Mongoose have asked me to write two demo games for GenCon, one for Traveller and the other for Babylon 5. The B5 one also has to be capable of including Claudia Christian (she played Susan Ivanova) on the off-chance that she makes it to the con. So, I’ve written up a pair of two-three hour con scenarios, with six pregenerated characters each.
Those are pretty full games, though, not the hour-long ’sell me’ demo that’s increasingly popular, so tomorrow I’ll need to whittle down both games into shorter demos. A con scenario that’s intended to showcase a game needs to hit all the game’s selling points, which is tricky if one of the selling points is ‘has a lot of background’ like B5. I might just grab the characters from the B5 Security Council and run an hour-long ’shout at each other in character and politick’ game.
Traveller should be easier to demo in an hour. The main selling points are the simplicity of the system and the career-based character generation, so I’ll do up some nearly-finished characters and run them through a combat. Neither game has an atomic instance of play, unfortunately, like an encounter in D&D or a conflict scene in a story-game – it’s an inevitable trade-off when a game is best suited for long-form play.
One of my side projects while I’m in Swindon is to come up with a more effective way of demoing Mongoose rpgs at conventions, selling people on more than just the setting.
27/08/2008 at 8:20 pm Permalink
Having people shout at each other in character can work very nicely. One of my more memorable games (as a player) involved about two hours discussing a fictional budget (a Mongoose scenario – can you guess what it is yet?). In the end the GM had to wrap it up because nobody in the group was showing any signs of being bored by the discussion.
02/10/2008 at 10:38 pm Permalink
Seconding what David said, nobody was in the least bit tired of the politics of Irish farming after two hours of that LARP. You’d be…thoroughly unsurprised by how much most gamers love to argue.
Also, doesn’t B5 the game tend to be predominantly bought by gamers-who-are-B5 fans? I’d've thought that the most effective way of selling the game to them would be demo’ing how much the system and setting reflect what they like about B5.