Just what the title says.

 The BEST time you ever had playing either a Demo version of an RPG or Best time you played an RPG with a group that was mostly strangers to you.


For me it was last May (June?) when DUNGEONS & DRAGON 4th edition had its debut gaming Day.
I practically NEVER get to be 'just a player' - so I asked my manager isd it was alright if I played in one of the demos after my shiuft was over. (I was opening the store that Saturday) He told me there weren't any rules against employees playing in the demos.. SO I did.

The first 45 minutes or an hour it was slow going for me trying to get a handle on the terminology. By that I mean the NEW terms that WotC threw in there.  By the next hour I was starting to get into it. Remember those damn animated statues in that scenario? IREALLY started to hate those things. Then  I decoded to play dead for a round, the group of creatures walked past me and Then  I did a Strikje(!) attack of some kind to the bad guy from behind. That made all the animated stuff drop to the ground.

They told me that I had saved the day the way that I roleplayed it. When they took the vote - I got voted best roleplayer and got the souveneir diuce set and 3 or 4 figs as a prize.

VERY COOL.

 So, yeah my first experience with 4th/e D&D was a pretty much positive one. Wound up having fun - and I didn't know that I was going to.
Keep in mind, D&D was never my favorite game or genre, but I still had a good time.

Next cloest to that for me was a 'speed demo' of the MAGE KNIGHT minis game in August of 2000 at GenCon.

Anyone else have a memorable DEMO or new group experience memory thats a really good intro time?

- Ed C.

I played in a demo/pick up game of Dragon Storm and got hooked. I ended playing that character for some time...

Seanchai

A dodgy home-brew / self-published WWII French Resistence RPG, called originally RESISTENCE.
 
Lots of fun, but then I was only 14! And way ahead of the current interest in Medal of Honour & Call of Duty and other WWII FPS games.

Hinterwelt Roma Imperious - run by the man himself. I've played two sessions with him running that and another running Shades of Earth.

Bill's a great GM and when the group is good (the first two Roma's were better than the last Shades - no offense) it's a blast.

Plus - it got me into the D&D group I'm in now as my DM was a fellow player in these Game Day games.

One of these days he'll bust my Sci-Fi cherry and run Neb - maybe Gen Con!

I ran a demo game of Sorcerer one night for three people at an RP club, and it was one of the best games I'd ever played. One guy played his chr like a complete arsehole and nearly ran out of humanity. The one girl who was playing was just beautiful in the role. She also had her 14-yr-old sister watching, so I was really on my toes that night.

Don't Rest Your Head - kids in an underground government facility who find themselves up against clowns, trolls, replicating cats, and more as they travel between the facility and the Mad City in their attempts to escape to the surface.

Dread - The real, Jenga-using Dread. Not this new-fangled Dread thing everyone's talking about lately. Using Jenga as a resolution mechanic for a horror game sounds weird, but works incredibly well in play. Obviously, it's only good for one-shots, but boy are those one-shots awesome. In one game, we played down-on-our-luck everyday people at a self-improvement camp/elder god-worshipping cult headquarters. In another, we played children who were whisked away to an extradimensional dollhouse of horrors to satisfy the whims of a spoiled brat ghost.

Wu Shu Renegades - A homebrew martial arts game that uses a kind of Exalted-style tic system for initiative. It made kung-fu and social-fu two sides of the same coin, with both having their pros and cons for use in combats. During a Mortal Kombat-inspired tournament, my socialite was able to verbally castrate the scariest villain of the entire game 'cuz of his weak social defenses. Then she ripped his throat out. That was awesome!

Played in:

Gurps Hellboy - Got to be a super soldier in this one.  Really had fun with it also.  The GM had a really good grasp of the rules and everything just flowed out real great.

Ghosts of Albion - A veteran of the unisystem mechanics and freelancer for Eden ran this one.  Was quiet the hoot, I drew the one armed general.... don't remember his name though.  Some of the other players really made this game go.  It was the very last game of the night and we were the final table of folks in there.  

Ran:

Kult - I've ran many a one shot/demo game of Kult over the years.  Always had fun with it.  So many ways to take the game.  Faves among the players were the ones that sort of had a Silent Hill twist to them.

Little Fears - I ran so many demos and one shots at a local shop it was insane.  At one point I was running three seperate campaigns (a different group with each) and running one shots before them for other players.  On Halloween I ran a special game that had fifteen players show up for.  The story took place at a Halloween party so at the game table I put out a big bowl of candy, gave out sodas and all that... until the shit hit the fan.  Then I took it all away, and got real intense in the game.  They loved it.   Those were the days.

Hong Kong Action Theater! is the best game for me to run as a demo. I've run it since it was new, but that was a long time ago. It has never failed me. Partly because it's a game designed to be terrific as a demo, and partly because I found the success running it to be very reinforcing and I put some polish on the way I do it. That led to more fun and more excitement, and it has become a self-perpetuating cycle of awesome.

I've run a lot of demo games over the years, so it'd be very hard to say which was "best".  One of the most memorable to me was a playtest game of the still-to-be-released C7 Doctor Who RPG, where we used the rules to play an adventure of the Legion of Substitute Heroes. That was fun.

My first session, which I guess was like a demo, of Coyote Trail was also really great.

RPGPundit

I got a chance to playtest in John Wick's Houses of the Blooded LARP and it was the most fun I've had at a demo.

I find demos in general to be tons of fun since I like to try out new games and to be surprised by new systems and settings.

Favorite Demo ever ran: Amber Diceless at Phoenix Con Games 2008. A table full of players with a wide range of players.

well i hav not palyed much games yet ..so i only can say that whatever the game is should be entertaining

Can I count playing White Box D&D with my older brother and his friends?

Otherwise, in recent memory, I'd say Dead of Night, run by Merwin S., one of the authors. It just went wonderfully smoothly and sold me on the game easily.

I also really enjoyed a con game of Pendragon. We didn't get much into the big picture elements of the game, but the group was a lot of fun and produced an all-time great one-liner.