-year old daughters bedside in the house of your estranged wife. She is shivering and sweating and holding her stomach and moaning in pain." At least.

Aim your demo at the same reasons someone would pick up your game in the first place. Nobody will pick up Timestream because they want to build a web of characters linked across time. It's key to play, but it's not the selling point. The selling point is using awesome time powers to do cool stuff and not have to be an astrophysicist to keep track of continuity.

Simple character sheet. Either create an entirely new sheet with only the stuff you will be using in the demo on it, or very massively hilight the pertinent info on your standard sheet. You should be able to point to one area on the sheet and have the person see what their pertinent information is at a glance.

Structuring The Demos

So now I'm thinking more along the lines of: grayscale character sheet with the pertinent info hilighted in color. Lots of Strain and little Time, which means that they can only use whatever their powers are once or twice before getting smacked down. Situation that demands the use of power in order to fulfill character goals/succeed at scenario. Practice the opening pitch. Below are two that I think are starting to come together, followed by my reasoning for various bits of content.

New Demo 1: The Doctor

The organ-harvesting time-traveling doctor is a pretty grabby character.

You are in the operating room, wristdeep in your 7-year old daughters [point to Anchor entry on their sheet] abdomen. The blood of the whore you killed for the liver transplant is still drying on your smock, but it looks like the procedure is going to be a success. Suddenly, the room is filled with beeping, as a nurse shouts "Doctor, her kidneys are failing." You are exhausted [point to large pool of Strain tokens] but still have some reserves [point to small pool of Time tokens]. The chair you use to Travel is still on, as you ran straight here from your last jump. Your daughter starts to convulse - she's going to die if you don't do something [point to Goal entry for giving her a good life] What do you do?

Credit where credits due, thats pretty much entirely cribbed from Tony. This character is a Traveler, he can jump from era to era, so I'm aiming the pressure towards that. Involving Goals and Anchors gives a variety of bonuses and penalties, to give an example of the resolution mechanics. Now, while there's usually a number of twists (Aspects) a Traveler has, for this I would just give him a certain range he can travel in - the rest doesn't really matter except for multiple people or extended play, neither of which is going to come up.

New Demo 2: The Warrior

I thought of this in the car on the way back, and thought it would be cool.

You are standing in the throneroom of the palace of the rival King [point to Anchor] that your lord, a powerful Necromancer [point to "Master" entry on this characters sheet] sent you to destroy. After ravaging the country-side with your band of marauders, you have finally cornered the young monarch and his daughter in their palace - but there's one problem. He turns to stare you in the eye, and you both gasp - it is your brother! You thought he had been killed when the Necromancer killed your parents and took you into bondage, but now you are charged with killing him and taking his daughter, your neice. Powerful forces boil inside you as you feel the weight of the oath you took on your parents dead bodies [points to Goal] to uphold the honor of your family. You have spent many days fighting, and are nearing the end of your strength [point to high Strain, low Time]. Three elite palace guards step between you and your brother, and 5 marauders stand behind you as the King says "Please, brother. Come back to me." What do you do?

A little longer on the explanation, it could probably be cut down some. This character is a Thrall, he's bound to a Master who gives him his powers, so I'm aiming at conflict between his Masters interests and his own. Again, Goals and Anchors are in play. For this, I would follow with "You have these three options for temporal manipulation:" and give a quick rundown of what each does. I wouldn't mention that Thralls can Travel as well until after the demo, because I don't think it's interesting for this scenario.

So...

I still need one for a Temporal Manipulator, which I'm brainstorming.

Mechanical tweaks: constraining your options for bumping/lowering stats after winning/losing conflicts, probably just to messing with your Time/Strain and your Goal. If you hit 10 Strain, making both die Strain Dice (instead of the usual 1), to increase chances of Breaking Strain, which is bad juju. Both of these are in order to lower decision-making time (3 options instead of 5), and increase danger level (1/3 chance of blowing the big one instead of 1/6). Also, probably making all conflicts apply to the Goal at hand (instead of it being players choice), in order to focus the scene towards that.

I hope to run these a couple times and finetune them with my group here.

Is this valuable, in terms of seeing this approach to building a demo? Would it be helpful to break one down even more? What else am I missing?

[Iskander]

Nathan, I slightly disagree with Tony. One of the appealing things about the game for me was taking "organ-harvesting doctor" and five minutes later explaining the Jack the Ripper mystery as I ...um... borrowed a Whitechapel whore's liver for the daughter. Now, someone else may not want to do that, or go there, and may decide to hop forward to his own daughter's death bed, and be sure to take the right liver from her, or find some other solution to the good doctor's problems.

Getting to make that choice and provide the temporal colour for my own "solution" was a selling point to me for Timestream. I recommend you leave that choice open, although you might have to press your punters to get something out of them.

The second thing that appealled to me from your demo was that it was quickly possible to see how characters changed over time - how their goals and drawbacks interacted, how I could strategically manange the resources on the sheet to drive the character in a particular direction. For example, if the character always actually improved his powers but never really made headway in resolving the sick daughter thing, that's an interesting thematic statement, and (forgive me for forgetting the precise details), I think you can implicitly show your punters how they might make that statement. Even if it's just one "experience" roll, and happens after you call a halt to the action, I think it is worth including. You've shown me how it's cool to be who I am now, so show me how I can change over time, and not feel trapped in three weeks' time.

Finally, I liked that my sick daughter was Brennan's potential girlfriend in the future. I wasn't sure how that worked, but I could see interesting possibilities (like actually losing the fight to save her life, and cloning her... ha! still fancy her now, Brennan?)

All of which should be taken with the necessary pinches of salt, snuff, etc. I think you can make a crackling demo from what you already have, given the right paring down.

Also, I didn't mind the character sheet, but there was a lot of information on there, so highlighting the immediately relevant stuff might be a good plan.

Also, I liked the futuremall dating for the temporal manipulator, but I think you need to get some good glosses down of the powers that encapsulate their mechanical effect. Pausing/Future Looping/Past Looping... bu-wha?

[TonyLB]

One of the appealing things about the game for me was taking "organ-harvesting doctor" and five minutes later explaining the Jack the Ripper mystery as I ...um... borrowed a Whitechapel whore's liver for the daughter.

I'm with Iskander.  If you hand players "This was the guy who was Jack the Ripper" then you shut them out of some of the fun of creating the situation.  If you give them "Your guy is going to yank organs out of somebody, or a series of somebodies, within 300 years plus or minus the date 2020" then you make the player into an accomplice in horror.

[Josh Roby]

In a way I think Tony and Vincent have it easy, as their resolution mechanics are the soul of their games, and so demoing Capes and Dogs is as easy as setting a situation and/or conflict on the table and letting it rip.  Timestream's setting up a web of characters across time (or FLFS's continual reinforcement of character) is hard to represent in ten short minutes.

Also, though, are you talking about a one-on-one ten minute demo, or a group demo?  Cause each person added to a discussion doubles the time needed. :)

[Nathan P.]

Alexander and Tony: True dat. Having a completely open field in which to explain things/make continuity is pretty important.

Joshua: I'm looking at a 1-one-1 demo right now. I can see doing a two-person demo with two characters that share Anchors, with some direct consequences trickling to those Anchors, but I probably couldn't call that 10 minutes in good faith. Maybe 15, probably 20.

[Callan S.]

Whoa! Fun play in ten minutes! What a goal - blows my mind to think of it and yet it shouldn't!

This question is really interesting to me, so I'm kind of wracking my brains as to the components you must have here and now.
* At least one player needs to make at least one choice.

* The player needs to be informed. The information given to the player will control (to an extent) the type of choice it is.

* There is no real room for the player to make two choices (or is there?). Thus you can't rely on "Your previous choices effect your latter choices" to make a choice have extra meaning.

* Speaking of that, the player has to be able to make a meaningful choice. What the hell is meaningful?
In part, it's probably the player himself saying through body language and tonal inflection "That choice I just made - THAT is meaningful" and importantly, for the other people at the table to absorb it as such when he says this.

* But why would the player decide a particular choice he could make, is meaningful? What will help him 'click' at a certain point?
Is it something like streaming information past the player? Until he has enough to make a choice?

And is there a sub issue there? That the info needs to convey some urgency, so as to prompt a responce. Yet at the same time, you need to give enough info for the player to naturally decide that a certain choice is meaningful. If that urgency comes to a head (ie, it's too late to make a choice now) before they decide, it stuffs up play. But if there is no urgency, the player can simply keep absorbing info, taking you over the ten minute limit.

Really intersting design goal and I these questions just rushed out. Are they on track at all?

[TonyLB]

* There is no real room for the player to make two choices (or is there?). Thus you can't rely on "Your previous choices effect your latter choices" to make a choice have extra meaning.

Sure there is, you just have to get to their first choice fast.  In my Capes demo I hand each player a set of three cards with conflicts ("Get away with the money," "Humiliate Major Victory", "Hurt Innocent Bystanders," for instance).  I say "Okay, everybody, take a look at those cards and choose the one you want to make into an arena in this battle.  That happens in the first sixty seconds of the demo.  I've then got nine minutes left for them to make yet more choices.  Each player generally makes about six or seven major choices ... they aren't all as fast, because after the cards people stop acting in parallel quite as much.

* Speaking of that, the player has to be able to make a meaningful choice. What the hell is meaningful?
In part, it's probably the player himself saying through body language and tonal inflection "That choice I just made - THAT is meaningful" and importantly, for the other people at the table to absorb it as such when he says this.

Same way it's meaningful to the agenda of a larger game:  it pushes the agenda.  Now, if you're asking "What is the agenda for my demo?" then I think that is an excellent question.  Again with examples:  the agenda of my Capes demo is "Torture Tony, because he squeals delightfully."  So choices are meaningful because they are better or worse ways to make me squeal.  People can tell in an instant how their choices effect the agenda.

Now I'd be real interested to hear from Nathan what agenda he wants for his ten minute demo.

[Callan S.]

Hi Tony,

I agree on the economy with time. But if were trying to hit all points at once here it'd also need to be a meaningful choice. If the player chooses "get away with the money", but latter says "Well, I just chose it at random. Really I could have rolled 1D3 to determine which one I go with", then it didn't have much meaning to the player to make that choice even though we got to it quickly. If speed didn't help make it meaningful then so far the demo would only have shown him a game choice which isn't of interest/meaningful to him.

I think I need more information about the agenda of 'Make Tony squeal'. I'm kind of seeing it as the players discovering what you find to be meaningful, by your squealing. I'd say there's great value in finding that out, and thus add some meaning to the choices that aid in it's discovery.

But I think what I was aiming for, is for the player to end up making a choice that makes himself squeal. And then think "Oh, this game makes me squeal this way! Ah, so that's what this game does!"

[Nathan P.]

Now I'd be real interested to hear from Nathan what agenda he wants for his ten minute demo.

Hmmmm. Well, at this point, I want to get people to do what Alexander (kinda) did - go "Oh, I can do that!? Thats awesome/twisted/whatever."

Along the lines of the "open field," I want to give the demo-ee the immediate tools and situation, and then totally support whatever solution they make to that situation - and have it be a solution, or at least a potential solution. "Sure, you can go to a future time when they have cloning, clone your future daughter and take her liver. Thats awesome." "Yeh, take the kings daughter and bluff while slowing down time and getting all of the marauders to "accidentally" stab each other. Rockin."

As for meaningful choices - I think part of the buy-in for the 10-minute demo is that you're seeing a tiny little slice of the game, which will hopefully give you context for your purchasing decision. Right? I mean, a choice is only meaningful in relation to the demo-ees goals here. I can have all the goals in the world, and if the person across from me's goal is to see if he can break my game in 10 minutes or less, it doesn't matter what choices I put in front of him.

Now, Tony is very upfront about aligning his goal and the demo-ees goal, literally saying "If we're not done in 10 minutes you get to see me do the walk of shame" - right off the bat, he's saying that he and the demo-ee are in competition via this game. You want to beat Tony.

So, as I continue to try to imitate Tony, I should probably set something up along the lines of "There is no right answer here. You have this power, and you can use it however you want."

Hmm. I'm reading a bit of subtext into my own post here. I think what I really want is for the demo-ee to come up with a solution that I would never think of in a million years. "There is no right answer here, but there are a lot of obvious ones. You have this unlimited power, I want to see you do something I've never seen before." Would I actually say that? I don't know.

So, uh, Callan, does that serve as a response to your thoughts?

[TonyLB]

Hmm. I'm reading a bit of subtext into my own post here. I think what I really want is for the demo-ee to come up with a solution that I would never think of in a million years. "There is no right answer here, but there are a lot of obvious ones. You have this unlimited power, I want to see you do something I've never seen before." Would I actually say that? I don't know.

You know, you could provide them with a "cheat sheet" ... like "If you totally blank, and you can't think of anything creative, you could always go with one of these things that people before you have invented ... like, maybe the doctor goes back to Whitechapel, brutally murders a whore and leaves her mutilated body to mystify generations to come.  Or ... y'know ... you could impress me by doing something that's not on the sheet.  But hey, if you don't want to impress the designer of the darn game, by all means work off the cheat-sheet."

[Callan S.]

Hmm. I'm reading a bit of subtext into my own post here. I think what I really want is for the demo-ee to come up with a solution that I would never think of in a million years. "There is no right answer here, but there are a lot of obvious ones. You have this unlimited power, I want to see you do something I've never seen before." Would I actually say that? I don't know.

I initially read that in perhaps a very different way to what you intended to say.

I need to check if I'm on the same page now that I've mulled it over. Are you saying something like "Here are a set of rules which keep alot of possiblities open. I'm honestly willing and open to believe/absorb/take on anything given that is within their scope. And I'll give strong, possitive social feedback over it as well!"

Yeah, a bit clinical, but that's just to help me get right on the same page as you. How far off?

[Nathan P.]

Tony - Maybe. That might be a little much for my tastes. But that kind of thing, yes.

Callan - got it in one. Within the larger context of "...and this is the kind of experience playing this game will give you."

Looks to me like we're on the same page.

[Callan S.]

Ah good!

Do you think these two elements...
* I'm honestly willing and open to believe/absorb/take on anything given that is within their scope.
* And I'll give strong, possitive social feedback over it as well!
Are something that your providing, rather than the game? [silly humour]Though perhaps you've got some deal where, for money, gamers can take you home! *wink wink, nudge nudge*[/silly humour]

I hadn't thought about it before, but that's why I go for the 'make myself squeal' model. Because if the person can do that to himself with the game, he'll get that at home as well. What do you think?