I've been asking a lot of questions here trying to get ready for my fist game today, so I thought I'd let everyone know how it went. The team did very well. They were not pleased with the pay offered, but took the job figuring they had to start somewhere. The run went downhill when an alarm was triggered and Lonestar showed up, but the runners survived and got out with the data. They earned some cred, fenced some stolen gear, and earned a new contact. I stumbled a bit when the hacker was acting (the matrix still scare me), but we got through it and everyone had a good time. The game was supposed to run every 2 months, but after we finished up everyone was asking to play again sooner, so I take that as a good sign. Thanks to everyone who posted ideas/suggestions/answers! It really helped a lot.

Wow, 2 months between sessions seems like a really long time. I don't think I could keep a group interested over that period.

Congratulations on a good first game though.

My regular group plays Pathfinder every 2 weeks. That has been my gaming limit for the past few years (I'm married, father of 3, wage slave factory worker with lots of overtime). I have a lot of games that I like and want to play, just lack the time. I've been wanting a Shadowrun game for years now, but most of my players share the same time constraints. In a last ditch effort to get some SR action, I threw out an open call on facebook that I was doing a game that.. 1:multiple people want to play but never get the chance, and 2: would require a very small time investment (available time being the common issue when trying to get games going in the past) The once every 2 months was my attempt to get people who wanted to play to join up without feeling like they were pushing the limits of getting free time. Thankfully, it worked. Two of my players are from my regular Pathfinder game, but the other 2 are old friends of mine who I have not gamed with in years. One of them has a PF group of his own, and the other has not played a RPG in over 15 years. The once every 2 months made it pretty easy for them to say "yeah, I can swing that kind of gaming schedule." It also helped when telling my wife" baby, here is another day when my adult friends are going to come over and we are going to play our magical elf game".

It is a long time between sessions, but a SR game every 2 months is better than no SR game. It seems like everyone else wants to make it once a month now instead, so I may end up being the holdout on playing more often. I just do not have the time that I did 10 years ago. Our next game is scheduled for April 14th for now and we'll see how it goes. I'm just glad that they liked it enough to want to play again before the 2 months. I hope that means I did it right.

some of the facebook chatter on my page after tonight's game....

friend 1: it's been too long since we hung out any. And really, it's not often you get to portray an alcoholic elf with cyborg arms, is it?

friend 2: I've never envisioned an elf in a Chameleon Suit, holding a sniper rifle loaded with explosive rounds after watching an Orc hack a wireless network! I'd call that AWESOME!!

me: Welcome to the shadows my friend

Congrats on the successful first run! Like you have mentioned, I will concur with the assessment that if they want to get together earlier, then its a sign that you gave them a good session.

As a GM in other systems, I can certainly understand your fear of the Matrix rules and such, but I've usually found that when in doubt, winging it tends to work rather well. If you don't know a rule off the top of your head, make something up and look it up later. Usually, your players won't be sure either, and if they are, they can probably turn to it in the books pretty quickly.

That being said, I've never tried GM'ing Shadowrun yet, mainly because I have a great GM already, but also because I have to admit that I would likely struggle coming up with opponents, etc. I like the idea of monster levels in other games -- but then Shadowrun doesn't use levels even for the PCs so that wouldn't help much here.

Anyhoo, congrats again and best of luck in the future. Oh, and if you are concerned with time (particularly prep time since I know that can be a huge hang up for GMs) you may want to take a look at the Missions adventures. I've played through one now (and started a second) as a player and they aren't too bad. It also seems as though they would be fairly easy to adjust (pretty sure my GM was adjusting things on the fly as we started to take everything that wasn't nailed down). They do give you relatively short adventures (which is good for Shadowrun) and you don't HAVE to report them if you don't want. The only thing you might need to be careful with is that they are generally going to be geared toward convention play, which means certain types of characters might not do real well in some of the Missions. As a Rigger, I was a bit disappointed during the first run when I discovered that I wasn't really going to be able to use most of my drones (driving an SUV and bringing armed drones through a department store doesn't exactly work) , but it was made better in the end with a nice loot haul (which I am assuming was adjudicated on the fly).