vastrix said:

I really like this. One of the more difficult things I've had to deal with is that one of my players is their ship's captain, and while the rest of the group goes on an away team, I've got to find something for the captain to do. One of the things that has worked so far, besides having a few Eldar corsairs drop from the storm, is to go back and look at what has happened on thier light cruiser in the past, among the crew, with hastily repaired battle-damage, with supply aquisitions that were overlooked, that sort of thing. The result is not only interesting sub-plots that keep the captain entertained and often complicate things for the away-team below, but it serves as glue that binds the whole campaign together. It makes the experience less "episodal" and more like a soap opera. (Think less Star Trek and more BSG)

"Hooks" are starting to stem directly from the player's actions and adventures flow together, which is a real challenge for me since I'm really not a "sandboxer." A sense of cause-and-effect is really bringing the whole thing to life.

Best piece of advice I can give to any GM, especially a RT GM, is to wing-it. Over preparation leads to stilted, linear adventures. Cook up a few vague ideas and run with them if you have a chance, or just bounce of what the PC's do and want. NEVER stat out major NPC's, the party won't know what they are exactly capable of anyhow. Plus, a lesson I learnt from running SLA Industries, you can't kill something that doesn't have stats...

Your job as GM is three-fold. 1, makes sure everyone (including you) has fun. 2, facilitate a great story. 3, adjudicate the rules when needed. Think of these like a progressive tier of prioritties. If everyone is having fun, I can then proceed to tell a great story in cooperation with my PC's. If a great story is being told, I can then enforce the rules. If the rules get in the way of story, sod the rules. If the story gets in the way of fun, time to change the story!

Hygric said:

The best part about this bit of advice to me, is that I can say I learned it the fun way; I was GMing WFRP 2nd edition running the quest in the back of the book (Through the Drakwald), and at the end of it the players attempt to stop someone from summoning a deamon. Afterwards they found out the character was summoning the deamon to get revenge on the guy that murdered her family, sympathized, and said "Let's effing kill that guy!", which led to at least 3 or 4 more hours of play as I made up how they were going to kill him. It's still one of my favorite memories GMing.

I've only been running RT for a short while, game started back in November.

We're in a peculiar situation where we are limited by our ability to get together physically, so we've managed to set up the five of us on Skype and use TTopRPG to roll dice and use the map. Files (PC Handouts) are shared via Dropbox.

In terms of the game itself, we are able to play 3h at a time, weekday evenings.

The game started with a "Okay, Lord Captain, your father was recently killed and you have inherited his Warrant. Your younger siblings are elsewhere in the sector or segmentum, so there's noone to challenge your inheritance. Your House Seneschal has located the following potential hooks for further profit, to repair the damage to your House's holdings. Any of them interest you? Or do you simply want to sail off into the wild black yonder and see what there is to see?"

He chose to pursue one of the endeavors I had written a very rough plot hook, and it was only after they committed in a certain direction did I start to fully sketch out the entire problem and what the PC's were getting themselves into.

One of the good things about playing a shorter session is the PC's can get _less_ off track before next session. There's few things more frustrating than having your entire uber plot prep deflected by the PC's making a weird left turn 2h into a 12 hour game and taking a completely different direction than the one you had predicted. Instead, I rarely have to plan more than 3 or 4 hours of material at a time, and I can ensure that material is really well filled out and covers all my bases.

At the end of one of our 'introductory' sessions (and I intend to make them a recurring feature whenever the PC's head off in on new plot/endeavor) is to have a "Okay, what kinds of things will your character be working on, what contacts will he try to make, what goals is he setting to contribute to the endeavor?" In this way, I get to kind of cheat, in that I can take all their questions at the end of the session, and say "Yes, and..." run with it from there. They are an incredibly creative bunch and they wonder about all kinds of things I never would have thought of myself. Then I have a week or two to expand upon their ideas, plan for some wrenches to be thrown into the works, keep track of what NPCs they need to meet and what they're going to be like, and put together any maps the PC's will need to view for the following session - that is crucial, since we're playing by net and not in person.

One of the things that has worked really well is that I've been able to go over my extensive collection of 40K literature in .PDF and do a lot of 'Print Screen' 'Crop' 'Save' to get images of character archetypes, starships, monsters and so on. I don't use these images for anything other than the game program, and the benefits to keeping the imagery and mood alive are great. No one has any doubts in their minds what the PC's look like, we don't forget about the little servo-skull floating around following the Explorator, and I can even drop a photoshopped Thunderhawk on the map and say "Here is your Gun-Cutter". I can do the same thing with starship combat, creating a massive starfield-type map, and all I have to do is set the scale, plunk down a couple ship icons, and off we go to the macrocannon races.