Sometimes you know in advance who your players are going to be. In the case of this convention, though, there is a set of boards set up in which a GM writes down the name, time, and location of their game, and puts down a blank line for every PC slot in his game. Attendees then sign up on the board, so the GM has no idea who is going to be coming to his game, or what their experience level will be. In addition, there is no opportunity to do character creation with the players, as we established before, A Time of War's character creation process takes far too long, especially with newbie players.
So when a player arrives at the game, he finds all the character sheets that haven't been taken laid out before him, and a brief, one-line entry on what the character does (Expert Sniper, Demolitions Specialist, Medic, etc.) Once everybody has a seat and a sheet, we go around the table and do introductions, and then I explain to the party what the situation is, and what their goals will be. I also do a quick rundown of the rules they're likely to encounter, and hopefully hand them a cheat sheet. I have the map pre-drawn infront of them, so I can indicate important features as I talk.
In this case, the players spend perhaps five minutes discussing strategy, initial placement, and the Demolitions expert decides where to place his charges. Once that is accomplished, we being the adventure proper.
I presume most of my players will not be terribly familiar with the A Time of War rules, so the first several shots they take I'll step them through. Within four or five shots, though, most of them will understand the process (there's always one that lags a bit.) Once they've gotten the hang of mowing down mooks, I start with the special events.
Likely the first event to be rolled out would be the enemy sniper -- because this threat is among the lowest of the special problems, and can persist as other threats appear. He takes his first shot, then spends two or three rounds aiming again.
After a few more rounds, I ramp up the storm a bit, and decrease visibility, allowing the NPC's to creep closer to the house, and take it under fire with their assault rifles. This is where the players should begin to sweat, and possible start taking hits. The Medic finds himself with much to do. The Demolitions guy also likely gets his moment in the sun here.
Finally, when most of those enemies have been eliminated, we roll out "the Boss", the light vehicle they have in support. For this I'll likely borrow a large miniature from another GM -- something to make it clear that this is a scary thing coming at them. The players scuttle to deal with the oncoming threat, and manage to bring the monster down just before it breaches the house. The storm starts to clear, the surviving bandits retreat, and the scenario ends in victory.
The real trick here, as with any session, is working around the problems that might arise during the run. Mechanically, there's little you can do -- if a PC gets hit by a lucky shot from an NPC and they're out of Edge, down they do. More important is sensing the mood of the table. If you're lucky, everybody's feeling the same thing; then you can simply cater to what they're looking for. If they feel like they're on top of the world, send in more bad guys. If they feel like the game is crashing down around them, ease up a bit, or give them an easy win to increase morale (like the Demolitions man blowing up a whole platoon of enemy troops.)
Your players don't know what to expect, and will often have wildly different expectations for how the session will go from you, and from one another. Challenge is good, fear is good, frustration is not good. The party should always feel like they're making progress, like they understand how what they're doing is getting them to their goal.
In the event of a massive deviation between what the players want and what the GM has planned, the GM ideally is the one to change. If you feel you can roll with the changing winds at the table, do it. A word of warning, though: it is easy to put yourself or your PC's in an unwinnable position by playing too fast and loose with the statistics and probabilities. When in doubt, err on the side of too few opponents.
As of this writing, it looks like I'll have a regular session of Ten Years on Terra on Saturday, but since I've already written it, I may run this one-shot anyways. I'll let you know next week how things play out.
No comments:
Post a Comment