I posted this in one of the topics I´ve started, and realized that it should be a topic of its own.

How do you guys run your sessions?

We´ve made our own little organization. There are 8 of us total. I am always the GM. All 8 of us is on the board of trusties, and we have a board meeting everytime we play, with news from the Cassier, Chairman of the board (me) and so on. We play 8 times a year. (Not much I suppose, but with families, jobs, kids etc., it´s getting tougher to find dates we all can play) During a board meeting we decide on the next date to play. Not all 7 can every time, (would be a bit too much we believe), so we just change the Runners as Runners would in real life too I suppose. Minimum is 4 players and max is 6. We have a pool, into which we deposit money every game date. This money is used to supplement train ticket prices or fuel prices. Denmark is a small country, but the 8 of us is scattered all over the nation. So, the pool helps people out financially. We have a pizza pool and coffee pool too. We always start playing saturday at around 4 PM (14.00 CET), and we only take 1 break. PIZZA at 9 PM. The game usually ends around 6 or 7 AM sunday, where we have breakfast and make cracks about the game. It´s so much fun, and even though some of us are in our thirties, we still become 16 year old school boys when we get together.

The things I love about RPG is easy: Fresh brewed coffee, lots of cigarettes, junk food galore, pizza, alot of sick humor, excitement, disappointment, joy, laughter, concentration, redemption, Cola, guys being guys a.s.o.

As said, we only play large sessions, ranging from 12-15 hours stretch. We always finish what we have started, no "to be continued" sessions here. Bt most of all, it is the joy of seing my friends. We almost only see eachother on game day, so the excitement is hughe.

Dang,....I should be reading about Magic instead of posting in here..... I´m out!!

Topper

Their are 7 of us here on the same floor of the same dorm and our sessions usuially last about 5 to 6 hr and we do have to be continued sessions depending on when everyone has tests and such. We dont really have a static GM we take turns doing runs. We do however have a head GM who has an overall better understanding of the rules than most of us who has the final say on weather or not something is allowed.

We have recently run into a problem that I am trying to fix. Normally we have all magic users and cyber sams on a team. No leg work, decking, and everyone takes their own cars. It has gotten kind of cheesey and redundant. So I purposed we try somethng new, everyone has a certain role on the team. We havent tried this new approach yet so I dont know how its going to go. We are going to have an ACTUAL TEAM! not just random stranger shadowrunners who happen to meat up at the jhonsons office.

Theirs gonna be 1 of each type of character (depending on how many of us can play) a mage, psyad, cyber guy, and rigger (None of us even come close to remotely understanding decking). And I am encouraging people to play different types of characters for a change like mage users playing cyber guys and cyber guys playing mages. So to kick of my own suggestion I volunteered for a character type that no one on the group has even attempted. A rigger (gasp) Im worried that the run will either wolnt go smoothly or will be cheesey for my character.

GM: someone hacks you network and is taking over your drones
ME: but I have a rating 5 encryption he only has a 9% chance of doing it even with a rating 10 decription
GM: Ummm....Well it worked this time
ME: YOU DIDNT EVEN ROLL ANY DICE!!!!!
GM: fine then......now a Troll with a great dragon rocket launcher is attacking your most expensive drone
ME: WHERE THE FRAG DID HE COME FROM!?!?!? my sensors didnt pick him up
GM: he was always their your sensors just didnt pick him up.
ME: Yells in exasperation AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! and leaves room with character sheet.

Any tips on avoiding this potential disaster?

EDIT: Dramataziation. Probably wolnt go THAT bad.....but then again I wouldnt put it past him.

How do you finish everything in only 15 hours?

Joker, my suggestion for you: find a decent GM. Doesn't mean you won't get screwed, but it'll avoid that particular disaster.

~J

I agree. Find a GM who doesn't believe it's his duty to win the game and beat the shit out of you. Kids like that ruin games.

A realistic suggestion, Joker, is to discuss with the GM the rigging rules in general terms at least. Make sure he knows that sensors can spot things you can't see, etc. Make sure he knows that you're running encryption to make it hard to steal your network (doubly important because he'll be upset if he throws a rigger at you guys and doesn't know those rules... and you steal his whole network in a few rounds).

if you have the players to spare, have someone act as the assistant GM. They learn the dekcing rules (they are complex enough to warrant a second gm) and have that person run any matrix players through their respective paces. this will keep the gameplay going for the others.

I just ran a table-top with 2 players. 1 Phys-ad, one otaku, both players were spankin'new to the shadowrun world (other than the otaku player had played the sega game-shudder-). 3 hours were spent in his 30 second hack job on a phone call, because the rules are not laid out in a sensible manner, most of the MPCp stats are not even defined where I could find them in the BBB, I eventually ran across them in the Matrix 3.0 book.

The other player didn't mind, gave him time to go outside and smoke, but if there had been a second matrix character, it would have been screwed.

I usually run with 8 players, I'm the only GM. We meet on weekends and try to do it weekly. I generally try to keep one major plot line going for a full school year with varying levels of success.

There are 6-8 of us regularly with 2-3 others, spouses etc who sometimes sit in. We game on Sunday afternoons from about 2pm-8pm- 3 of us live in Pennsylvania and drive up together to save wear on cars and on the drivers.

We're all pretty much grown up and one pair of friends when they build their house had a gaming room put in just for this stuff. We all bring munchies and for those of us with a long drive usually hit the drive through.

# of us rotate through with GM'ing SR with a 4th trying to run VtM. Each gm runs a campagne or serries of adventures that are linked running from a couple of weeks to a few months. This rotating through lets the main GM rest up, not burn out and can work on his adventures, making them special instead of cobbled together in a rush.

for each GM we have different characters, that way if 1 GM has worked out plans for a character, it doesn't have to get spread through the gorup and we get to try different ideas without retiring another character. Some of us have been gaming (AD&D) since hs so we have the patter down pretty well.

We have a relatively small group. There are 4 of us, counting whoever is GMing at the time, me or Cap'n Dave. There's beer, laughs, and occasional mockery of the ghoul. A good time is had by all... except the ghoul sometimes.

How much further away than Idaho does it get? Do they role play in Siberia?

We try to play every other weekend for eight or so hours. I GM, I have five players. We use a variety of visual aids, computer graphics, mapping programs, a large sheet of clear plastic and a four foot by two foot map with one inch squares with dry erase markers.

We play Shadowrun. They play other games with out me, but I do Shadowrun. I record adventures in my log book, and we keep pretty meticulous track of our game.

I've got 5 days off in a row, so I'm going to try to work out a little mini-marathon of getting a new group and breaking them in. I'm going to try to play every waking moment (I rarely get time off work where I can actually do anything so I want to have fun) and when we can't (players have to work or whatever) to work on stuff for the game later that day/the next day. 5 days straight of Shadowrun!!

Eh, it'll never happen I bet.

Personally, though, I prefer running once a week/once every other week with 3-5 regular players for 6+ hours in a stretch to be able to cover a lot of ground, plus munchies and getting off-topic.

The Abstruse One

I'm in SF's group so she already laid out what we do. We can't do long marathons because we have families, some have kids that can't be left alone that long, or spouses that need attention. She and others have a 2 hour drive home when they're done so it can't run too late. Usually we have time on sundays after church I cna change, run an errend or two and then go off to game.

our group consists of 6 to 8 players. We at one point played EVERY saturday beginning at 2p and lasting until 11p. That continued for a good 5 years.

Now though various members have gotten married, and the toddlers make gaming interesting. We meet now once a month at the least.

As for GM's we have 3 in the group with a 4th running once every millenia, but when he does run...WOW.

Grilling is the preferred method of feeding the masses. The men congregate around the grill while the women folk watch the little ones.

I play with a generally small group, four to five tops, with me as the sole GM. For the most part, I run the games democratically with the players able to influence minor rulings, point out idiosychrocies in my usage of rules (which I encourage unless I purposefully fudge them), and so on.

Unless I have to go dictatorship on them.

Well... In my case, I have a group of about 20 friends who like to play rpgs. They all went to the same college ( or are still going to that college in some cases ) and participated in the school's gaming club, or were the friend of someone of that college.

Thus, if a DM wants to start a game, he just goes see his friends and ask if they're interested - or if they know someone who would. It's not that hard to find players ( you just have to send them an email saying : 'DnD game, 3rd ed. Saturday evening, starting 4PM. Who is in ? ). The challenge is to find a way to keep all the players because it is quite hard to deal with the changing schedules. Some of the players are still at college, some are at university, some work, some have familily or Significant Others, some do a mix of all of this...

We do have that section devoted to finding people to game with. Can't say how many people actually look to see if someone is asking around where they live, but it might help.

I look for people nearby all the time. The answer is no

Where i'm going the nearest down is less that 500 people. And i leave 23 miles from that even. Plus all the people are like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

Tennessee is okay, depends on where you are. If you're in one of the big three cities, you're fine. More than an hour outside one... and it's Cletus country.

My town is 3hr away from any major city and is 5,000 people. Definately cletus country.

My group meets every Monday for about five or six hours. We all have experience as actors and entertainers, all used to work together, and are buddies outside of gaming. We use lots of 'weaving' plot threads, so lots of "we'll see how this turns out next week" happens. My group has stabilized at a consistent four, with a frequent fifth and occasional sixth. I GM about 9 times out of ten, having several years more experience with the game than any players. The players have 'secondary' characters to play when someone else GM's although background information and contacts are the same. We dabble in other games, but Shadowrun is the only consistent one.
I just bought a house (and start moving tomorrow) with a basement rec-room that is gonna be perfect for gaming in.