I'm going to be running a demonstration game of Dogs in the Vineyards at [/url=http://www.spikyfishthing.com/con-fusion/]Con-Fusion at the University of Victoria in the next few weeks. Does anyone have any suggestions on running an effective Convention game (both in general and for Dogs, specifically)? How can I show a predominantly Dungeons & Dragons and White Wolf crowd that there is hope in the indie RPG market?

Any suggestions would be wonderful.

I'd just, y'know, play the game.

One prob I see with Dogs at cons is: it works best for few players. 2, 3, 4 at the most, plus the GM. I wouldn't try to run it for 5 players, let alone the 7 or 10 I've run puppies for.

But yeah, run the game in public so people can see, for 3 or 4 players. Start with character creation, that's fun, and then play the first half of a town. Or else bring a bunch of pre-made characters and launch straight into a town. For sure bring more characters than you'll have players; a Dogs scenario never depends on having a particular PC there, so the players can freely choose.

You can run a town out of the book, choose one that someone else has made (I have a list on my Dogs page), or make up your own. I recommend your own.

Any other advice, anybody?

-Vincent

If you're going to run a short, Forge-booth-like demo to introduce the system or draw attention, you could do worse than running the example demo scenario with the player, the brother, the son and the shopkeeper's wife/whore.

yrs--
--Ben

Oh yeah. If you're only spending 10-15 minutes, you're showing someone how the rules work, that one's perfect. I love that one.

-Vincent