[prionic6]

Hi! I hope this is the right subforum to post this, we're currently plaing Manhunt (Sprawl Wilds), which is more or less part of the SR Missions program as far as I know.

So, we're playing this adventure in a private / at home session which, I guess, is expected to play out differently than on a convention. The books states that Manhunt is meant to be played in a 4h session. I'd just like to know: How do you do that? We ended our second session (~4h each) yesterday and are now at dusk, shortly before the big fight will start. So we took 8 hours to

- Get contacted by the Johnson
- Get the team together and get some transport to the barrens
- Analyze the files the johnson supplied
- Get some legwork in
- Arrive at the crusher 495
- Check out the convoi people
- Join the convoi
- Go through the barrens without incidents
- Arrive at the farm
(this was the end of the first session)
- Checkout the situation on the farm and get up to speed with what the Johnson knows and wants
- Help out with the generator, setting up / fixing the perimiter, fixing a few weapons, some roleplaying
- Going to the old brewery and analyzing the situation there
- Going to the squatter settlement and checking it out
- On the way back to the farm some discussion about what could have happend - my players guessed correctly that the two incidents were unrelated though they aren't really sure. They didn't take a close look Chaaya yet and had some bad luck with their assensing tests.
- Arrived at the farm and helped a little bit more with preparations / planning for the coming attack, scouting a little bit (they found the bait)

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the last session that got a lot done and it was fun, too. But I think a 8 hours in, without even a fight yet, are we just exceptionally slow? I mean we have to look up some rules from time to time but it's not like we're new to the game. We re-started playing SR more than a year ago (after a 10 year break) and manage to do a session about every two weeks.

My main question: How do you manage to get a mission like this into a 4h window at a convention? Do you sometimes just say, time's running out, I will railroad you a little bit to the interesting parts? Or are players just more disciplined than mine?

[Jayde Moon]

I've run Manhunt three times for Missions tables.  If you want it to, Manhunt can be shortened to fit in a 4 hour Conventions time slot... but that's kind of pushing them through.  I could EASILY see Manhunt being run for 8 hours and feel good about it.  There's a lot of places to play around and get into some good RP.  Missions usually pushes through a lot of that, if you want to get to the juicy bits before the end of your 4 hour time period.

So, like, instead of Legwork being a bit of RP that then results in a dice roll or even the information being passed through, a lot of times Player A just says, "I call Contact X", the GM makes rolls and the interaction, though perhaps played out in character, takes half a minute to a minute.  This is an interaction that could easily chew up 5 minutes.  So now legwork across a table of six takes 5 minutes where it could be half an hour if you really RPed it out.

Learning about Chaya is a whole thing that could be a lot of RP, but pretty much needs to be quickly glossed over in a 4 hour slot.  GM makes a note of her, points her out, then if the players don't pursue, forget it and move on.  Stuff like that.