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[6E] How should I run 30 nights?

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marfish:
Toronto is ... flat, the nights are just one encounter after another. My group is on the 8th night, two of them already drop, and I have to recruit two more in order to keep it engaging (for me). The worst thing is, I felt like the game just need 3 players to get through all the nights, the rest can just sit around and watch and it would be totally fine...

any tips or suggestions?

0B:
Treat 30 nights as a buffet, not a roadmap. If some nights don't appeal to you or you don't think the players would enjoy them, let them have a night off to do downtime stuff, or swap in something that suits your table's playstyle.

Balancing is tricky, especially in an adventure with a twist (Same story with Harlequin's Back, this isn't a 6e thing or whatever). Don't be afraid to change things to better fit your playstyle: if your group prefers social stuff to combat, it's completely fine to switch out combat for something more engaging to them or add in additional options. (Or the reverse, if they prefer combat to social encounters). If your group loves hacking/decking style encounters, you'll want to skip around a bit because of the twist.

This is my doc of wrongbad opinions on 30 nights. A lot of it stems from my pickiness about adventures. I prefer the older ones that spell out building layouts, positions of foes/traps, etc. There's a few places where it railroads players where it doesn't need to:

If the PCs are intrepid enough to find a way to stop and steal a van, the people inside hit kill switches that destroy the equipment inside and then take cyanide pills to end their own lives. This should be a hint of future mysteries.

If the plot's moving too slow for your group, since you're on the eighth night you could always switch the end so that the van driver actually knows something, rather than drawing out the mystery.

MercilessMing:
I have SO MANY SUGGESTIONS, I only wish my GM guide to 30 nights was finished already so I could link it to you.  I will DM you my discord so we can chat about it.

MercilessMing:

--- Quote from: 0B on ---This is my doc of wrongbad opinions on 30 nights. A lot of it stems from my pickiness about adventures. I prefer the older ones that spell out building layouts, positions of foes/traps, etc. There's a few places where it railroads players where it doesn't need to:

--- End quote ---
Edit your link, didn't work for me - I think you just need to remove the quotation marks from the url code.  worked for me when I copy pasted the url inside your code.

Also 0B I used your doc when going through 30 Nights, even though it's a review with some critiques, it had some helpful suggestions that made my game better.

MercilessMing:
Some general tips: Yes definitely treat it like a buffet, in that you can skip nights, you can pick a later night and do it earlier, you can combine nights, but you have to read the whole thing first and plan accordingly.  They're going to introduce a new gang and new npc's almost every night, so being aware of stuff like The Triple during the first few nights if you settle in Cabbagetown is important and helpful.  Knowing what's coming will also help you plant seeds for later events and makes the introduction of some nights more organic, like making people in the players' base/village get sick before night 12.  Town building is a good way to get the players invested in the area they're settled in.  When you start, the players are the ones doing the heavy lifting to help out the community, like Night 3; keep them invested by threatening the community.  Later, get them to hire gangs to do the day to day work and transition their involvement to more admin decision making while they go off and do more important jobs.   

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