Sorry you didn’t have a great experience, but thank you for sharing it. It’s a useful perspective to keep in mind, thank you.

What I like to do is to postpone crew creation until after the first score

That’s a very interesting suggestion. I can see some wisdom in it, but I am likely going to do things by-the-book on this first go around. I could see adopting that once I’ve had a chance to experience some of the dynamics first hand. That said I will crack the whip on moving them past prep quickly.

I also work hard at first to get the players to contribute to the story.

Yeah, I expect this is a challenge I focus a lot on. I ran Dungeon World for a while and this was a big challenge for players.

Having them come up with devil’s bargains for each other is always a good start

I like this suggestion. Will definitely try it.

I always have a bunch of possible scores prepared, but they are just index cards with a single sentence summary on them and then three (3) obstacles.

Thanks for sharing, nice to hear some practical examples of what people are doing.

do not advertised it as a rule light game it’s not.

Thanks, seems like good advice. I have two players who will be brand new to this, setting expectation will be important.

In general I keep a large macro clock the plot thicken/alarm level when I’m getting rid of short term idea to materialise time lost letting NPC move in the background

I’m planning on setting a “game clock” since the goal is to have an ending for this particular game due to scheduling.

While I am less happy with the downtime phase…

I’m assuming downtime is where a lot of character roleplay will occur with this group so I’ll do what I can to provide some interesting opportunities around that.

Remember, as the player are stuck in the city, their action matter, treat it like a political game, they’ll quickly need to find allies

Good point

Thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks for the feedback.

preparing some interesting but open ended antagonists/allies is the best call

Good to hear. This aligns with my thinking.