[Agon] Runing demos

[RPL]

Howdy,

I’m currently running a series of monthly demos in my home town of Lisbon, Portugal with a friend of mine. We’ve been balancing things and showing a lot of different games, from Exalted to Spirit Of The Century.

This month is my turn, and since I’ve been having such a good time GMing in a long term Agon campaign (who’s AP report is a bit overdue, so sorryness) that I thought it would be a cool game to show off.

For that purpose I would like to know a couple of things:
1)   Is there any kind of “official” demo that I can use;
2)   From those of you that have run Agon demos do you have any advice I found valuable;
3)   In the case I run it with pre-gens should I stat the whole character out, should I leave some blanks for the characters to fill, and most importantly should the Achievements phase be played out in the demo or not (I ask this because I believe it to be an important part of character creation, although time consuming).

Thanks in advance for all your help.


All the best,
Diogo Curado

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Diogo,

I ran some Agon at CanGames this past summer.  I used the stats for the Golden Boar of Ion straight out of the book, whipped up a couple of heroes, and let the players have at it.

It went well -- with one huge caveat.

Don't put armour on your demo NPCs -- it makes stuff drag out too damn much.  Much better to let things move along at a good clip.

Cheers,
Darcy

[John Harper]

Hi Diogo,

I don't have an official demo kit. I probably should, though.

When I run a demo, I use two pregen heroes against the Golden Boar. One hero is good with a bow, the other with spear and shield. I start by telling the players that they are approaching the boar's cave and ask them if they want to try to ambush the boar, or try some other maneuver for advantage. Then we do a simple contest. That's when I tell them they can add a creative ability (I only let them add one in the demo). And we talk about divine favor, and what it's for.

The hero who wins the ambush contest sets the starting range of the fight, and since the heroes are good at different ranges, this puts them at odds right away. If you want, you can tell them about oaths at this point, and ask the loser if he wants to offer an oath to the winner in exchange for a better starting range.

Then we play out a few exchanges of the battle (2 or 3). Sometimes this is enough for the heroes to kill the boar, sometimes not. That demo format takes about 20 minutes to play. If you end up with a third player, give them the boar to play.

Darcy is right: don't use armor (for heroes or NPCs). Armor slows down a fight, which you don't want in a demo. If you really want to include it, you might also talk about the advanced tactic of taking actions before the battle to separate your foes from their armor.

You can hear a recording of my GenCon demo for Agon at the Sons of Kryos. I was using a Gorgon as the monster, but the format is pretty much the same as I describe here.

[RPL]

Thanks Darcy and John for all your advices, no armor for those bad ass NPCs then hehe.

This is what I'm planning to do, probably a 4 hour session is to small to go for a standard 3 gods quest island, so I’m just going to go with a One God Quest To Kill The Boar, with a lot of steps in order to fully demonstrate all the mechanics the game has to offer.

Also I’m trying to recruit about 4 players for this, so I need 4 pre-gens, 2 of them will be like John said, an archer and a swords man, the other two will be a spearman and a javelin thrower. My idea is to specialize each character in one weapon and then in one of the 4 kinds of non-combat skills, so when we go for the various steps of the quest I’ll have something prepped for each of them. I know Agon doesn’t talk about flag framing to create the challenges, witch is a good thing because it could undermine inter-player balance and glory gathering, but in this case I think it will help to demonstrate how the various choices at skill distribution can shine in their own way, and since there will be something for everybody it will probably even out in the end.

Does this make sense to you guys?

I don't have an official demo kit. I probably should, though.

Yeah, that would be cool hehe.

I still haven’t had the chance to listen to the GenCon demo yet, but thanks for linking it out for me, I’ll do it as soon as I can.

Thanks.


All the best,
Diogo Curado

[John Harper]

Hey Diogo,

Good point about flag-framing. It can be problematic in Agon.

Maybe use Accomplishments instead to show the players how to push for what they're good at, rather than trying to pre-plan specific ability uses during the quests. Pre-planning that way will almost certainly backfire.

During quests, present the heroes with problems and situations, then demand that they come to an agreement about how to address the problem. Don't let them split up and do different things! Naturally, each player will all want to do something that uses their good abilities, and then you have good conflict between the heroes. Someone needs to step up and lead the group, probably by winning an Orate contest.