VoidHeist / Scum & Villainy mini-hack should have been more OSR

I ran a mini-hack of VoidHeist (a combination and simplification of Blades in the Dark and Mothership) where I added a few Scum & Villainy mechanics to it — gambits, protect a teammate, PC contacts, crew contacts, and crew special ability. The players were great and when we got into the action they were able to shine. The feedback I got during the Stars & Wishes phase after the game indicated prep was too long and it was unclear how much narrative authority the players were allowed to share.

I agree - when we prepped, they made fun choices and I should have moved us all into the action faster given the three hour timeslot for a one-shot. I thought about why I spent so much time in prep, and I have a feeling it was related to some uncertainty I had about the game that I was trying to get comfortable with. Although spending many hours creating a character keeper for the game made me relatively comfortable with the rules, and although I borrowed Chris McDowall’s locations and NPCs for the adventure, my ignorance about how OSR works meant I felt there were gaps in the game I wasn’t sure how to fill. The challenges I had running VoidHeist were the following:

1. VoidHeist feels like OSR and I don’t have a lot of experience with that / didn’t prep the players for that. I haven’t played VoidHeist or watched an actual play of it, though have read Mothership and watched some of an actual play of that. OSR is probably why the system and characters feel a little thin. For example, having Weaponry as a skill (rather than subskills like guns, knives, etc.) is a nice touch for a broad-strokes game to distinguish between a fighter type and someone who could be a corporate desk jockey. I’m not sure whether thin characters affected me as a GM, but I think I was self-conscious that the system didn’t give players enough hooks. I noticed them lean into their unique items, which was interesting, and some of them did pack a punch (a Corporate Operator gets a nano-veil that lets them disguise their face to look like someone else they’ve met).

2. I personally wasn’t comfortable enough with the fictional positioning, which, I realize, as the GM, is at a baseline my responsibility to be comfortable with. I think this was because:

   1. I should have ditched the idea of understanding the fictional positioning deeply at all and instead leaned into OSR being light on lore and heavy on lethality. Some of this was because of my ignorance in advance of the game.

   2. Given that I was of the mind that lore was somehow important, I didn’t commit hard enough to explaining the Scum & Villainy lore and factions, etc. That said, the online character keeper for the game includes S&V factions and the mini-hack allowed players to create contacts (also from S&V). However, for a one-shot, explaining custom lore (S&V isn’t well-known like Star Wars), it could have gone past everyone’s heads anyway. Which brings me back to that I should have asserted that the backdrop didn’t matter, and asked for the players’ buy-in so I could have leaned in more to the messy heist, throwing more enemies/aliens at them quicker, with the idea that characters might die.

   3. Players either need more fictional positioning (or touchstones, etc.) to feel comfortable sharing narrative authority — or they need a GM who will encourage them to build whatever they want in the world and to get as creative as possible about how to get out of sticky situations (which is what I have a feeling OSR is about). For them to feel comfortable with the latter, I probably would have needed to model that earlier.

3. I found myself giving them a thin description of the locations, feeling I didn’t have enough scenario hooks (specifically NPCs and clues) that the players could take and run with. Granted, for a one-shot, there’s more railroading or hard-framing required to keep things moving in the short time period, but offering a few options can give players more that feeling of control and player agency.

   1. I’ve most recently been running two games with a ton of prewritten backstory and rules (Wild Beyond the Witchlight and Coyote & Crow), and I believe there’s enough plot hooks there to explain a rich world and ask players what they’d like to do next.

   2. In VoidHeist, with the premade skeleton of an adventure it includes, giving players three targets and bare bones locations is probably not enough. In preparing a fair amount to know the system, and relying on a prefab skeleton, I didn’t put enough meat on those bones myself.

   3. In addition, given this was a stealthy heist, I was preoccupied with the idea that they were supposed to avoid NPCs, which was a basic error the result of which felt like it was challenging to decide how to help keep things moving. In fairness, we did keep things moving, but I have a feeling that slowed me down up-front.

All that said, it could be argued that there is a simpler explanation for some of what happened during the game. I’m reminding myself of ideas about GM prep (less of it, more high quality), and to consider more thoroughly how to adapt something to be a one-shot. Specifically, I should in the future avoid PCs/players having to do much prep at all besides character development and entanglements, given a one-shot already has a limited time (in this case, 3 hours) to spend roleplaying, and any PC prep that’s done isn’t guaranteed to benefit them in such a short adventure.