Days Away

First session is now scheduled for 5 June. The purpose of the session is to introduce the Jihad and the impetus for Case White, and to familiarize the players with the in-Mech combat system. I expect this to be the session of "What does that do?" and "What do I roll again?" Of course, that's going to last past this session, but hopefully we'll cover the fundamentals sufficiently that people will get the checks. I'm going to be evolving a cheatsheet for my players with key tables and other details on it, but I've found that such things are never what the GM thinks they will be, so I'll hold off on sharing it until its gotten some field testing.

One anomalous thing about this game, as with many of the games before it, is that it runs at 0900 on Sunday morning. Originally I chose this timeslot because in a post-college world, all my friends and I had extremely busy weekday lives, working late at our respective jobs, or being caught in traffic, or just being exhausted, and Saturdays were reserved for cleaning, chores, and often parties on Saturday night. Sunday morning, however, we were all up by 0700, because that's when our bodies naturally wake us up now regardless of when we went to sleep, and we had nothing to do. So I decided to fill the slot with a game.

So each Sunday I get up at 0700 or 0730 if I sleep in, set out my gaming material, and go make pancakes before my players arrive. I've actually found this time rather helpful as a GM -- once you've made the batter, making pancakes is a fairly mindless job, and it lets me think about the session and get myself in mindset without pouring over my notes. People usually start arriving about 0850, and we eat breakfast, get the social time out of the way that every gaming group of friends I've ever seen or heard of has at the beginning of session, and at 0930 we start running with what players we have -- there's always somebody chronically late who gets in right at the buzzer. We clear away breakfast, put down books and character sheets and maps and the other minutiae of gameplay, I hand out dice to people who forgot theirs, and we start.

I'm telling you all this so that you understand the context that this game is taking place in. We miss some weeks due to travel or other things that take players or me away, or if we all have some social function we're attending (there are only two major social circles represented across my five players, so anything that steals away one is likely to steal away two or three.) Sessions only run to about noon, so really there's only 2.5 hours of real solid playtime to work with -- each encounter needs to be lean and fast. Fluff is something that you take home with you and read between sessions. Because sessions are so short I am hoping to have most of the session planning done between sessions, so that when people arrive at the table, they know what they're going to be doing, why they're going to be doing it, and how the plan to make it happen. The session is execution and surprises.

Of course, all this means I need to be ready to go myself, hence all the pre-planning. I'm a little apprehensive about getting the systems in place to maintain proper records of the status of all the player's training and XP generation. The paperwork for XP in A Time of War seems to get messy fast, largely because characters need to work together to train each other. I like the mechanic conceptually, but its execution is a bit awkward. I'm sure I'll come up with a better system after playing around with it a bit, but it is complicated. I know I wrote about it last week, but I think there's another full article at least just on maintaining XP records. Back to the rulebook...