Just ran my first game, and had made a few tweaks to run it as a one shot, and it seemed to work pretty well. My main concern was around bullets being too abusable since each player could just auto-ignore 5 shocks.
Rule Tweaks
- Drop starting bullets to 2 per players, force them to take wounds instead, then give them back 1 bullet for each successful tab.
- Let players reroll 1s when rolling for rhythm, this way they don't get stuck not being able to do as much their first game.
- Force players to narratively motivate using a bullet to absorb a shock, if its not related to their memory, don't let them spend it.
General things I would do on a second run
- Really ramp up the difficulty, use your Risk at the start of the tab and bump the difficulty by 1-2 at the first tab. This forces more 0 hit checks, so players need to start exhausting their wounds and rhythm earlier.
- Players generally won't ask to make clocks, so as a Big Shot you should redirect objectives to smaller clocks.
- I used 2 clocks for small things, like using a very unorthodox approach to achieve something.
- I house ruled letting players tick another clock after closing out a non-objective clock, if the non-objective clock was to do something that furthered the objective. I may have missed something, but I don't see any mechanical incentive to finish clocks outside of the objective clock so I felt like giving a small bonus to it felt more concrete than just giving them something narrative. Also, most clocks are created in order to advance another clock anyway.