I'm going to mark this down as more of a get-to-know-the-system session: we got into assorted trouble and heroics, but didn't really deliver everything I was looking for in Night Witches.

The one-shot rules suggest levelling characters quite a lot, and this can make for a team that's immediately very effective; with the right Moves and careful seat assignment, you can be making effectively all of your Night Moves at +2 or +3. Combined with some above-average rolling and a reasonable amount of attention to the Mission Pool, this meant that the Night phase just wasn't as dangerous as we had been expecting: we ended up making a bunch of superfluous Attack Runs in the final mission, just to get some more dramatic chaos.

Perhaps due to this, this ended up being a fair bit goofier than the game is really designed to be: players were pushing towards Fiasco-style Terrible Plans That Will Obviously Backfire Horribly. The oneshot setup also encouraged us to be a bit more callous towards our NPC co-pilots, and to take much bigger risks with the PCs. That made for an evening's fun, but not so much on the character-development end. Getting strong character development in a powered-by-the-Apocalypse one-shot can be challenging, and Night Witches doesn't offer super-powerful character hooks: the bird-based Natures (Raven, Owl, Hawk...) aren't quite as grabby as the Monsterhearts skins or AW playbooks.

I think the crucial thing for doing this in future is going to be slowing things down, encouraging players to unpack characters - NPCs and PCs both - rather than jumping straight to Moves. So, for instance, I noticed that people tended to treat Reach Out moves as kind of like Turn On or a Charisma check. In future I think I'm going to insist a little more firmly on the 'reveal a significant truth' part: you *can't* make a Reach Out check unless you show us something new about your character, or expose them somehow.

The other thing is that, because we were playing GMless, I didn't really bring in Threats: it felt as though we had enough going on. And for the basic rhythm of immediate play, you *don't* need Threats; the world and the duty-station Questions provide plenty of immediate trouble. But my sense is that the GM's Agenda, and particularly the Threats, are the engine of coherent longer-term story (not the story itself, but the thing that gets it to coalesce.)