There’s no real prep if you use the published adventures to create your locations, NPCs and adversaries. If you sandbox it, then you get whatever prep level you have in any sandbox game (I struggle with sandbox play, because I want to overprep everything — going into MZ0 and just rolling and winging zone travel was emotionally stressful)

It is a game for players who want to engage the system. The subsystems interlock in really elegant and important ways. But it sounds like your troop was into that for moto, so shouldn’t be a problem.

But this: loading up on gear –> fatigue –> reduced effectiveness –> spending hope to restore effectiveness –> misery –> madness –> my character changing and going all Boromir…is so delicious once you see all the clogs clicking along that I find it has a pretty big payoff for the learning curve.

It is geared to longer play so you may have to retool a few things to see the cycle in a shorter time.

We’d played a dozen or so sessions and got to see the shorter cycles fire off a few times, the middle cycle really ramp up but not yet climax, and the long cycles were sitting out there tantalizing…we could see what they’d do, but base game speed wasn’t enough to budge them yet.