So.  Sunday, myself and and one of my players will be running demo games of Dogs at the grand opening of our newest FLGS.  We're expecting about 12-30 players over the course of the day; each of us will be running at least one, and up to three, seperate demos. 

Depending on the number of players and the speed we need to run the demonstrations, we may need to use pre-built characters.

So, if you've got a few characters sitting around in a file, I'd love it if you could post up a sample starting character for me here.

I'd be careful about using pregen characters. It takes a away quite a bit. I say that from personal experience -- the first game of DitV I played was using a pregen, and it almost soured me on the game.

Hm.  I haven't demo'ed this before.

So.  Say that we have three hours in a demo.  What would you suggest as a good structure for that time?

A 3 hour demo is pretty tight (4 would be better), but I'd say you'd be a lot better off letting people make up characters, doaccomplishments, and get into the town, even if they don't finish it, because there's nothing wrong with leaving them wanting more.The real hook that makes players light up is Accomplishments, in my experience.

The only time I'd use a pregen is for the 10-30 minute one or two player demo using the situation presented on the opening page: Yourbrother's headed to town to murder the whore his boy's been stealing money to go see.

I strongly recommend printing out copies of the Dogs character sheet from the pullout PDF at Vincent's site, because it has all the fallout and other crunchy bits on it.  I use antique-looking paper because for a few pennies more it looks really nice.  I also have 4 bowls to keep the dice seperate, and plenty of dice for all, and I bring extra pencils.

Something I haven't done yet but might be good to try is to put the starting dice on the sheets for the various types of background,and pencil in gun, horse, book of life, jar of earth with no dice. Then read off the backgrounds and hand out sheets as people ask for them.

Good luck with the demo, and I'd love to hear how it went.

--Carl

I've only run DitV as a convention game once. But I do GM a regular session of it. What I would do (and recommend) is let players create their own characters, do the initiatory conflicts, and then run a really short town. With three or even four players, I think you could do this in three hours or less. My regular games only run four hours per session.

For the town, I'd really just hit them in the face with it. "Hey, here's the obviously bad thing and the people who are equally obviously responsible. You've talked to everyone else and there's no more information to be had. Go!"

Fast creation, short town, keen preparation.  Thanks!

Levi - watch for the results from my play tonight. I may have as much as 6 hours, though I'd prefer to keep it to 4. We'll be creating characters and then trying a short town. I will only have 2 players, so we will probably accomplish more that you will with your demos (plus, playing in a home environment is less distracting than playing in a store with 2 or 3 other games going on).

I like the idea of just laying the problem out. I think I won't do it quite like that, but the general idea of thinking in terms of speeding up spilling the story is a good one for fast play.

Frank