After running a ridiculous D&D 4e game last night (we had 9 people show up, as in every single person who was told about it, so poor Jules got stuck running a one-shot for 8 players. Eugh.), we ran a game of SK. We had 5 players plus the GM, to put things into perspective. For Mr Brunner, as you know these people, it was: Me (GM), IF, SB, Sven, Peter E, and my girlfriend (who you haven't met).
1. Character creation is a snap. I walked Sven through making a character, and once he'd done it it made complete sense to him. Him and I were able to then each help one person make a character. Creating a character, even for people having never done it before, took only maybe 5-10mins.
2. Character creation was awesome, everyone really liked it. It really makes you think about who your character is rather than mechanical effects. Having to come up with your history, inspirations, etc. makes you have a grounded idea of who you are. This especially helped when my girlfriend asked people for a rough description of their characters to draw them as the night went on :) Everyone had a rough idea of what their character looked like and what sort of person they were, which doesn't always happen with other RPGs.
3. AFAIK, the PDF doesn't say anywhere how you level up. Trying to extrapolate from what was written, it seems like at some point the DM goes "ok, you all gain a level" or something; however, it wasn't really explained. Additionally, you invest money to increase your wealth level, but there aren't really guidelines as far as how much money people would get, mostly caused by not really NEEDING a gold total. It seems like this is meant to be left open-ended, though.
4. We weren't sure if familiars interfered with their master or not; see
Sven's thread posted for discussion on that.
5. Regarding Five Seasons' "Sere Pressure Point" (what's the word for those again? maneuvers? I forgot), used on say a Battlecraft spellcaster. One can knock out the row that has all of their rebalance abilities. If the player then had to rebalance, would he be knocked out of his combat style by the rebalance attack, given nowhere to go on the style sheet?
6. One concern is you can end up "getting ganked" in combat. In other words, you could suddenly have everyone stack up on you, whereas other times nobody's attacking you. This was more of a concern in our PvP demo combat though, and not so much in actual play (though there was only one short combat in-game). To explain the PvP thing, beforehand I ran a quick 3-4 round free-for-all tavern brawl just so people could get a glimpse of the combat system and get used to how it works.
7. How does one "win" a chase scene, without someone getting grabbed? IE, when you're trying to run from the city guards. I ended up finding spots to say, "ok, you were far ahead and you chose to slip into an alleyway, so you've managed to escape" and took that player off the chase list. Option B was have everyone in 1-2 rank with the guards in "Far Behind" or something. I think the roleplay method was the intent, though.
8. Regarding chase scenes: should they be ran with everyone effectively in "the same area" with the area rotating every round (IE you start in an alleyway, then next round you're breaking into the bazaar, then you're exiting the bazaar in the next round, etc) or are the different "tiers" (1-5 and Far Behind) supposed to have their own separate zones?
9. Can you catch up from Far Behind, or does that correllate to "out of the picture now"? I'm not looking for a hard set rule, just a general guideline.
10. Social encounters were fun. For stuff with us it was always just a quick one-or-two opposed rolls and then going back to RPing, but it made sense and gave the players a choice without totally abstracting it. It really prevents people from locking up the conversation due to a difference of opinion (IE kids pretending to play cops and robbers and they get stuck at "i hit you!" "nuh uh! you missed!" "no, i hit you!" "no, i dodged it!" arguments. SK social encounter rules prevent that sort of issue.)
11. For the Savage combat style: it says, "No shield, weapon for Fury Strike, Rampage." I wasn't sure if that meant "no shield & no weapon allowed if you use fury strike or rampage" or "you can't use a shield, and you need a weapon for fury strike and rampage" or what. My assumption was the latter.
Overall, receptions were excellent. Everyone really liked the system! I explained the idea behind "scene order play" and it basically was ran as the characters picking what they want to do and directing the flow of events until I jumped in as GM whenever something happened, a dispute needed to be settled, opposed rolls needed to be made, or whatever. It was very player-driven instead of GM-driven. At many points it almost felt like I didn't need to be there as the GM as the players were able to handle it themselves (until I came in later with something, of course). GMing with player-driven play was quite passive and mostly just required me throwing wrenches in the system.
P.S. Sam had to leave partway through, so he played over skype using video chat for a big chunk of it. It worked pretty flawlessly without much of a hitch.