[PTA] The Belt - Pilot episode

[Blankshield]

Two weeks past we played the pilot of The Belt, which was pitched here.

In the after-game banter, our show acquired a tagline:
"Hell is somewhere the Company can transfer you."

Overall, the session went fairly well.  A little bit of fumbling, and as Fitz's player noted, it felt like we had to shut down just when we were getting started.  Part of that was my fault as Producer - I wasn't driving scenes towards conflict early enough, so when we ended the evening, I still had about 1/3 of my budget unspent.  We did struggle a bit with setting stakes properly, but were getting better.  We also spent, I think, a bit too long in each scene - total of 8 scenes in 2 hours.  (Hmm.  Looking at it that way, I think we did OK.  It just felt like there should have been more scenes.)

Opening scene: Plot scene, starts in the space truck, Leon and NJ are on their way to pry a crotchety old rock miner out of his failing habitat.
There's some establishing dialogue between Leon and NJ which does a lovely job of setting the mood of the scene in between Leon's optimism and NJ's "You're shitting me" responses.  It comes out that Zachery is "A good old boy, if a little cranky sometimes" who's never been willing to move, even if his atomic plant is "a mite old."  Best quote:
NJ: "So, how did you fix it last time?"
Leon: "Which time?"
NJ: "..."
From there we slid straight into what probably should have been framed as a different scene, but it flowed so smoothly I didn't sweat it.  Long shot of the space cab floating outside a old mined-out asteroid with the space equivalent of a tar paper shack, complete with an exterior pipe venting steam into space.  Cut to Leon and NJ outside the airlock.
NJ: "Zachery?"
Zachery "Piss off!"
Cut to credits and theme song.
Return to scene, NJ offers a blatant bribe of "we've got some alcohol..." to try and get in the door, at which point Zachery actually comes to the airlock and looks out at them, and exclaims "Nina Joe?  Ah knew yer ma!" and cycles the airlock."
Needless to say, conflict.  NJ's stakes were pretty clear: Keep the old coot from revealing anything else about her belter past.  We agreed Leon didn't really have anything at stake in the conflict.  I dropped 4 budget on there, 'cause I really wanted to put the pressure on early, and because NJ's spotlight is early in the arc.  Alas, the cards didn't love me.  NJ drew on her screen presence of two and her "streetwise - the Belt" edge and beat me 2-1, and the narration, too.  While Zachery was nattering on looking through the cupboards, she coldcocked him.  They loaded him up on a stretcher, shut down his hab and towed it away.

Scene two: Character, Docking Port 3, Fitz arrives on-station.
Overhead angle shot, of Docking Port 3.  It's a large open space with a bank of 8 self-serve kiosks down one wall, kind of like a blend between a payphone and a photo booth.  Looping through the scene is an announcement: "Vistors and future citizens, welcome to the Station!  The automated entry port is here to serve your needs.  One of our friendly staff is on hand to assist with any problems!"  There is no one in sight; tumbleweeds could not make the place look more abandoned.  A sign reads "back in five minutes" but the little hands are set for three hours earlier.
We cut to Fitz trying to fit himself, a briefcase and an (empty) cat carrier into one of the little booths; the cat carrier ends up wedged over his head.  He closes the little half curtain and puts his card in the slot.  The screen blinks on and reads "Please insert your card."
It goes downhill from there, and Jack gets drawn into the scene by being the guy stuck at the security desk when an alarm starts beeping to notify him of "attempted sabotage, Docking Bay 3"  He goes there, stands behind the desk, tips over the "back in 5" sign and says "May I help you, sir." in his best 'bland assistant' voice.  Some lovely back-and-forth happens between the two characters, which ends with Jack pointing to the "Out of Order" sign taped to the booth curtain and Fitz looking up at it, and looking back at Jack with a 'deer in the headlights' completely deadpan "That wasn't there."
Cut scene, no conflict.

Yeep.  I just noticed I was getting a little 'travelogue-y'; I'll keep things a little more concise.

Scene 3: Character, in the control center with Lance, Jack and Fitz.
Opens with Lance coming on duty to an empty control center, and bitching at the absent Jack.  Jack and Fitz shortly arrive, and Jack promptly gets out of Dodge.  It comes out that Fitz is transferred there to be legal council.  There's some more lovely back-and-forth with the best passage being:
Lance: Here, look.  Fill out this complaint form, and I'll make sure it gets to the proper authorities to look at it.
(Fitz fills out the form and hands it to Lance.)
Lance turns it around and hands it straight back.  "Here's your first job."
(No conflict)

Scene 4 (plot, DP3, Aries, Leon and NJ) brings us back to docking port three, with an identical overhead shot, except that this time, the guy in the booth is wearing greasy coveralls and a utility belt.  Leon and NJ come through the scene, bearing a stretchered Zachery.   Leon and Aries banter about Zachery's place (Aries: Last time I went out there, I was in decontamination for three days! Leon: You're lucky you were just working on the heater.)
Zachery starts to come around and NJ clips his jaw again.
(No conflict)

Scene 5: Character, Open 4H; Fitz, Aries, Jack.  NPC: the Station Commander.
Fitz resolves to seek out the station commander to sort out his woes.  He's overjoyed to get an indication of civilization in this dump when people keep giving him directions to the 4H Club.  He arrives into an open area and his face falls when he sees a seedy little dive across the plaza with an ancient neon sign in the window "Open 24 Hours" .. The '2' and the 'ours' is burnt out, leaving "Open  4 H".
Fitz goes in and, in a classic "I have no idea how to act here" fashion loudly announces that he's looking for the commander.  He is pointed at one of the drunken sots, played, we agreed, by Gary Busey.  A long argument plays out between Fitz and the commander (mostly Fitz) where it comes out the station was told Fitz wouldn't arrive for three months yet.   My mind is grown fuzzy, and I can't recall if we brought this scene to conflict or not.  If we did, the stakes would have been something like 'Does Fitz convince the commander that he's supposed to be here'.  I would have lost the stakes; the cards hated me that day.

Scene 6: Character, in the plaza in front of the 4H club, Aries and a waitress from there.
In the last scene, the commander had drunkenly told Aries 'shouldn't you be fixing something?', and Aries took that literally and went off to fix something.  This set the scene for having the gorgeous waitress with a crush on Aries chase him out, conveniently off-shift.  Conflict!  Stakes are 'Does Aries look like an idiot in front of this babe?'  Cards are drawn, again I lose.  She plays coy, trying to make him invite her somewhere, he stammers and fumbles the pass and ducks out, leaving her disappointed, but thinking he's not only a hunk, but kind of cute and shy, too.  Best line of the scene: "I uh, have to go, um, a-a-adjust something."  "Can I help?"

Scene 7: Character (for Lance), in the corridor outside medlab, NJ, Leon, Lance and Zachery.  Explicitly, the player wanted Lance to need to demonstrate his weapons expertise.
We start the scene with NJ and Leon taking Zachery on the stretcher, nearly at the med lab where Lance is waiting.  Leon starts to pry gently at NJ about the 'I knew yer ma!' line, and is soundly rebuffed.  At this point Zachery starts to wake again with a 'Somebody hit me!'  Conflict!  Leon's stakes were about getting Zachery calmed down, NJ wanted him to keep his trap shut about her ma, and Lance wanted to control the situation without needing to pull a weapon.  We pull cards and finally!  I win stakes!  NJ manages to keep any more information about her ma from getting out, though.  Zachery clocks NJ, and she drops her end of the stretcher.  The three of them get tangled up in the hall, and Zachery is getting wilder by the minute.  Finally Lance pulls out a little tranq gun and as Zachery turns to include him in the brawl, fires straight and clean into deep muscle, then waits calmly as Zachery takes two stumbling steps and falls down right at his feet.  NJ looks on, and notes "That was, uh, a really good shot."

Scene 8: Character,  maze of corridors outside NJ's quarters.  Jack, Fitz and NJ.
Scene opens with Fitz and Jack weaving drunkenly through the halls, looking for Fitz's room.  Fitz is bitching about his as-yet unseen roommate, and among other things declares "I was married to a messy woman once – I'm not going to put up with that again!"  They weave to a stop in front of NJ's room, and they argue about if this is the right room.  "Oh, no.  This can't be right.  I know whose room this is."  "I tell you, it's the room.  Here, look at the number."  "Oh dear God."
NJ, hearing the commotion opens a door with a cold pack over her eye (for the shiner she got last scene).  The stare at each other in dawning horror until just as the credits roll, "Joseph?!"  "Nina-Joe?!"

------
Some things I definitely did wrong this first time out of the gate.
-First off, I called WAY too many of the scenes.  If no one had anything, I bulled ahead with my next great idea.  I ended up calling 4 or 5 of the 8 scenes.  Partly it was me wanting to do the TV pilot 'parade of protagonists' thing, and partly not wanting to put anyone on the spot right out of the gate.  It didn't hurt the game per se, but it did leave me doing too much of the action and it showed.  I reigned in for our next episode (which I will post up in the next few days, I hope) and that went much better.
-I then committed the real offense, which was not pushing things to conflict.  We had three, maybe four conflicts and I ended up with way too much of my budget sitting unused.  Bad management.

As a group, our stakes-setting was shaky.  We did toss things back and forth until folks liked their stakes, but it was slow going, with a lot of "umm..." 

My over-all conclusion from this:

Matt: the 'Pilot' idea rocks on toast.  It totally let us get the kinks out of the system without damaging anyone's spotlight ep.  We all know it's a pilot, and we know that if stuff doesn't work, or we start going in the wrong direction, we can just ignore it or rewrite it when the real season starts.

James

[Mike Holmes]

So what do you think the odds are that you're going to play this show? Is the pilot going to get a rewrite? Substantial?

Do you think that if you did another show another time that from what you'd learned that the pilot would go more smootly?

Mike

[Blankshield]

We're definately playing the show; I'm running behind on my play reports; we've done episodes one and two already.  There was no rewriting to speak of; we did talk about recasting the actor for Jack, but that was banter and fun poking at the player, because he'd said he might not make episode 1 due to work.

Subsequent episodes went much much smoother, and I'll talk about that when I write them up.  In general I think that the first time any group of "mainstream" gamers runs through PTA they will have similar issues regarding the producer framing most of the scenes and having trouble nailing stakes unless it's approached very carefully.  However, this group, or any group that included at least a couple people with PTA experience already would be able to take a pilot and make it fly.  The hiccups are all about the paradigm shift going from more traditional systems to PTA; if the players are already there, Boom!

James

[Mike Holmes]

Cool. Look forward to the reports.

Mike

[Rylock]

I think my only issue with the game is that it's not actual roleplaying. And by that I mean that I don't feel that it's me as the player just playing the role of my character and leaving everything else to the storyteller, which is what I consider roleplaying to be. This is very much co-operative storytelling. Yes, we players are the stars in the world, with the Producer playing everyone else, but the relationship is much different in that we play a much more active role in determining how things are resolved.

This is not necessarily a bad thing -- but it is a huge shift to get used to. I tend to be the storyteller in most other games that I play, and as I'm playing in this one I find myself wondering how PTA would play differently if the Producer was trying very hard to be the "only" storyteller. Would that even work? I'm not sure, and really that may not even be the goal here. It seems that it certainly wouldn't work for a group of players who weren't willing to do more work than they normally would. Overall I find it interesting as an exercise -- but very different.

[Mike Holmes]

Yes, it's quite intended to be something a far cry from your typical RPG. That's entirely intentional. Play it for what it is, not what it's not. Just as you'd, say, play Monopoly as a boardgame, and not as a RPG.

Consider this, however. Have you ever said, "I grab a mug from the bar, and hit him with it?" Is the creation of that mug "roleplaying" by your definition? To some extent all RPGs are about establishing a consensus on what's going on in the world, and that rarely means that the player only controls their character and nothing else. A lot of it has to do with genre expecations that everyone agrees to tacitly to start. So PTA is really just an extension of that sort of idea. Making the player control of elements much more explicit and common.

In any case, it's fun. Whatever it's labeled as.

Mike