RE timing of runs....
I started playing Shadowrun ohh... some years ago. 3rd ed was still reasonably fresh, and I was introduced by a GM that had played since the start of 2nd ed. We had a Seattle based game running as a campaign, and we'd play every Tuesday night for about 4-5 hours, trying to break the action at logical or dramatic points. A "run" would take us about 3-4 weeks normally, with the first session being meeting the Johnson, planning and shopping, the 2nd being getting there and scouting, the third being the job, and the 4th being escape, evasion and getting paid. Not always, but that would be reasonably common. After that campaign came to an end we had a break from SR for a good few years, played other stuff and then came back to it.
This time though, we had our "Pink Mohawk" game. Rather than a set of constant players and a campaign, it was a drop in game, with changing players from week to week. Meeting on a friday night, we had 4-5 hours to play, but had to get the job done in one session, as the same players might not be available the next week. To get it done in one night, there were a couple of things I felt that I needed to do to make a stand-alone run work.
- Fixer - I made a fairly iconic / distinctive fixer, and made him trustworthy. For background reasons, the fixer would not hose the team, and what he said they could count on. That cut down a huge amount of time on researching the fixer and looking for the double-cross / preparing for the betrayal and coming up with fallback and contingency planning.
- Simple runs - a lot of the legwork was done by the fixer, so there was little for the team to do, other than go and do the job. He'd often have any specialist gear already in stock (not to say the team could use it well e.g. nightgliders, but they had them at least) so we could avoid the shopping element of the run.
- One encounter showdown - due to the simple nature, there was a lot of fairly straightforward runs - break into a place, do a thing, get out - that kind of stuff. In the location, I would generally plan only one big fight, or complex encounter that would take time to resolve, to ensure that we got things done on time.
- No deckers - I laid down at the start of the game that we would have no deckers. Though they are very "shadowrun" in flavour, it's always been a problem to integrate them with whats going on with the rest of the team, and they tend to be maths heavy and slightly game-in-a-game. So, all the deckers were NPCs and a lot of the work deckers would do were provided as stuff from the fixer - either passcards or programs to run, or intel already gathered.
- Diminished consequences - the forces available to chase and hunt down the players were reduced from what would normally be available, and they can get away with stuff slightly easier. To a certain extent this is "easy mode" on the game menu. Partly it fits with the "pink mohawk" ethos of over the top characters, partly it's to ensure that when they're getting away they don't get bogged down in massive running gun battles and long winded car chases, again to ensure time constraints are met.
Overall, these seemed to work, and we ran for about 2 years with most Friday nights running from 6-7pm to about midnight, and the players earning about 3-5 karma per run for the "simple" jobs. Ended up with some fairly powerful characters - grade 4 or 5 initiate mages, riggers with big combat robots and Sams with some mil-spec sniper rifles and hardened armour.
A bunch of players wanted "more" though, so we started a Black Trenchcoat game, using a core of 5 of the Mohawk players. This goes right back to the first campaign style - runs take weeks to complete, there's Johnson double crosses, shopping, research, downtime, full consequences (and boy did that come as a surprise for some of those people that thought they wanted "full on" and discovered what that really meant. But they're learning to police their brass and clean up the forensics!) and Karma awards tend to be back to the more normal 6-12 range for a run, depending on what happened.
Alongside that, my Smuggler game using a bunch of the people that we started playing with all those years ago, has been running for coming up on 2 years now, and we're at game session 72. In those 72 sessions, we've covered 76 days of IC time. Starting with their escape from the bunch of Chechen guerrillas that captured them, they broke out in a stolen truck, and have taken to a life of crime ranging across the middle-east and asia. This is full consequence stuff as well, and a bit of a pain to manage unfortunately - with work, people with kids and travel time, we only get about 3 hours to play. But, at least two of the team are very strong story players, four of them really like the RP side and all of them have played SR long enough to have a fairly decent grasp of the rules, so combat tends to go reasonably quickly.
So - running a game in a single night / session is very doable, but you have to think through what you're doing and limit the scope of the action, and either drive the team to make quick decisions or force external events on them. My wife who plays in the smuggler game very occasionally plays in the mohawk games, and has difficulty "switching down". She starts to plan complex what-if scenarios and fallback plans, with alternate backup plans and routes, and then fallback plans for those, just in case (she's pretty risk averse...) - I have a sign now that I wave at her saying "Remember - it's Pink Mohawk", to let her know she's needlessly making it more complex than it needs to be, and it's probably going to be a simple job and she needs to crack on with it...