So we ended up having our first session this past Friday night, it was a little sooner than I thought I'd be ready for, but it actually went pretty well. And by pretty well, I mean the players had fun, and so did I. From a preparation standpoint, I wasn't nearly as prepared as I thought I was.
I arrived a few minutes early and got right to setting things up. The first holdup was was technological. I had a laptop and a couple tablets, plus my phone, to use for various purposes. My friend has a gaming table he built and there is a TV set in the middle facing upward. The TV didn't have a VGA port, and this laptop was old so there was no HDMI port on it. Thats wasn't a huge deal, but I will be getting an adapter going forward, because there will be times where showing things from the laptop is easier. Luckily that TV can be casted to using Google, so I did that with one of the tablets, and could probably even do it from the laptop now that I think about it.
Next I tried to get organized. I dug out the printouts that I had prepared for the game, quick reference sheets and some of the player's characters I had put into Chummer for them. There wasn't time to hang up the giant map of Seattle that I printed at work on our 42" plotter. Time was beginning to become an issue, I felt like the prep was taking too long and I wasn't ending up feeling any more organized. So I gathered what I could and got started.
Things started off a little slow here too, because I had written some narration to bring them into the situation. Not just one narration, but two actually. The group started out not as a group, and two players were arriving at a destination separately in the first narration. Then I paused them, and narrated the start of the third character. The part with the 3rd character was actually supposed to happen solo a few days beforehand, but that fell through, so I had to change things a bit the morning before we played to roll them together and risk some boredom. That risk came from the third character being a Technomancer who had to do a datasteal and then get located by the target so the other two players had a reason to go extract him.
This was about the point that I realized I had lost all concept of time, I couldn't feel how long things were taking because I was in overdrive trying to prevent them from taking a long time. Rules/rolls I thought I knew, they wouldn't come to mind. Some player was always holding the sheet I should have been referring to at that moment (need to make more copies!). And on top of that, my TM was still very shaky on his understanding of Matrix mechanics. So I had to guide him a bit without telling him what to do, and that takes longer. I don't actually know how long it was between the moment we started and the end of that data run, but it must have been less than an hour. That sounds long, but it could have been 30 minutes for all I know, the players weren't complaining.
I really tried not to design a mission where the players decisions could break things wildly, and for the most part I succeeded. After all, an extraction is pretty straight forward if everybody is working together. But where I goofed was how the data run had to end. The TM had to get knocked out, that was my only must happen event. Even if all the PC's got captured at the end of the extraction, I could work with that. But the TM had to steal some data, get traced, and then get knocked out. That would give the enemies time to get to his location, forcing the need for extraction. Simple right? I setup the host with a high attack stat, the spider had the same stats. I had patrol, acid, and probe IC's to find him, hit his firewall, and trace him, respectively. I even ran the IC's fairly loosely so they could achieve what they needed as it was needed. But the TM was scared and didn't fully understand when he was in real danger. So of course he decides to switch back to AR and jack out before I get the final boxes of matrix damage on him. I had no choice but to pull the "as you go to do that, an IC you didn't see before hits you with a data spike." I had him roll and I had to fudge a little, but he was out and not upset about how it went down. Reading the rules later, I was shorting the damage he was taking because I wasn't counting the two marks they put on him to run the trace. So it might have worked out right, but I chose not to stop and look up any rules that whole session. I don't regret that decision.
The rest of the session was the extraction, and it went well, with a few minor quibbles. I hadn't had time to put my ganger NPCs on index cards, or to worry about tracking all of their conditions. Since I hadn't spent that time, I also missed the fact that professional rating 0 NPCs don't have guns or armor. My original plan was to aim low on quality and make that up with quantity, just using as many gangers as were needed as they proceeded. That worked, and along with the out of sight, out of mind principle, I kept them feeling in danger while still being able to dominate combat and achieve their objective. By the end I started giving some of the gangers guns, which I wish I had started doing earlier, but my head wasn't clear enough to get there until the run was almost over.
Even though this session was designed to be a bit on rails to get them started, I tried to roll with whatever ideas the group had. If a player had a good idea, then the friendly NPC would change her plans to fit the player's idea. That happened a few times, and was good to see as they got more involved in the story. By the end of the session it had been about 4 hours since the start of the narration. I think I apologized for the slowness about every 5 minutes the whole night, but the players said it was fine. The upside is that while two of them had to wait during the datasteal, the TM had to wait until the NPC used a Medkit to wake him up again. That actually took a similar amount of time as the face was off doing his thing pretending to be one of the lowbie gangers that were looking for the TM. During that time the Rigger was doing surveillance and plotting how to be in place for the pickup while getting combat drones into position. It certainly could have gone worse.
Post-session everybody was happy and it looked like they were hooked. This was confirmed the next morning when the player who had initially had the least interest emailed me background story details and started really getting into it. Now I need to get back to planning so I'm ready for the next session. So much learned though, and I don't doubt the next session will be just as chaotic.