Me Rusty

I ran an episode of Buffy yesterday, and it didn’t go as I would have liked.  I started with a bad call to wait for a new player who was late.  I decided to wait because it would have been a stretch to insert her character mid-stream and I couldn’t think of a graceful way to do it, but in hindsight the waiting cost me.  I could feel the energy of the room dissipate as the minutes dragged on.  

To make room for the new player, I temporarily removed Jacqueline, my main NPC, from the episode.  Big mistake.  Without her, I had no way to control the pacing of the episode.  When things got bogged, and they did, I had nothing, and wasn’t fleet on my feet enough to come up with another solution.

Then I allowed the first act to go on too long.  The late start threw me off my normal timetable.  With Act One taking an eternity, I of course screwed myself for time on the remaining acts.

Next on the list was my inability to control the off camera comments of a hyper player.  I made my usual “your character isn’t here” remarks, and even threw in a “no distracting the other actors” but that wasn’t enough to get the job done.  Thanks to the unwanted chatter, other characters who were on camera were distracted or lost the spotlight.  

Can you tell that I feel shitty about this?

So, what am I going to do about it?  I start as close to on-time as possible.  Either leave Jacqueline in or create a backup character who I can use should she be unavailable.  Keep closer tabs on whether an act is running over time.  Talk before the next session to certain player and ask for his help in keeping it quiet on the set, and stress at the beginning of the next couple of sessions that characters who are off camera are not to be heard as it’s not fair to others.

That should help.  But I still wish I had a time machine.