That rings true honestly. You'd run a demo and sell zero or one copies and you'd think...maybe I could have done that on the booth.

I think Malcolm's nailed it in another thread (which is probably better than my post above). It's the practicalities. You need to keep a table free for the demo, you need enough people on the stall to spare someone to run the demo. It can work, but you really need to be set up for it.

You know, I'm wondering about mini-demos, just something you could do in 30 seconds at the stall to show how a mechanic works.

"So this is how Trust works in Cold City. Let's say you're an intelligence officer and we're trying to do X, but you can betray me if you want. You roll this..."

I've always liked ME1 more then ME2! It felt like, with the ME2, they'd spent a bit too much time thinking what the fans might like and it wasn't quite as fun.

(This is probably unfair obviously)

I think I remember that, at one point, we got a bit sick of them, because you'd take 30 minutes to run them, but the players wouldn't buy a copy, and then we thought "Maybe I could have been on the stall instead".

Maybe I'm imagining that though. I like them, I should write one sometime.

I'd love a film or TV adaptation that scares me like that one. The ones I've seen always seem to lose the Victorian-ness or the weirdness somehow.

Did Jeff Wayne's version not do it for you?

(To steal the mechanics)

Or is he returning to the real world? If so, where are we?

I think it's probably Fronts in Apocalypse World and Towns in DitV, although Night Witches is a great extension of Apocalypse World