I’d like to talk about both the preparation for these demos and the actual play experience on the Forge/IPR booth.

Prior to coming to Gen Con, there were several evenings where interested parties met to test out them demos for Cold City, Mob Justice and Best Friends. The aim of these was to make sure the demos were tight, focussed, ran to time and got across the essential elements of the games they were demonstrating.

The results of this were extremely beneficial. The very first test demo I ran for Cold City, even though it captured the important elements of the game, was bloated (it ran to about 18 minutes) and overly verbose. One of the best suggestions was this:

“Explain the system in play, don’t go over it beforehand.”

And what a great piece of advice this turned out to be. The demo was slashed from 18 to 12 minutes by this simple piece of advice, giving leeway for the more descriptive, setting-based elements. The demo testers also gave input into the structure and design of the demo characters sheet (which ended up being much simpler, easier to understand and easier to read as a result of this feedback) and the delivery of the demo itself. Very worthwhile.

Taking the advice given and the much modified demo, I arrived at Gen Con. I won’t go in to the specifics of a single demo experience here), but rather give my overall thoughts on how the demos went as a whole.

1) The demo was essentially split into two conflicts: one conflict was a character vs. character conflict, bringing hidden agendas into sharp focus and demonstrating how they worked. The second conflict was a character vs. monster conflict, showing how trust worked in the contest of the game. This worked well, allowing players to observe and learn, as well as highlighting two vital areas o the game, without overburdening the players in complexity.

2) The ‘two conflict’ set-up worked even with only two players. In that case, the character vs. character conflict was immediately followed with the character vs. monster conflict, using the same characters for both, rather than two sets of characters, one for each conflict.

3) The demo went even better when the characters fighting the monster actually lost their conflict or didn’t fully achieve their stakes! Many times, when I brought the curtain down on the scene as the monster trampled towards the characters, I heard the cry “No! I want to shot that sonofabitch dead!”. Players wanted to carry on and find out what happened, which was great. Although there was still satisfaction on the part of the players when the characters had a successful outcome, I felt it engendered a greater emotional response when they failed.

4) Arm waving nonsense. My style of GMing has always be rather on the physical side, but in many ways, I think this helped. Being animated encouraged the players to be animated as well and I saw, on many occasions, players becoming more enthusiastic themselves, which was great.

If anyone played in any of my demos, any feedback or comment you might have would be greatly appreciated, as I’d love to hear about it from the player point of view.

And thanks to Gregor Hutton, Iain McAllister, Paul Fraine, Cat Tobin, John Wilson, Doug Whitely, Myles Stenhouse and Craig Oxbrow for all their help in testing the demos prior to Gen Con. And to everyone who played in a demo at the con.

Cheers
Malcolm