Multiple Session heists?
My past two sessions were both spent on the same score. Admittedly, this is my fault as I threw a major sidequest into their main run. I had the sense this might happen, and built in a mini-refresh point, but it brought the issue to the forefront that runs in BitD don’t transition well into a second session. Has anyone else had this issue or come up with ways to deal with it?
I’ve had many scores run multiple sessions, some more than two sessions even. This actually might be the norm for our group, now that I think about it. Our sessions are really short, though. Hasn’t been an issue for us, so I don’t have any specific advice to offer. :-/
I think having a score run into a second session should be relatively problem-free. It can delay the cycle of Score
> Downtime -> Experience -> Session End, but it shouldn’t break things outright.You can definitely run into some pacing problems if it’s doing so because it’s a particularly long and involved score though.I ran into a somewhat similar issue with a score in one of our early sessions. The crew wanted to hit one of the Church’s tithe collection wagons, and then use that wagon and some disguises to gain access to the location where the tithes were counted/stored. We’d already established that those wagons were pretty heavily guarded, and that the church would know what’s up within a day of the wagon being attacked. The players and I agreed that it should play out as two back-to-back scores without an opportunity for downtime in between –the wagon hijacking part of the job was interesting enough that we wanted it to get equal focus, rather than just being relegated to a setup action for the main score.We kept it all to one session (a little long though, at 4 hours compared to our usual 2.5 or 3), and it was exciting throughout. Doing it this way definitely raised the stakes though, maybe a little too much — by the time they got to the church for the second half of the heist, they had already burned a bunch of stress and gained some harm. But they made it through, just barely…
All of this to establish that, ultimately, you as the GM can adjust the difficulty slider pretty significantly with the pacing of those longer scores. I could have (and maybe even should have) offered them the opportunity to take a round of downtime actions after hijacking the wagon, at the expense of a tougher score at the church due to increased security. That would have presented them with an interesting dilemma at least — Do we rest up so we’re at our best for a tough job ahead, or do we power through to hit them while they don’t expect it?
Also, maybe more directly in line with your situation, don’t be afraid to offer them outs. If a job turns out to be particularly long or taxing, give them opportunities to leave early and find another way to continue later. This should probably involve a trade-off of some sort — longer scores are inherently riskier, and thus should also probably offer better rewards.
Hopefully this helps! It’s also possible I’ve misread your problem entirely — could you share more details about how you felt the transition between sessions was lacking?