It feels like you've never run Blades or any kind of a similar game...
I was both a player and a GM in a lot of FitD games, and its downtime is not just a D&D shopping session, it's another phase of the game covered by the rules.
D&D-like shopping sessions, in contrast, are just table talk.
A shopping trip can kill half a session if it’s been a while.
Do you really have fun running a session like that? Me and my players would die of boredom.
I can make one case for people like that: if it's a paid game. I can tolerate people like that because if I don't get their emotional investment in the game, at least I got paid. Not that I would invite them to play another session, of course, because there are a lot of better people out there.
Our Sorcerer knew Wish, but the player knew better than to try something like wishing to get to the lowest level of Hell, because on the meta level they wanted to play through this adventure, not to cheese.
The biggest challenge during Tier 4 is still resource attrition. Let them use their big spells, but don't let them rest. The best challenge you can give them at this point is to make a multi-session-spanning dungeon-like structure.
An example from my previous campaign: heroes needed to get to the lowest level of Hell, but they needed to transit through every one of them in process. Enemies were everywhere, and places for rest were virtually nonexisting. I think they had like 1 long rest in four months of play during T4, and it actually was hard for them.
When I did play 5e IRL, I used Ard sheets, tweaking them in Photoshop or Illustrator whenever needed.
The worst thing is Bob doesn't know he wants to play something other than D&D.
Where is this jail cell? What’s the city name, vibe, etc?
That's a bad question, because it draws blanks, not leaves them. Better questions would be:
- «Fighter, how big is the city? Is it more like a village, or something closer to a big, prosperous metropolis?»
- «Rogue, which known criminal is doing his time in some other part of this jail?»
- «Barbarian, you've been there quite a lot for your drunken fights, did you? Name one guard who's here now, you know each other a little too well!»
- «Wizard, for what breakthrough the local magical academy is known?»
- «Cleric, which religion do they preach here?», and, optionally, «Which part of it you would never agree with?»
Don't just ask «what's the city vibe», get them something to build from!
Still, memes likes this one actually breed such GMs, because somehow they think it's funny.
Odyssey is pretty lackluster after a certain point (authors really overdid selling their names on the cover, while the actual adventure is... well, a little better than WotC ones). But at least it has a brilliant active community around it on Discord, so should you run it, you'll have tons of support from fellow DMs.
Girl by Moonlight's space mecha setting isn't much about mecha fighting, it's more about politics in an enclosed space (I was a playtester and have run a pretty number of games between all the playsets there was).
Beam Saber is more about mecha fighting, and it uses the same engine
My first game in 2024 is tomorrow, and we're finally playing a oneshot of 13th Age. I wanted to check this game out for so long, and it finally happens. I won't run a campaign (no time for another game with statblocks and maps), though.
Second plan is to finish our Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign. We're getting closer to the 'canonical' ending with 30 sessions behind, but I also wanted to run additional post-ending content, so I feel like we're here for another half a year or so.
Third plan is to completely and utterly stop running campaigns on 5e, saving it only for the paid (and very expensive) games for people who're willing to pay for the brand, basically. I'm tired of prepping it, and I'm tired of WotC's shenanigans and bad book quality.
Fourth is to finish our Forged in the Dark game, working title Edge of the Blade. It's a basic Pondsmith-like cyberpunk game without any shenanigans which is somehow still not present on the market, except for the new release of CBR+PNK which I've yet to check out (but the one-shot edition was brilliant). Every FitD cyberpunk I saw were either weird or unfinished, or, most often, both.
Fifth is making my paid GMing portfolio. Sixth is to run my paid GMing service to connect good hosts and new players, but that two is yet to come.
Most people just want to do cool shit.
There are THOUSANDS of other games, and most of them let you do cool shit instead of tracking resources. Just, you know, stop playing D&D.
As a DM, I cringed at this. Alright, you broke the game, overshadowed your martials and blew past the encounter your DM spent so much time carefully crafting. And your game session ended two hours earlier. Thanks everyone, see you next week I guess.
Shame about removed monsters. I personally used all these Arch-Devils, and Boreas basically became a father figure to a lot of PCs at my table.
I've looked for any PbtA games, but there seem to be none in the cyberpunk genre.
The Sprawl is Pondsmith cyberpunk in PbtA. It seems like it's close to what you're playing. The Veil is a japanese style cyberpunk, closer to Ghost in the Shell.