Title: ...out of a clear, blue sky.
I freely admit: I was feeling a little cocky after the relative success of the previous 2 sessions. I thought I was really starting to get a handle on this whole GM thing, and that the hard part (getting the players together and moving) was over; from now on, they'd start playing the main roles and I would just be filling in details and providing boundaries.
I knew exactly what was going to happen this session, and for once I'd actually tried to do my homework on the system. We were going to land on Higgin's Moon, but the contact wasn't going to be there; instead, Kai would have to haggle with a new guy, and he wasn't going to agree to do anything unless Kai and the crew went and took out some robbers who were in the area screwing things up for everybody. If they went to the town they'd be able to pick up a sidequest that would get them some extra cash and prizes, but if they went straight out to look for the robbers they'd find them, Kai would go down to negotiate and conveniently get killed, the crew could nuke the site from orbit, take the ship, and continue on their merry way with some fun-fun-fun tidbits scattered around the ship to give them a little direction. Next session we'd be on another world, with none of my squishy, non-combat players ever needing to damage their hitpoints. Great!
Ha.
Things went wrong almost immediately. Kai had barely started haggling with the new contact before Will got carried away and levelled a gun at him, which naturally soured the deal and the new guy took off into the woods (and safety). So much for that part of the storyline, or, you know, Will 'not liking violence'. Mercifully, this meant the crew now HAD to go to the town, where they learned about the robbers in the woods. They also 100% talked to the sidequest guy in the bar, but then essentially forgot all about it. Oh well.
So, armed with info and finally on their way, they head off to find the robbers. As I'm writing this and looking back on all the sessions we've now had, I'm starting to realise that my group plays far more aggressively than you'd think their characters would allow. I mean, we have all these squishy, non-violent, non-weapon-using folks, and instead of playing like sleuths and con men and diplomats and pickpockets, they play like freaking tanks, charging towards the issue in the most direct way possible. Odd. Oh well.
Anyway, back to the session. I felt like our pilot, Wren, wasn't really getting able to role play a lot compared to the other characters, and the next section of the story called for the party to be sort of skimming over the tops of trees looking for the robber camp - perfect time to get her to do some rolling and some role playing, right? This is where I learned Note to Self #2: Don't get a character to roll on any action you don't want to open up to failure. Oh well.
And, of course, no good ship nosedive is complete unless several characters get injured in the crash. In our case, of course, the most severely injured character was also our medical expert, because, really, why would you even expect anything else ever. So, what I had imagined to be a nice, clean little session full of sleuthing, haggling, and intrigue, immediately dissolved into damage control, and the last half of the session was spent frantically tending to the wounded and assessing ship damage (luckily Higgin's Moon is known for its nice, impact absorbing mud). My pilot got to role play, all right, as the rest of the crew took turns yelling at her, and the bulk of the die rolling was done by our mangled healer, Molly. An interesting and memorable session, certainly, but definitely not quite what I'd imagined. Note to self #3:
Oh well.
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