First time running Demon: The Descent

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Also going to be setting the game in NYC during Occupy Wall Street.

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You made a pretty good collection to start! Too bad I'm going to bed now or I'd dump properly. Here is a thing I picked at random based on thumbnail.

Based on experience, I'd say: With respect to your own plot in Demon, go hard or go home.

You can strap the players to the fucking train on the railroad with iron clamps while it steams ahead full speed. But if you give PCs basically any freedom in Demon, their ability to determine their own priorities and pursue them, possibly utilising the rest of the party to help them, possibly not, is unmatched by any other system I have ever played in my life.

The second you ease up on the CHOO CHOO everyone will scamper off and find their own favoured morsel of agency to chew on that is better for them than whatever shitty ride you had planned. Raiding infrastructure, starting cults, robbing people, making angels fall, these aren't means to an end for your average Demon PC as the book suggests, I guarantee that for your party and any other party they ARE the end. As a consequence, you need to plan an enormous, LUDICROUS quantity of potential targets, because the PCs will mill through them quickly.

A Demon PC who doesn't have some grand scheme they're working towards doing literally 100% of the time probably indicates the player is severely lacking in engagement.

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>>49564846
So just so I understand correctly your saying go for full railroad or just give them a setting and let them go with it?

I tried running Demon once. It was horribly hard. I loved the idea behind it, but I didn't engage the players right. They got "kinda like the matrix" and wanted to get into cool gun battles and do kung-fu and all that. They weren't prepared when Agent Smith equivalents came gunning for them with more power than the PCs had. Entirely my fault.

Make sure the players know what they're doing. They're unbelievably powerful, and overwhelmingly fragile with it. Oddly enough, I found myself playing a lot of video games to get myself in the mood and tone, and the game I can recommend most is Dishonored. There's a single thing that you have to do in that game, and in each level it's "reach the target and deal with them". But there's so many ways to do that, and for Demon there's even more. I made little maps and sketches and stuff and watched the PCs reduce my plans for heists to ribbons when they pulled Shotguns out of duffel bags and recreated the Matrix lobby scene at every available opportunity. If the players do this, let them have their moment but remember the sirens don't just bring Police. Angels are coming, and they will utterly screw your day right up.

I wanted to really play up the heist angle, sharp characters in suits watching that law firm that distributes packets of data every second Friday of the Egyptian calender, that kinda thing. The Embeds and exploits aren't the end, they're the means to an end, and only your players know what that is, so you'll have to keep up.

Good luck OP

Read the Demon Storyteller's Guide.
It has a lot of suggestions, and even includes gameplay changes to better suit different kinds of stories.

>>49565354
I'm planning to use the Operative Stigmatics just because I like the idea so much. Also really helps play up the secret police and will let me save using angels, so that when they do show up it's extra terrifying.