[PtA] It's Not The End Of The World

[Martin O'Leary]

Whenever we all get our acts together, I'm producing an as yet unplanned PtA series for some friends of mine. All of the players took part in a one-off I ran a month or two ago, and seem keen to try this crazy hippie game again. However, there were a few issues with that game that I'd like some people's input on before I go ahead.

The whole thing was knocked up quite quickly. Ever since our Amber campaign had ended, we'd been running various one-offs each Thursday night with a reasonable player overlap. As there didn't seem to be anything planned for that evening, I suggested on IRC at about lunchtime to get people together and try out PtA. None of us had that much experience with Forge-style games, although two of us had been reading about them (and Adam had gone so far as to buy a copy of PtA, which I was using).

Playerwise, we were six including myself.

• I gamed a reasonable amount when I was younger (D&D, Vampire, Paranoia), and got back into things recently with an Amber campaign and the start of a Nobilis campaign (GMed by Adam). I'm happy with most styles of play, although I've got a preference for fairly mechanically light Narrativist play (hence PtA).
• Abi, my girlfriend, isn't much of a gamer, but was interested enough to try this out. She seems to prefer collaborative play, and prefers to think of it as story-telling than role-playing.
• Adam, the other Forgite, who actually owned PtA has gamed a bit, and is getting quite into indie games. He's very definitely into Narrativist stuff. He was part of the Amber campaign, so I'd gamed with him before and had a handle on his style.
• Carrie, Adam's girlfriend, again hadn't gamed much, although she was in Adam's Nobilis campaign, so I knew she was mostly into Illusionist stuff. I don't think she was really convinced by PtA, of which more below.
• Bryony, one of Adam's housemates and another participant in the Amber campaign. Her major roleplaying kick is in a local LARP system which is best described as "Simulationists trying to play in a Gamist system", although I think she's more of a Nar/Gam blend than most of the other players.
• Xanth, another friend, I hadn't gamed with before. He plays a reasonable amount of D&D, and seems to enjoy both the Gamist angle, and the chance to just make silly shit up.

Going into the session, my only thought for the show was that I didn't want anything "IN SPACE!" or similar. Supernatural/SF elements to an X-Files/Buffy level was fine, but I didn't want the thing turning into a space opera or D&D: The TV Series. We kicked around a few ideas, mostly centering around either medieval stuff, or a soap opera set in prehistoric times (The Flintstones with less dinosaurs and more angst). When we mentioned this to Bryony (she'd been in and out of the room getting food), her response was something along the lines of "Cool, if by prehistoric soap opera you mean INSANE CULTISTS!".

This more or less set the tone for the subsequent discussion, which came up with two options. The first was a reality show charting the lives of five young inductees into a religious cult. The second followed the stories of the remains of a cult which had travelled to a remote island in order to await the end of the world, only to have the cult leadership abscond with all their worldly goods. We went with this one as having more opportunity to showcase character emotions, and allow more varied storylines.

We then looked at possible characters. This was interesting, as the group seemed to focus more on which characters should be in the show rather than which characters they'd personally enjoy playing. I'm not sure if this was good or bad, as while it reduced "my-guyism" and promoted a set of characters that worked well together, it may have meant that people didn't engage with their characters to the greatest degree possible. Probably not important in the case of a one-shot, but I'd be interested to know if people have seen this happen.

Fairly quickly we decided that there should be a believer who wants to keep the group faithful to the cult's ideals, an undercover journalist doing an expose on the cult, a simple "stoner" type, etc. Adam settled quickly on the journalist character, Mary, with an Issue about keeping her identity secret. Bryony, Abi and Carrie shuffled characters around a bit, with Abi eventually deciding on the stoner, and Bryony playing a crazy old guy left over from the previous time the scam had been pulled. Carrie decided to play a ditzy blonde character, but had trouble thinking of an Issue. I'm unsure if this is why she didn't like it, or if she couldn't think of an Issue because she didn't really want to play that sort of game. Xanth's character took quite a while to come together, but once it did I think it really worked.

Anyway, characters:

• Adam: Mary, undercover journalist. Issue: Keeping her identity secret, and being unable to open up because of this.
• Abi: "Fresh", stoner. Issue: Secret crush on Crystal and lack of anything to smoke.
• Carrie: Crystal, ditzy blonde. Issue: Feeling needed, and trying to find a useful role in the group.
• Bryony: Dean, crazy old believer. Issue: Learning to relate to human beings again.
• Xanth: Frank, the "straight man". Issue: Keeping the group together in the face of increasing stress.

There was a bit of a problem assigning traits, with people having trouble identifying what would make a "good" trait. Eventually, people just slapped something down (I think Adam took "remarkable singing voice", which seemed a bit odd). Connections were also problematic, as these were supposedly the only five people on the island. We ended up with three imaginary people as connections: Fresh's "spirit of the forest", the ghost of Dean's old nemesis Howard, and Frank's hero "Alexandre Halfman, Teambuilder Extraordinaire". Adam decided that Mary had a radio with which she could talk to her boyfriend back home. I don't think Carrie took a connection, but I didn't really want to force it as it didn't seem that important.

We mapped out the plot arcs, and decided on a rough storyline for each episode. The episode we chose to play was the last one, Frank's spotlight, with everyone else on SP 2, except Mary on SP 1.

I opened with dawn breaking on the beach where everyone was asleep, and lots of dead fish washing up (throughout the session I kept describing storm clouds gathering, and general apocalyptic symptoms). Dean woke up, and started performing strange rituals and chanting. Everyone else remained asleep.

Cut to credits.

I forget what happened in which scene, but the basic plot revolved around Dean and Fresh stealing the island's food supply to perform a ritual (we'd decided that Fresh saw Dean as a spiritual leader), and Frank trying and failing to mediate. We pretty quickly dumped the turn-based scene framing and scenes flowed fairly naturally into each other. Eventually, as the storm began to break, we had Frank, who had been shunned by everyone, walking up a mountain trail and encountering an apparition of his hero, Alexandre Halfman, who inspired him to try to pull everyone together as a team.

We only had three conflicts all session. One early on had Frank and Dean arguing over the food; I believe they both won, leading to Frank getting some of the food back, but being dragged into participating in the ritual and getting smeared all over with baked beans. The second conflict was a bit limp, between Mary and Frank. I don't even really remember what the stakes for Mary were, but Frank had "Keeping his cool", which he lost, leading to him storming off and climbing the mountain. Finally, there was a conflict on the mountaintop, where Frank fought his own demons. Interestingly, Xanth wanted Frank to break down here, so I played the side which wanted him to be inspired. Xanth lost, and the episode ended with Frank, standing on the mountaintop in a single shaft of light as the storm broke around him, shouting "FUCK YEAH!". We never ran the second half of the episode, but I think we all had a good idea how it would go.

With regard to fanmail, there were only two pieces handed out all session, both by Adam: one for Fresh's stoner stylings ("It's like a whole galaxy...of fish") and one for Frank's mountaintop conversion. I don't think this was because people weren't enjoying things; I think they just didn't really get into the swing of things fanmail-wise. I didn't really want to push people into it, but maybe I should have been more vocal.

One problem which a couple of people raised with me was that we spent a lot of time before each scene discussing what it was about, and not really getting anywhere. I think this was partially that people were afraid to take "ownership" of scenes and just run with their ideas. I certainly had to spend a while convincing Xanth that if he wanted a scene with just Frank in, that was fine and dandy, and he wasn't being selfish. Has anyone else experienced this problem, and does anyone have any advice on convincing players that it's ok to just run with things?

Anyways, I'm running a series starting soon with everyone except Carrie (she didn't really enjoy it, and as far as I can tell, that's simply because it's not her style of roleplaying). Does anyone have any pointers on how to improve on what we've got here? It wasn't a bad session by any means, quite the opposite, but it did feel like there was an enormous untapped potential there that we were missing somehow.

[Adam Biltcliffe]

Being the Adam in question:

It felt to me like we had a lot of difficulty striking a balance between nothing happening and everything being planned out in advance. Sometimes someone would say "oh, now there should be a scene with X and Y at the hut eating breakfast" or something and the players of X and Y would sit there and go, "what? oh, um, nice weather". Recognising that that was happening seemed to lead to people talking more about what they wanted to happen in upcoming scenes, but that quickly collapsed into setting the agenda for every scene so tightly that playing them out felt like reading from a script.

I've heard people mention that PTA is a very creatively-demanding game, and I think part of the problem may have been not appreciating the extent to which it falls on the players to drive events towards hitting one another's issues. The extensive pre-planning of scenes felt somehow wrong to me, and I'm wondering if I'm correct in my impression that the agenda for a scene is supposed to be a quite vague thing and the onus is on the participants to make sure that the events of the scene continue to drive the narrative. If so, I'm guessing that the 'dead' scenes which resulted from us simply dropping two people in the same place probably resulted from the ingrained gamer-think telling players to sit still and wait for someone else to foist story onto them.

[Sydney Freedberg]

What really worked for our group in our first-ever PTA session was (our interpretation of) the "scene agenda" bit in the rules. As everyone works together to set the scene, you decide not just what's happening at the start of the scene, but "this is what's definitely gonna happen by the end of the scene" -- to take examples from our game, "we contact the occult underground," or "the freaky seers give us the person we've been hunting." Those events aren't in question. What's in question is how we'll get there, i.e. how what happens along the way will hit on each of our characters' Issues. The question changes from "will you succeed or fail?" to "we know you're going to succeed (or fail), but at what price?"

[Adam Biltcliffe]

That sounds like a good point to start from. I thought at the time, and this somewhat reaffirms it, that the other problem was that we had very little idea what the characters did in their day-to-day lives over the course of an episode, so there was no overarching plot to use as inspiration for conflicts that hit on individual issues. So there was no "what happens along the way", because there was no way to have stuff happen along. When we (hopefully) play again, I'm going to push for a show with a better-defined franchise, in the sense that the PTA book uses it, so that we have something to pursue while finding out feet in terms of individual characters' issues.

[Mark Woodhouse]

I'm guessing that the 'dead' scenes which resulted from us simply dropping two people in the same place probably resulted from the ingrained gamer-think telling players to sit still and wait for someone else to foist story onto them.

Oooh, yes. That's exactly how I felt like our our PTA attempt got flat and limp. It's so different from the normal way we've learned to approach scenes, it's a rough adjustment to make.

[REkz]

One problem which a couple of people raised with me was that we spent a lot of time before each scene discussing what it was about, and not really getting anywhere. I think this was partially that people were afraid to take "ownership" of scenes and just run with their ideas .... Has anyone else experienced this problem, and does anyone have any advice on convincing players that it's ok to just run with things?

My observations:
Do not overplan, do NOT 'discuss' for more than a minute or two.  The only time we're discussing scenes is if someone is totally 'in the dark', or someone has an ingenius idea.  We DO discuss scenes as they're being played,  but we don't stall out while we're doing this.
Also, as Producer, I 'take ownership' of the scenes.  Players dish it out, I start it off. The way my group has played is the players answer the form (verbally) "plot or character", "agenda", and "location". 
The player needs to lay out agenda in a few short sentences. 
Location also includes who is there.
Then the Producer describes it -- until the conflict comes up, and then the narration winner describes the resolution.

Here's an example:  Jimmy (Player) comes up with a scene.

Producer:  Who's scene is it next?
Jimmy: Mine!
Producer:  OK, is it Plot or Character?
Jimmy: Plot
Producer: Where is it?
Jimmy: My garage.
Producer: What's the agenda?
Jimmy:  I'm having a fight with my neighbor about how my car was trashed.

Then the Producer says, "OK, the scene opens in Jimmy's garage, a closeup of Jimmy on his back under his trashed car, tools and spare parts scattered on the floor.  His girlfriend Susanna is on the phone in the background, talking quietly about Jimmy and her personal problems, when their neighbor Cartmann walks in.  Jimmy, what do you do?"

I'm wondering right now if I've been TOO controlling in my game?  But it works, and it flows, and it's fast.
That should be the earmark of a really good PTA game.  As fast as a TV show, and you need commercial breaks to take a pee and a breather!   

We only had three conflicts all session.

Huh?  Only 3?  Unless it was a 5 minute game, that's impossible.  Something did not work in your game.  You SHOULD have a conflict in almost every scene, either between antagonists and characters, or nemesis and characters, or  ???   So that means every 3-5 minutes you've had 1 conflict.  In a game night (~ 4 hours) that means 30+ conflicts, right?

My God!!  Only 3 conflicts in the night?  It sounds like hell!!!!
That's like playing D&D and never getting to roll your dice!!!!   (HA HA)
"An act of god causes lightning to strike you and obliterate you with no saving throw."

With regard to fanmail, there were only two pieces handed out all session,

WHAT?!??!  Only 2 fanmail?  If 1/2 of that audience pool is not given back out to players by players, I as the Producer will start nagging.  "Look at all this audience pool, why don't you give it away" type of thing.  If fanmail is not given out, the players lose a lot of power & autonomy.

Good luck in the future -- spice it up!!!