PTA: Gun of Truth

[Lee-Anne O'Reilly]

Last Monday at a convention, I played my first game of Primetime Adventures with four strangers and an old friend. I'm pretty sure all of us were new to narrative style play and to conflict resolution systems. I was the only one who'd read the game, and I think we wound up playing it "wrong".

Then again, we had screaming fun, so something of the play was right.

I'm still trying to process the experience; what I'd like from posting here are suggestions for how to reproduce the fun aspects, and questions to help me articulate why some of the screaming on my part is fearful.

I found the initial brainstorming exciting. T proposed right at the start that we do something Firefly-esque, and we were off and running in that vein until we surrendered to a palpable collective fannish urge to make it an out-and-out canonical spinoff. (In what way was it palpable? Was I oblivious to reluctance on someone's part? I don't know.) Ideas popped from all, most heavily from T, L, and N.

I got upset at one point when I realised that we were spoiling the film for S, who hadn't seen it yet, but he claimed he wasn't bothered to learn details out of turn if they were important to our show's concept.

N actually roleplayed through the brainstorming, as a cheerfully crass production or network exec who proposed things like casting David Beckham to hit in the all-important female and sports demographics that the original series missed. We were a few scenes into the episode before I realised that he thought this roleplaying of production staff was what players do in PTA; he'd come late to the table and missed the earliest explanation. He had and created fun, regardless, so no harm was done, and he later slipped easily into playing his episode character without any overt discussion of his initial misapprehension.

About ten minutes into brainstorming, it occurred to me that T was coordinating things, was seemingly sparking with everyone at the table, and I felt that things would be more fun with him as Producer. I proposed that any of us could produce the episode. After the two of us danced some very silly mutual deferring and not admitting what we actually wanted, and an even sillier cutting of the deck, I got to be a Player, apparently to the satisfaction of all.

One discomfort I had throughout the game, though, came from T's tendency to reject some suggestions. It wasn't frequent, and the feel of it varied from reasonable to dismissive, synthesising to unilateral. At least some of it was to contain some of the more outrageous wackiness proposed by N, and some from an agenda to be true to the source canon, I believe. It struck me as very DMish: disappointing when I'd been longing for a more cooperative experience, but neither too frequent to detract much from my enjoyment, nor surprising when I'd never SAID I wanted very cooperative play. More on that later.

When we started discussing cast, I passed character sheets around and led us through their minimal crunchy bits, ignoring the arc aspect of Screen Presence as it seemed unimportant for a pilot. Most was easily explained and grasped, which was nice, though Edges took a little fumbling on my part because I was familiar with Risus' clichés before encountering PTA, so hadn't had to think my way through that explanation before. I misremembered how many Traits we should take.

I left Issues for last. B seemed stumped by having to come up with one, which prompted me to remember that I'd printed out the collected TSoY Keys for just that purpose. I passed those around, and the PTA book, opened to the section of sample Issues, and a few people looked at them.

At that point, I turned inward to brood over my character. I have little memory of what went on outside of my head, even though I think I offered suggestions to others, and I'm sure I invited some when the issue I'd been thinking towards seemed to overlap too much with B's character. I busied myself with setting out and labelling token bowls and counting out Budget. Toward the end of it, when an idea for a Connection struck me, I asked if I could create a dockworker's union.

Why did I ask permission? I was feeling that GM-is-arbiter-of-Truth thing that we were all slipping into. I'm not sure how much of that was the habit of a collective nine-odd decades of traditional RPGing, and how much T's personality and investment in the canon we were working from. (I found out later that he'd purchased the Serenity Role Playing Game the previous day for its twentyish pages of colour, and had absorbed them before we played.)

An hour into play, we were ready to start airing the episode. Here's what I can remember of the basics:

Gun of Truth: A SciFi Western about the crew of Veritas, a high-speed bucket of bolts that served as a Browncoat intelligence ship during the war. It has some very sweet, high-end comm equipment and a missile launcher with only one missile, The Bullet. The Bullet was to serve as a running source of conflict as a highly valuable commodity on a cash-strapped ship, and as a source of comic relief due to the crew's tradition of sneaking around behind each other's backs to repaint the thing. We had a concern worked out for the season's adventure story arc, but we didn't realise until several scenes in that we weren't clear about what the crew DOES most of the time.

T - Producer
B played a by-the-book engineer and ex-lover of Badger.
L played a gambles-from-the-rich-to-give-to-the-settlers pilot.
S played a Jaynesque master-at-arms and former Alliance soldier whose issue was feeling like the outsider.
N played Devil, an amnesiac idiot-savant mechanic re-trained as a male escort.
I played Tsang, a tramatised medic acting as pursor, with an issue of safety/survivalism that manifests in squirreling away supplies.

I'm sorry that I can't remember more names or issues. I'm also sorry that I'll have to continue in a future post, likely in two of days, as tomorrow I'm meeting two of these players and a couple of others to reboot/continue this series.

[Jason Morningstar]

Your series sounds great!  It was interesting to read the process you arrived at to bring it to fruition.  I'd keep an eye on T's producing, since the role is more akin to being an observant guide and instigator than traditional GMing in my experience - the producer doesn't get to decide what's going to happen all the time and really has no power over other player's scene framing (he can call for conflicts, of course, and should!) 

It sounds as though you are off to an excellent start, though.  You also mentioned screen presence not being critical in the pilot, which is sort of true, but you definitely want to get in the habit of being aware of everybody's screen presence and playing accordingly, episode to episode.  Also, don't forget to give each other fan mail like it is going out of style.  T will thank you for it and it will make his job easier!  Plus it is awesome and fun.