I'd really love to try MLwM, at least at first, as a single-session thing. (Let's just say that my friends have commitment issues. Damn pesky college kids and their loud music!)

It's been somewhat addressed elsewhere:
* start with a few points of love
* begin with going after each others' connections, in the midst of the action

Any suggestions for initial Fear/Reason rating? What guidelines to follow for Love ratings? And other help?

Yeah, I'm going to go out and buy a mess of d4s shortly... (or d6's...)

I have to wonder, by the way, what I did wrong in my original playtest of the game. We started with no Love, and still did a complete story in one session, ending with the murder of the Master...

In fact, this is one of the most confusing things to me about the published version of the game, the claim it's intended for long-term play. ALL of my players said they thought it was great for short one-shot stories, not unlike Wuthering Heights, but didn't think the structure would hold up to long-term play. I have no idea what I did -- if anything -- to encourage this idea.

We'll be playing our third session on the same game of MLwM tomorrow night. We also started with 0 Love. One of the characters got within 1 Love of being able to challenge the Master after one session of about 3 hours (with 4 players). At this point the Master almost killed his connection but we managed to save him once by all coming together.

I think the if the Master had persisted we would not have been able to fight him off again. We had a few different players for the second session and now 3 of us are within 2 Love of challenging the Master.

Perhaps your Master does less to counter threats against him than ours does. He is so cruel, and yet I obey him still. How I hate myself!

You just played well is all, Kirt. And doing so managed to get in all the relevant details in a shorter amount of time than average.

It says in the text that it's for long-term play? Really? It's not. Given the rules I can't see a game going for more than, oh, say, five sessions. And that would be tiring (if potentially rewarding). Our last game went 2.5 sessions or about 7.5 hours of play. And it was pretty "right" to me in terms of length.

One of the things I like about a game like this is that you can get it behind you and move on to other things. Coming back to it as often as you feel the urge. Rather than the real long-term game which you can't put off attending to without it dying potentially.

Mike