Long story short: aside from the occasional game or two at GenCon, I haven't been able to play an RPG in close to 15+ years. I used to GM SR 2nd edition back in the day, and we played pretty regularly, but I'm a decade and a half out of practice. I've finally convinced some of our friends to give an RPG a try, and I convinced them to try SR. All of them are at least halfway interested in the setting, but only two of them (out of five) had ever played an RPG before (one had played 1 session of Call of Cthulhu, and the other had played 1 session of SR4 about a year ago). So I sorta had to show them all how an RPG works in addition to introducing them to the setting, the game rules (and in the interest of simplicity, some rules, like recoil, I didn't even bother with), and so on. The players ultimately liked the game—all except one, that is: he kept wandering off because he failed the Surprise roll, then he rolled low Initiative on the next two Combat Turns, some of the other player's actions took awhile to resolve, and he wasn't terribly invested in the results of other people's actions. We're going to convince him to give the game another try, so my hope with this next session is to make people's action take less time and get him a bit more involved in the action.
(The grand irony is that the one new player I was most concerned about liked the game far more that I expected him to. I guess giving him the magical character was a good idea. The guy who kept wandering off was the one who'd played Call of Cthulhu.)
For making the game go a little faster, here are my second-session plans (so far):
1) I wrote down the dice pools for standard Defense Tests and Damage Resistance Tests on everyone's character sheet (instead of me having to keep telling them "Roll Reaction + Intuition" for a "free" Defense Test or "Roll Body + Armor – AP" and they keep adding them up each time)
2) I plan to give each player a number of color coded dice: X red dice for their highest possible combat roll, X green dice for their highest possible Spell/Summoning pool, white for Edge dice, etc. If they have modifiers, I'll just tell them to subtract X [color] dice.
3) I built a spreadsheet where I can:
A) keep track of how much P/S damage everyone has
B) plug in the Initiative everyone rolls, and it automatically calculates the Init totals for all subsequent rounds, including having an option for Init modifiers (like –5 Init to Parry/Dodge/Block or wound modifiers)
C) calculate everyone's recoil modifier. Strength-based RC, weapon-based RC, and 1 free bullet are all included in the calculation.
4) I'm giving everyone a copy of the list of possible actions for each action type (Free, Simple, Complex, Matrix). For the first game, I did make up cheat sheets on how to resolve common things like Ranged/Melee Combat, Spellcasting, etc. (since the 5th Ed. Runner's Toolkit isn't out yet), but I forgot this list… My hope is that each player can look over the list and already know what they want to do when their turn comes in the Initiative order, rather than waiting until their turn, not knowing what to do, me making some suggestions, THEN resolving that action.
These are all the ideas I already came up with, but I'm sure there are more I haven't even considered, seeing as how long I've been away from GMing. So does anyone have any other advice or suggestions, either for an out-of-practice GM in general or for ways to keep player interest high or to speed up gameplay?
Thanks, everybody.
