So, on another thread, a vociferous, and sometimes annoying, but generally respectable poster brought
up that there are more Battletech events, which include demos, at Origins and Gencon then Shadowrun
events. Now, this got me thinking:

What goes into demoing an RPG? How do you run an RPG tournement? Since Tournements have to have
a clear winner, how do you "win" an RPG?

By stacking on as much armor as you can and not-dying.

You are not winning the RPG, you are winning the tournament. And how varies. You can advance entire teams based on some sort of scoring system (you got items a & b, didn't do c & d and no PCs got killed and nobody noticed you etc) or you can advance by individual accomplishment. The most interesting example of advancement by individual was a game where there were 6 PCs who were secretly assigned a character who were all in a tavern and you were required to role-play the character write up by sending notes to the GM. Then the GM would read them all and say what happened. You had no idea who played what or whether a given character doing stuff was a PC or an NPC. Winners ran the characters as close as possible to the write-up. I lost because my character, the bar owner, got tired of the bar maid not getting the patrons beer fast enough so I started helping but missed that the character was more lazy than money hungry....

I would suggest 4 bare bones characters already pre-built, give the players a printed out list of equipment/spells and allow them some time to flesh out the characters.
Then simply run them through a pre-built run designed to work through in about 40-60 mins/

I have had excellent success showing some new players the game that way and they really enjoy having a hand in making the characters they get to play with
PS: also have a small cheat sheet with some of the more common rules for the game for them to reference themselves. Its a much more casual/immersing experience when they don't have to flip through books.

Shadowrun isn't the best system to take a casual dip in, but as with all systems you need to give the players a pre-generated character that gives them the information they are most likely to need in a quick-to-read fashion.

I do that all the time as a member of the "Pegasus Support Team".

First step: "Do you know RPGs?"

Yes = Fine
No = Very short introduction

Second step: "Do you know SR (from previous editions)?

Yes = Explain changes
No = Very short introduction of the setting (Awakening, Metahumans, magic, matrix, corps, Shadowrunners, etc.)

Third step: "Do you have a character?"

Yes = Fine, show it to me
No = Here are some archetypes from the BBB, you may choose one

Explain the four base types: Mages & Ki-Ads / Hackers, Riggers & TMs / Sams / Faces

Fourth step: Explain the basic game mechanics step by step using the character record sheet. -> target numbers, hits, glitches, critical glitches, dice pools, attributes, special attributes, what to do with edge, active skills, knowledge skills, qualities

Do not explain combat mechanics. Wait until there's a real combat in the game.

Fifth Step: Start a short demo run. Skip the fixer and start with meeting the Johnson. Use a simple plot. Integrate combat, magic and hacking opportunities.


I've done the explanations and a short run in ~2h at the last Games Fair in Essen several times per day.




I've been participating in a "The Dark Eye" tournament. 4 groups where playing the same adventure simultaneously. The GMs where taking notes and assigning points for certain actions like e.g. linking a murder to the right NSC. At the end the team with the most points has won the tournament.

Doc knows his stuff! My contribution:

Each character should have one or two special things the other characters lack; A good team might be a Combat Mage, a Combat Decker, and two flavors of CyberSam - maybe a lightly-chromed Troll and a heavily-wired Human. Riggers, Adepts, and Summoner-type mages are all pretty tough to learn in a hurry, and you want this to be simple.

Set up a simple map, with minis if you can swing it. Remember, you've only got an hour so you have to move quick, and minis let you show instead of tell. Have a 'suggested' route that involves smashing the front door, taking out the mercenaries on the ground floor, not getting killed by the mercs on the second-story balcony, and recovering the Briefcase. Have at least three other "seemingly obvious" ways to do the mission, using everybody's special skills - e.g. a security terminal on the outside of the building, a second-story window that could be levitated up to, a sniper nest on the building across the street. Warn the players that if an alarm goes off, or if gunfire is heard, they only have X turns to leave the building before the SWAT guys show up.

Remember that these guys don't know the game at all, so advise them to take five minutes (maybe have a timer on the table) and plan the assault before they move in. You might need to give them tips - notecards clipped to character sheets, maybe - that advise them how their character thinks it should go down.

First off, keep in mind that there are several different types of events that happen at the conventions. "Demo" is short hand, but also misleading.

1) Demo Games

These are short games. Sometimes they're scheduled demos, often unscheduled "booth Demos". For a long while we ran "Welcome to the 6th World" demos, which were two hour demo games. These were designed to be fairly in depth, give some good amount of background on the game world, and then show off the rules with a short "adventure that wouldinclude a basic "Meet Mr John at the Bar", hire the runners to Steal a MacGuffin from Corp X, let them do some recon and legwork to learn the core rules, and then run a short combat scene when they broke into Corp X so they can see the characters in action.

Booth Demos are shorter events, usually no more than an hour in length. For these I give a much briefer background on Shadowrun, and then dive into a short combat scene to show off the rules. Usually it's a Stuffer Shack or Bar FIght type of scenarios, and we just throw them into the mix, since you can't tie them up for a couple of hours.

2) One Shots & Missions

These are both essentially the same thing, except that Missions Games are tied to the Missions Campaign, and players can bring their own characters. Missions games also tend to be more "Straight" and adhrere to the SR World and Rules, while on occasion One Shots can get a bit wierd and funky. I've run One SHots where the PCs were all Free Spirits, where they were in a illy Wonka & Chocolate Factory setting, where I turned one of the PCs into a Wendigo and had him try and eat the rest of his team... They're one off games, so sometimes it's nice to go crazy and do things you wouldn't do in a campaign.

Anyway, these are games that fit in a 4 hour block of time, with the assumption that the players know the basic of Shadowrun, though often well end up with new players anyways, so you still need to teach the rules.

3) "Event Games"

These are all over the map, but they're less standard than One Shots or a regular Missions game. We've had multiple GMs running the same adventure with three different teams, where the teams were all working against each other but didn't know it, till they all met up at the end of the adventure for a big showdown. Who's Run Is It Anyway? is a game run in the vein of the TV SHow "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" where a group of experienced players and a GM create characters adn run an adventure based on suggestions from an audience. The Shadowrun Scramble is a Missions event that's 8 hours long and is half tabletop, half LARP..

4) The Tournament

For a long time, this was one of our focuses at the cons. The first few couple years I was involved, we actually didn't do any scheduled events except the Tournament and the occasional demo game.

The Tournament is basically a multi-night event game where up to 12 teams of players run through the exact same adventure with the exact same characters. PLayers are scored based on a variety of factors: RUles knowledge, Roelplaying, how well they do at the adventure itself, meeting certain goals, etc. Therea re a whole pile of things that go into the scoring, and we had some pretty comprehensive guidelines to help GMs score events so that they were all scoring on the same scale. (We would also get together after the rounds and discuss the teams and what they did, to kind of double check each others scoring).

The team with the best score at the end of the adventure would win a prize, sometimes a trophy, sometimes free books, sometimes just gift certificates. Depended on what the company (FASA, FanPro, etc) would supply.

Bull

That first step is one I've seen skipped far too often. The biggest pitfall I've seen with any system is over explanation, the human mind can only process certain amount of new info at a time. For example, don't bring in auto fire until the player understands normal attacks.

Right now I'm working on what we call "Multi-User Run" in Germany for the upcoming Feen Con in Bonn. 3 teams, 3 jobs, 1 old drilling rig in the North Sea being secretly converted into an off-shore casino under some cover story (geothermal power station). Toss in a rogue AI and a Mana Storm caused by a failed ritual counterstrike. (among several subplots) What you get is some horror-survial scenario that's based more on imagination than real threats apart from the other SC teams.