Players can also use a couple of these. I’ve known a couple of players who scour the Internet and magazines for photos to use to represent their characters. They can also use familiar locations for their own homes.

I’ve also picked up realty books with floor layouts, and pretty much any building maps I can find. I also have a book full of “maps” based on TV sets. All of these are useful as “Familiar Locations.”

My battlecry when time gets short is “Semper Gumby!”. Be willing to handwave or skip parts of the adventure if they won’t fit in the time allotted.

This just gave me a thought. If there is some critical event, one way to speed things along might be to take the initial check for success as a baseline that grows at a constant rate until success is met. For instance, in Storyteller, the difficulty to pick a lock might be 4. On the first roll, two successes are garnered. After that, each additional turn gains another 2 successes. In D&D, you might add +5 to the original roll, every round, until it’s opened.

This guarantees that success comes, but it includes a penalty for now doing well initially. It also eliminates the slow-down factor of rolling every round, so you can just skip to the outcome.

IE, you have a scene in which the PCs are FBI agents trying to stop terrorists. They’ve caught one but the others are escaping. The DC (using d20 terms) to successfully Intimidate the prisoner into revealing the hideout is 25, and the first roll is a 12. If you have a rule like +5 per time unit, this tells you that the DC is met in 3 units of time, but you don’t have to make the player roll 3 more times to get to the information, which is the whole point of the encounter.