So Conpulsion 2008 has just finished in Edinburgh, and I got to run my first ever game of Solipsist entirely to people who had never seen, read, or played before. I'm glad to say it all went really well, and the players enjoyed it enough to buy my last two copies :)
The game started with a little hiccup, when I discovered that I had left all my carefully pre-generated characters, play aids, and the like sitting on my bedroom floor ... ooops! Luckily I still had a pad of paper and a copy of the rules, so we decided just to go for it and create new characters anyway. You can see the characters that were created by Brian, Susan and Gwen here. In the end I was glad that we created new characters, even though it took half an hour out of a 4 hour slot, because I think the players were much more attached to their concepts than they would have been if they had just picked some of my pre-gens.
Following the advice in the book to start the game "here and now" we began in a pub on Edinburgh's Rose Street on a Sunday afternoon, where the three Solipsists were meeting to discuss a strange rash of odd and disturbing graffiti that had been popping up all around the city. After trying to erase the symbols the characters quickly became involved in rescuing the graffiti artist from a bunch of Shadow tainted circus performers who he was trying to keep in check with the symbols.
The players started a little tentatively, with small changes of reality (reading someone's surface thoughts, levitating to hide and the like), but once they realized it was no harder to make yourself Queen and produce an army of Knights from thin air than it was to hide in a pub things soon exploded into wilder and weirder stuff. Discovering that the Circus folk were nothing but hollow shells with holes in their heads (Brian's idea I think) they raised an army and set out against the Circusite kingdom, only to realize that most of the Circusite army was in fact normal people, who were being turned into these hollow creatures at the circus, and then controlled by microchips. A number of plot twists later and we reached a final confrontation on a medieval battlefield, at the edge of a giant theme park.
The endgame featured a fight between the Solipsists and a bunch of strange Circusites (partly drawn from a bizarre children's book I once had called Rameses in Rio Moto), like the Lion Tamer and a Clown who shot missiles from his mouth. After defeating these in suitably grandiose ways (Loki dealt with the missile by changing reality so that all computers were in fact tiny brains that she bred in her lab and could control with her telepathic powers) the party confronted the Ringmaster and finally did away with the Shadow Infestation.
Even with new players everything went smoothly, and there was certainly no need for advance preparation. I made a note to myself, though, that when getting into a big conflict between Solipsists and the Shadow, with tokens being spent on both sides, that it would be great to play it out as with the dice bonuses in Tiny Triangles, narrating how reality goes back and forth as each side spends tokens.