Ambassador - Lesson 3

Creating a Narrative Demo

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Hello there and welcome back to the Ambassador Program for Star Wars™: Unlimited.

As always, I’m your host Jonah and today we’ll be talking about how to create a narrative demo.

As we discussed in the previous lesson, which more broadly covers running demos, we strongly believe that a narrative experience is a faster hook and quickly teaches a player the key elements that they need to know in order to play the game.

Before we dive into the process outlining how you can create your own, we have our own Narrative Demo using the Intro Battle: Hoth™ cards, and you can look at that script as well as the card pool to see if you can determine how we made our decisions.

Determine Scope

Before you get started you have to determine your scope - who are you going to be using this demo with? How often are you going to want to repeat it? Is this is a demo that you want to scale up?

If you’re just teaching one or two people, you can create a much more involved demo, almost a full narrative campaign filled with specific characters that they’re attached to. If you’re teaching at a convention or expect to have a lot of people interested, bringing it back down to a more focused experience lets you get them hooked faster, and then you can pass them along to playing more complex games.

Finding the Right Cards

Similar to the scope, you want to select the ideal card pool. Considering too many cards makes designing the experience more complicated. Too few, and you’ll be very restricted in what you’ll be able to teach.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive experience, you may want to start by picking specific cards out of all available cards.

If you’re running demos in a space that you aren’t familiar with and that’s open to the public, you may want to use cards that you can easily replace in case any go missing.

If your goal is to create an experience that other people can replicate, using a preconstructed pool of cards make that a lot easier.

Develop Your Syllabus

What do you want to teach? Which mechanics need to come first? Keep in mind that you’re designing this experience, and can work with non-standard board states, so you don’t have to teach mechanics in an order that would emerge organically.

In the Intro Battle: Hoth demo, the first thing we do is have a player attack with a Leader Unit and defeat a Base - that’s not how most demos will start, but it demonstrates a few key mechanics, and in the context of the rest of the demo, sets us up to move forward.

You also don’t need to teach every mechanic - nor should you - so figure out which are the key elements. Core game functions that are a key part of a successful demo include the following:

Hitting every entry in the comprehensive rules is very excessive, but you can look at starter decks as a guide. For example Intro Battle: Hoth doesn’t have any tokens, including experience or shields, nor any upgrades, there are no delayed effects and the only lasting effects have a duration of a single attack, so there aren’t things players have to remember for a significant period of time. While these are key parts of Premier play, you don’t need to know them to decide whether or not the game is interesting enough for you to want to learn more.

Allow for Agency

This is a stretch goal, and might not always be available based on the card pool you’re working from. Part of what makes the narrative elements so exciting is being able to make choices that resonate with you.

While the Intro Battle: Hoth narrative demo has only one course because there are a very restricted number of cards, when designing your own narrative demo, you can allow the player to pick from a broader number of leaders and bases, and tell a different story depending on what they pick.

Games are fun because of the strategic and tactical decisions we make - whether they’re right or wrong. In fact, making wrong choices in games is often very exciting because you then have to claw your way back, and you can learn from the experience.

Keep it Clear and Concise

While we want to allow players some degree of freedom and exploration, the goal of a narrative demo is to hook the player - not necessarily go through the whole strategy of a game, which is a lot more complex and can take a significant amount of time to go through.

While this sounds like it goes against the previous recommendations, constrain meaningless choices. For example, because each stage of a narrative demo is usually separate from the previous turn, decisions like “What card should I resource?” don’t have a lot of meaning in this format. To make life easier for the player, stack the deck so that when they draw during a regroup phase, they’re drawing the same card twice, so there is no wrong decision.

While limiting strategic choices may feel constraining at times, creating guidance allows the player to see the scaffolding and progression of strategy, without having to make those strategic decisions before they understand the long term impact.

One of the most common questions you’ll hear when teaching Unlimited by playing a game naturally is “How do I decide what cards to resource?” The answer to that is a substantially complicated question, based on the deck you’re playing against, the other cards in your hand and what you’ve previously resourced - and way beyond the scope of a demo. However, it’s a very obvious and significant choice, and so new players want the answer, even if they’re not prepared for it.

Consequently, if there’s a decision that the player isn’t ready to make, due to the strategic complexity, rig the game so that they don’t have to make that decision.

Maintain Strategic Cohesiveness

One thing that’s important to keep players engaged is to make it so that the decisions of both players make sense, even though it’s scripted to one degree or another.

While in a traditional demo you can pull your punches by keeping good cards in your hand or even putting them into play as resources. This allows you to “show” the student that you had no way you could win. However, when you’re constructing game states for a narrative demo, you need to balance the story you’re telling with how the game actually plays.

For example, if you set it up so that the game is close, make sure that the student has units with Sentinel in the appropriate zones, so that the enemy can’t just attack and win. If the enemy has a card like Superlaser Blast, and they play it at the end of a phase, after taking several hits from units without attacking with any - why didn’t they play it earlier to save taking damage?

Individual starting game states don’t need to make too much sense. You can have very lopsided positions, as long as the actions that the student sees makes sense. Players may not recognize that a game state is weird, because they don’t have the familiarity with the wider scope of the game, but many players will realize “wait, my opponent could have made an obvious play and won/had a better unit for unit trade. This doesn’t make sense.” Those smaller decisions are much easier to call out.

While teaching strategy isn’t a goal of demos, teaching them actively bad strategy should be avoided.

Overall the three primary goals of a narrative demo are to provide a strong narrative, hook them quickly and teach in steps.

Link the gameplay to the story of Star Wars. The galaxy has a depth to it that can bring in players, and telling a story can create context for a player and make it easier for them to fully understand the tactics and strategy.

Hook them quickly - playing a full game is a blast, but going through a full demo can feel like riding a bike with training wheels. If you can get through the key mechanics in five minutes instead of twenty-five minutes, that means that they can jump into a full game and have the baseline understanding they need to play without significant handholding.

Teach in steps. The rules, when broken down into bite-sized pieces, little vignettes in context, are a much more approachable way to handle teaching the whole structure. Rather than overwhelming the player with a flood of information and decisions - what card do I resource? What do I play? What should I attack? a narrative demo focus on how you play the game, and offers each piece separated from the others, so there are fewer distractions.

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Until next time, good luck and have fun!

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