First Session Notes - the Just Games players of Rochester, NY

[Cthulhus_Voicemail]

Here's the full write-up of session 1 with my group, minus GM notes.

I forgot what a pain it can be to roll up characters with six players at the table, with skillsets ranging from "I started playing Cthulhu in 1983" to "what's a d10?" and an age range of close to thirty years' difference between the oldest and youngest players at the table.  I ended up writing "cheat sheets" to try and speed character creation along by boiling it down to the bare essentials, and still had to hold a player's hand through the whole process.  I kind of think she just didn't want to have to read a one-page handout and felt like whining, because her father, one of the other players in this campaign, was getting pretty fed up with her attitude during character creation.  

Only one player has a character in a hard sciences field, with the rest being the sorts that would be on the "go talk to the locals" end of things.  We got through Day 1 in the first session, I think for Day 2 I'm going to split the folklorists up into two smaller groups and put them to work on opposite sides of town.  

They're already starting to seriously dislike Blaine, just for being uptight and a stickler for rules, so in session 2 I may need to have Trent do something weird and unsettling to get their minds of Blaine.  

One of the players, after having the first dream (her character was friends with John Jeffrey) drew a connection between the creepy trees in the dream and the creepy trees being drawn by Jason Haggerty in the diner, and is now pursuing him pretty hard in hopes he can provide some sort of answers.  Any suggestions on how I can best handle this without giving away the Youth too early? 

Other issues...

I think I need to institute a policy of players having to hold up a stress ball or some similar object to be able to talk, because we had a lot of problems with players talking over each other during the first session.  

I might have to dial back Harry Higgins as "class clown" since one of the players decided to play a class clown and crank it to 11.  Speaking of which, I need to ask him to tone it down, because it started to seriously interfere with other players' enjoyment at the table by the end of the session.  Oy.