Jace, please, please, please tell me you have a recording of this! That sounds like it was a lot of fun and you wrote it up really well!
Sadly not; our friend with recording stuff wasn't there.
@Jace
That write up is so helpful! Thank you so much! I can't wait to see more!
A few other points of interest:
1.
During the shootout with the Nazis Tom and I realized that, so long as Grizz had good cover against attacks, the combination of Called Shot and Cover rules (Move to end of initiative for CS, can't be targeted if you haven't fired that round) effectively made it impossible for the Nazis to hit him while at the end of every round he could pop out and snipe one in the head. We weren't sure if this was a bug or a feature, but we agreed that it wasn't terribly unbalanced since all the Nazis would've had to do is make an Athletics check to flank the car the party was using for cover. Fortunately they were gunned down/mauled by an angry German Shepherd before they figured that out. Unless we read one of those rules wrong, which we may have--we had a general policy of "roll with it, look up later" to avoid bogging the table down. I just reread the rules on Called Shot and realized that Tom definitely would have been exposed to gunfire the entire time, whoops! :V
2. For the coin/mat thing, during the climactic encounter at the job site I realized that keeping track of resources with physical tokens
also had the benefit of allowing the GM to simply look around the table to see where characters were at with Endurance/Rations and use that to gauge how much to push them, rather than asking every round "how many points do you have?"
3. This might have been due to the small number of players, but although I was worried that negotiations with McCaughen would prove terribly easy and they would make a shit ton of money they were actually hard-pressed just to work their way up to Hazard Pay--they only uncovered one of the client's spots, and he used one of Alpha's plus a Gift to force them back, and Alpha botched his Leadership check at the end so they couldn't move up to Expenses. Obviously one game isn't enough for a judgment call, but my first impressions of the negotiation mechanic and its "difficulty curve" are positive.
That sounds fantastic. I won't do a full writeup of the game I ran last weekend, since it's one of the pregen scenarios and thus possibly spoilery. But it sounds like your players had as much fun as mine did!
And for my next game I'm stealing your pennies, nickels, and dimes idea. Maybe use quarters or dollar coins for Will, too. I could see having a little stack of shiny golden dollar coins sitting in the middle of the table would be a good reminder for players to use their Spots!
I also used quarters to represent the delicious Bounty they were earning--during negotiations as I was placing stacks on the slider I could practically see them salivating, and when they scavenged more out in the Legs they gave a little cheer when I added those to their growing pile. I really think having physical representations of their reward reinforced the experience for them, and I'm definitely using this idea in all the other games I hope to run!
Incase anyone wanted to see how we managed the tokens in the game Jace ran, I played Grizz by the way.
This was taken pretty early in the session--by the final encounter Grizz was completely out of rifle ammo, most of his first aid kit, and was digging deep into his rations to keep himself going.