Character Creation
Planning characters chatting online and then jumping straight into the session worked well. I've often ended up doing that unofficially, but I think I might make it my default. Planning actually benefits from some time to mull over ideas, mixed with talking to other characters and the GM, and often doesn't need much face to face time. If people are completely new to the system, then yes, you probably want to do that together, in what I think of as a pre-session.
Obviously that's when players are designing characters. For one-shots I'll usually provide a range of pregens to choose from, or maybe a mix-and-match set of character sheets with mechanics, and of fill-in-the-blank backgrounds.
Setting the Scene
I've been refining my skill at describing the setting, and giving the characters a clear motivation straight out of the gate. I still get hung up on it surprisingly often, but resolving to get my players to repeat back what I thought was important meant that I could notice and fix any holes before anyone got lost without a clear goal.
I also did ok at describing the rooms, in terms of scale and general contents. It's still not my best strength, but I was fairly happy.
Pacing
This is one of these things where if it's done well you don't notice but if it's done badly it can undermine everything else. But compared to many sessions, I did great, we finished almost exactly on schedule, with an appropriate number of fights.
What did I do right? I had a fairly clear idea of what would happen in each third of the adventure, and when that should happen, and took a five minute break to recharge at those points, and hurried things along when I needed to to fit those times. That meant that if I needed to, I'd be cutting short the introductory bit to get to the climaxes, not cutting short the climaxes. That doesn't work if the players actually haven't really succeeded the introductory bit, but if they've basically got the idea but just not worked their way through everything, I can fast-forward and say "you wrap that up without much more problem" rather than playing through more similar fights.
But in fact, I didn't need to do that at all. I was fairly loose with how each fight went on. When I thought it needed it I did encourage players to keep attacking for another round "same attack, roll, damage, ok next" style. But when an enemy was mostly dead or a fight was mostly over, I'd handwave it by letting the last enemy run away or be knocked out a couple of hitpoints soon or whatever.
Notice, there is an art to that. If the fight has juuuuust turned and the players were really looking forward to using their big abilities, it robs them of a lot of fun to say, "ok, you've got this one, we'll assume you win". You need to judge when the *players* are ready to end the fight. But I think I got the balance right.
There was one moment where the Ninja who builds up to a big attack didn't quite get to do it enough, but we handwaved things so he could even though that wasn't perfect.
I'd wondered if I'd have to keep encouraging the players to keep moving and not hang around faffing with one room before moving on, but they were really great at getting sucked into things sometimes but quickly moving towards the main objective whenever things flagged.
Acting and Characterisation
My players almost did me to shame, here, they all made REALLY GREAT characters. Rusty was great as the chief engineer of not-Tony-Stark, pushed into combat he didn't really want to be handling, and playing up the mechanic persona. Vapourwave's glam rock was utterly impeccable. Nova Ninja really brought to life the low-budget well meaning goofball. Dr Weird was a great aloof wizard.
So for a lot of it I just fed them straight lines and let them get on with it.
But I'm pretty happy how I fleshed out a concept to include a few serious moments, some slapstick, and a lot that was a bit silly but also worth actually fighting. And the environments worked well, the storeroom full of magical ingredients and the basement with different experiments behind forcefields made great settings for a variety of wacky shenanigans.
And planning the major characters but bringing them out when it seemed appropriate or the dice called them up worked very well.
Planning characters chatting online and then jumping straight into the session worked well. I've often ended up doing that unofficially, but I think I might make it my default. Planning actually benefits from some time to mull over ideas, mixed with talking to other characters and the GM, and often doesn't need much face to face time. If people are completely new to the system, then yes, you probably want to do that together, in what I think of as a pre-session.
Obviously that's when players are designing characters. For one-shots I'll usually provide a range of pregens to choose from, or maybe a mix-and-match set of character sheets with mechanics, and of fill-in-the-blank backgrounds.
Setting the Scene
I've been refining my skill at describing the setting, and giving the characters a clear motivation straight out of the gate. I still get hung up on it surprisingly often, but resolving to get my players to repeat back what I thought was important meant that I could notice and fix any holes before anyone got lost without a clear goal.
I also did ok at describing the rooms, in terms of scale and general contents. It's still not my best strength, but I was fairly happy.
Pacing
This is one of these things where if it's done well you don't notice but if it's done badly it can undermine everything else. But compared to many sessions, I did great, we finished almost exactly on schedule, with an appropriate number of fights.
What did I do right? I had a fairly clear idea of what would happen in each third of the adventure, and when that should happen, and took a five minute break to recharge at those points, and hurried things along when I needed to to fit those times. That meant that if I needed to, I'd be cutting short the introductory bit to get to the climaxes, not cutting short the climaxes. That doesn't work if the players actually haven't really succeeded the introductory bit, but if they've basically got the idea but just not worked their way through everything, I can fast-forward and say "you wrap that up without much more problem" rather than playing through more similar fights.
But in fact, I didn't need to do that at all. I was fairly loose with how each fight went on. When I thought it needed it I did encourage players to keep attacking for another round "same attack, roll, damage, ok next" style. But when an enemy was mostly dead or a fight was mostly over, I'd handwave it by letting the last enemy run away or be knocked out a couple of hitpoints soon or whatever.
Notice, there is an art to that. If the fight has juuuuust turned and the players were really looking forward to using their big abilities, it robs them of a lot of fun to say, "ok, you've got this one, we'll assume you win". You need to judge when the *players* are ready to end the fight. But I think I got the balance right.
There was one moment where the Ninja who builds up to a big attack didn't quite get to do it enough, but we handwaved things so he could even though that wasn't perfect.
I'd wondered if I'd have to keep encouraging the players to keep moving and not hang around faffing with one room before moving on, but they were really great at getting sucked into things sometimes but quickly moving towards the main objective whenever things flagged.
Acting and Characterisation
My players almost did me to shame, here, they all made REALLY GREAT characters. Rusty was great as the chief engineer of not-Tony-Stark, pushed into combat he didn't really want to be handling, and playing up the mechanic persona. Vapourwave's glam rock was utterly impeccable. Nova Ninja really brought to life the low-budget well meaning goofball. Dr Weird was a great aloof wizard.
So for a lot of it I just fed them straight lines and let them get on with it.
But I'm pretty happy how I fleshed out a concept to include a few serious moments, some slapstick, and a lot that was a bit silly but also worth actually fighting. And the environments worked well, the storeroom full of magical ingredients and the basement with different experiments behind forcefields made great settings for a variety of wacky shenanigans.
And planning the major characters but bringing them out when it seemed appropriate or the dice called them up worked very well.