Player-conflict resolution possible?

[Tropico]

Hi, I just bought Primetime Adventures based on many good things I've heard and how fun it is. I'm planning it on playing it with my DVD group; we're a group of cousins and friends who get together regularly and have a blast watching stuff like Lost, Prison Break, Heroes, various reality shows, Anime OVAs... anything really, if it's good, we'll watch it.

So, at first this would seem like the perfect game for us to pick up and play, but after reading it and reading several posts in this forum I've realized it's actually a bit different from what I had hoped in one crucial aspect... mainly the "everyone decides what's going to happen beforehand and the conflict only deals with the character's psychological issues" aspect.

The thing is, we're just regular people who watch DVDs, we're not "gamers" or "roleplaying people" so to speak. The games we play are card games, board games, all games where players compete and outsmart each other and have fun doing it. And I'm not trying to discount the importance of character issues in any way whatsoever... but... we know right off that making the game ALL ABOUT those issues is simply not gonna fly with us. We need some interaction, some competition, or it's not going to be fun as a game. If all we're going to do is analyze psychological conundrums we might as well just keep watching our dvds, which offer more than enough ground for that type of thing.

For example, right now I'd like to run a Prison Break game, where the tension would be all about who makes it out? Who gets left behind? Who snitches to the guards? Who double-crosses everyone and gets away with the money? And of course, added to all that would be each character's backstory about the girlfriend they left behind or the mob boss who's out to get tham as soon as they make it out, etc, which is awesome. But the way PTA is mean to be played (from what I've read here) is that we would simply go "ok, Bob you're gonna get left behind, Mike and Charlie are gonna make it out, and Suzy you're gonna snitch to the guards but not make it in time to stop them ok? What we don't know is whether each one of you is going to proud enough of escaping to get over your self-esteem issues." That's cool and all, but it's not what we're looking for in a "game".

Of course after reading around on these boards I realize that you guys have your community where it's all about the "deep issues" of the characters and their childhoods and psychology and whatnot, and competition and "winning" is looked down on or whatever, and that's cool for you. But rather than just tossing the game out I'd like to ask if anyone has attempted to adapt PTA to play as more of a normal game, with players competing to win in the scenario that you come up with and not coming to an agreement just by negotiation beforehand.

The most obvious thing (and what I'm going to try first) is definitely to just have players draw against each other when they come into conflict. I'd like to know if there's any problem that crops up in terms of balance of gameplay that anyone is aware of? And what alternatives could I try? Anything that has given success in making this a game that's fun for casual players would really help me out.

Thanks everyone for any input and help, I really do hope I can make it work.

Harry.

[Glendower]

No man, no.  You can totally change things up in the game.  Conflict resolution is about choices.  The way I play is I ask the player what he wants to happen.  That's their side of the conflict.  Then I challenge them with something I think would be a different direction, something interesting but not what the player wants.  That's my side of the conflict.  It's not touchy feely stuff, it's Narrative control over what happens.

Let me give you an example.  In a previous game I ran here, the heroic Soldier Jack Farmer was up against a group of brigands, who were menacing his brother's farm.  The player wanted Jack to talk these brigands down, and get them to join his resistance.  What I wanted?  Them to attack, forcing him to horribly slaughter the brigands in front of his brother and his family. 

That's not touchy feely.  That's hardcore awesome plot.

[Matt Wilson]

The most obvious thing (and what I'm going to try first) is definitely to just have players draw against each other when they come into conflict.

You don't need to do anything differently for protag vs. protag conflict.Each player should still draw against the producer, because there are cases where neither player will get what they want.

Imagine:  player A's goal is "I want to leave character B to get captured by the guards and beaten up." Player B's goal is "I want character A to respect me."

If player B's goal is "I want to effectively cancel out everything player A is doing," that's both lame and misguided.

[Tropico]

OK, thanks for the replies, I've re-read the book and given it some more thought. It hadn't ocurred to me that by not having players draw directly against each other you actually open up up many more possibilities, mainly they both succeed / neither succeeds. It doesn't have to be one or the other... That is cool.

I've also given more of a look at Prison Break and Lost and come to a realization: most of the time the action and the conflict SPRINGS from the character's "issues". It's not what the character wants, but what he wants to accomplish (or maintain as accomplished) in the situation that he's in.

For example, let me see if I'm getting this: (These are SPOILERS for Prison Break and Lost in white text):

====== BEGIN PRISON BREAK SPOILERS ======

In the scene where Mahone and Tweener are facing each other down in the FBi interrogation room, Tweener gives a false confession and leads the FBI on a wild goose chase and thereby keeps the other cons safe. Now, the thing in this scene isn't that Tweener WANTS to send the feds on a wild goose chase, it's that his "issue", as it were, is to prove to the group that he belongs and can be trusted, and he's doing that by not rolling on them, and the whole goose chase idea STEMS from his success in keeping to his loyalty.

As such, if this were the game being played, the player's stakes would not be "I want to send the FBI on a wild goose chase" but "I want to do anything I can to keep the group safe (and therefore prove to everyone and to myself that I'm not a snitch)". And the chase would come as an original idea from the player who won the narration.

====== END PRISON BREAK SPOILERS ======


That's actually really cool when you look at it like that. Another example:


====== BEGIN LOST SPOILERS ======

When Jack escapes from his cell in the Hydra Station and discovers the screen showing Sawyer and Kate sleeping together, he then turns to Ben and goes, "I'll do the operation, I just need to get the hell off this island." The reader is led to believe that he's FAILED himself by becoming consumed with jealousy over Kate (jealousy being his "issue"), and that that's what led him to make the decision to give in to Ben, but in reality, he actually SUCCEEDED in his REAL issue of being a leader and of keeping all his people free and alive, by coming up with the whole kidney-sac escape plan on the spot.

So the player's stakes here would not be "I want to fool Ben into thinking that I'm giving in", but rather "I want to resist the emotions that seeing Kate and Sawyer together brings, and keep to my goal of getting both of them out of this camp alive regardless", with the subsequent plan rising from that success.

Similarly when Locke decides he's going to let the timer run out, his player isn't saying "I want to let the timer run out and see what happens", but rather he's saying "I want to find my faith in the island again" and failing, while Eko's player would be saying, "I want to stay true to my brother's wishes" and failing, Desmond is saying "I want to break myself free of the tyranny of the button" and succeeding, and Charlie is saying "I want to be important and useful in what's going on" and also succeeding, and the resulting dramatic scene is simply one possible idea that stems from all these successes and failures.

====== END LOST SPOILERS ======


And when you look at it like that, that is really really cool. Totally opened up my eyes as to how these shows work.

Anyway, thanks for the replies (and for other posts in other threads that have also helped me) and I realize I sound like a confused newbie in my first post (that's what i am, lol). I'll keep reading and hopefully soon I'll b confident enough in all this that I can actually run it.

[Tropico]

Hmm, I meant to make the spoiler text invisible by having it the same color as the background, but I forgot to put in the tags. Since editing of posts has been "turned off until further notice", I can't fix my mistake, so I apologize to anyone who I might have inadvertently spoiled.

[Tropico]

Let me give you an example.  In a previous game I ran here, the heroic Soldier Jack Farmer was up against a group of brigands, who were menacing his brother's farm.  The player wanted Jack to talk these brigands down, and get them to join his resistance.  What I wanted?  Them to attack, forcing him to horribly slaughter the brigands in front of his brother and his family. 

Glendower, I just spent a few minutes reading through your post. It was extremely helpful to me, so thank you. It let me see how half the fun is coming up with a cool setting; my original plan was to just scrap the brainstorming session and just go "let's play Lost / Prison Break with characters of our own". Now I'm more inclined to go through with the whole brainstorming thing (although knowing my group, it's 99% that we'll end up with "let's play Lost / Prison Break with characters of our own"... we're not a very experimental bunch).

I still have trouble looking at all this as a "game" though. I've shifted my point of view on it somewhat, and I can feel it will be fun, I just need to stretch the definition of what we consider a game. Everyone is working together, and if there's any competition going on, it's in who can come up with the coolest twists and ideas, get the most recognition through fan mail and therefore influence the story the most. So essentially the "winner" would be the one who makes everyone else so entertained that they willingly give him/her the most license to shape the story with.

This concept, while totally new to me and my group, is something that I can at least wrap my mind around.

So this brings me to yet another doubt I have now: why the Producer? The producer seems to me to be the mediator, the arbitrator between players. If everyone is cooperating, why the need for an arbitrator? It seems to me everyone can be a player with a character. The Producer role could be reduced simply to the cards for the conflict set out face down in the center of the table for everyone to draw against. The budget could simply be a shared pool of point everyone is aware of, and the scene-setting could be handed off to any player who is not actively in the current scene. You already hand off the narration of the outcome to the player with the highest card, why not also hand out the scene-setting to a player who draws the highest card out of a pile?

I guess if we're going to do a cooperative / creative thing, I'd just like everyone to be a player and have a character and "cooperate creatively" all the way and be done with it... It just seems to me a shame to have one player singled out without a character, in an authority role, when there's really no -pressing- need for it. Nobody's judging one player against the other and saying "Suzy wins this one." So rather than having one guy who's challenging everyone else with different interesting outcomes, why not just have everyone take turns challenging each other with different possible outcomes.

Like, when you play Trivial Pursuit or Kokology, there's not ONE guy asking all the questions, players take turns asking each other the questions. It seems more dynamic and fun like that to me... but maybe this is just me trying to turn this all into a party/board-game like I'm used to. Anyway, I'd appreciate any feedback; our first "game" will be next week, and we'll see how that goes.

[John Harper]

Hi Harry,

It sounds like this thread has helped you a lot and you're definitely on the right track now. Excellent.

It is very tempting to do away with the Producer, in favor of a group-think thing. And maybe that would work just fine for your group. However, the PTA system is built around a strong Producer role, and the game system depends on it to work properly. Give the book another read regarding the jobs the Producer does and then take a look at this old thread:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=17519.0

There's a lot of good advice there about how to handle the Producer role and make it important to the game play. Let us if know if that helps address your concerns. If not, I'm happy to talk about it in a lot more detail if you want.

[Filip Luszczyk]

This might be a bit off-topic, but...

Of course after reading around on these boards I realize that you guys have your community where it's all about the "deep issues" of the characters and their childhoods and psychology and whatnot, and competition and "winning" is looked down on or whatever, and that's cool for you.

It's not like competition is looked down on or something here - only, not all of the games here support it. If you're interested in a more "gamey" story creation entertainment, you could check out Capes here on Muse of Fire forums. It's much more competitive, lends itself easily to many genres and best of all, it has very good and playable demo version available. It doesn't have a Producer or any other kind of leading player, btw. You might be interested in trying more than one game in order to find something that fits exactly your needs

I still have trouble looking at all this as a "game" though.

Actually, I think it may be better to think of it more as an "entertainment" than a game in a classic sense of the word. No real need to stretch definitions, or anything

[Tropico]

Thanks for all the suggestions and help. All this has been really eye-opening for me... I started out all "I just wanna play a frickin Prison Break game!" and have ended up all intrigued about this new thing, and watching my favorite shows with a totally new perspective. So thanks!

I'm pretty confident now that I can scrap the "competitive" game idea altogether and just re-pitch the game to everybody as just a "show-writing" game, where our own psychology provides us with awesome shows that we can just sit and enjoy.

See, we already play a game kind of similar to that concept called Kokology: The Game of Self-Discovery http://www.amazon.com/Kokology-Game-Self-Discovery-Tadahiko-Nagao/dp/0684871483/, where everyone gets narrated a scene and a situation, and everyone by turns describes what they see or what they do in that particular situation. Then what you answer says stuff about your personality and your psyche. We take turns reading out scenes and interpretations to each other. It's immensely popular with everyone, so I can every everyone getting behind PTA if I pitch it as sort of a 'backwards Kokology' where "it's not the story that gives you your personality, but your personality that builds a cool entertaining show".

Having said that, I got together with one friend of mine and we tried just tossing around possible issues, scenes, conflicts, and outcomes to see if we could get the hang of doing it in a fun way... and it didn't go so good... we had lots of questions and lots of doubts that neither one of us could answer, and the book seems to assume that you already know this stuff.

The most important things we -eventually- realized were:

- The scene turned out better when we identified it with some main "Interest" that was either with or against the character, otherwise the conflict would just feel pointless and/or contrived.

- It was better to leave the stakes ambiguous before flipping cards, as in, if the character wins, everything goes smoothly and the conflict / obstacle would be nullified, if not, the goal would still be accomplished, but the resolving of the conflict would have severe complications, or the character's issue would rise up and screw the everything up 'somehow'. Then after we knew success and failures we would try to come up with situations born out of the results.


Finally after a lot of trying we ended up with kind of a routine to follow that more or less consistently gave us interesting outcomes, like so:

- We'd come up with a setting and two or three main driving "Interests" within that setting

- We'd come up with a couple characters with interesting issues

- We'd come up with a scene in which a character accomplished some goal against one of the main Interests of the setting

- We'd figure out how the Interest would respond to the attempt, or how they would have made 'preparations' against the attempt

- We'd figure out if / how this obstacle would hit on the character's issue, or how the issue would interfere with the goal

- The 'player' would sketch out the character's strategy to get around the obstacle and what he envisioned as the result

- At this point we'd assume cards being flipped (we didn't actually do it)

- We'd go through each possibility of win/lose, come up with different outcomes, and decide which one was the coolest. Even if the player won the conflict, his strategy / plan was free to be twisted around in unexpected ways as long as he got what he wanted in the end.


The most fun part was the end, where we would let loose trying to come up with as many different weird or surprising developments that still kept to the success / failure combination we got. Very creative stuff.

I'll put up some examples to get some feedback on whether I'm still doing something wrong later, right now I've written too much as it is

[Tropico]

Well, the PTA game never materialized wince someone else brought over Settlers of Catan and we spent the week playing that...

Also, the guy who recommended PTA in the first place came clean that all he wanted was to get us into RPGs and PTA seemed to him like a good 'introductory' choice. After talking over with him about what kind of game we like he offeredto teach us another, True20, which ironically is a lot heavier on the rules and Producer-role but at the same time was so much easier for us to "get" as a game.

PTA will go on the shelf for now but with every expectation that eventually we'll get back to it and have fun with it when we're more exeperienced and confident with RPGs in general.

This whole experience was a little curious for me. PTA (and, I later realized, the majority of "The Forge" games) is billed and marketed as a lighter easier to grasp RPG which is better for non-gamers to pick up... in theory. And reading the rules of one book versus another you would really believe, that too.

But when you take the step over the line from theory into practice, PTA, Capes, Universalis, etc, are all asking for lots of heavy thinking, and some kind of confidence, experience, or creativity that you only get from playing a lot of RPG games in the first place. I think maybe it's hard for people who are so steeped in gamer-culture for such a long time to realize it, but as a non-gamer, in the end, I found that "normal" games with winning and competition and battles and lots of rules foster learning a lot better that these types of story and conflict games, which while mechanically simple, I would place one step above traditional RPG games like True20 in terms of difficulty and accessibility.

Anyway, wish you all the best, and eventually I expect to pick up PTA and have lots of fun with it.

Harry.

[John Harper]

Very interesting, Harry! Thanks for coming back to the thread and sharing your insights.

I've had something of the opposite experience with non-gamers and Universalis and PTA. People who had tried "battle" games and not gotten them found Uni and PTA very easy to grasp and jump right into, even with no former RPG experience.

I don't say that to argue a point (I think we're both "right" in our observations) but just to offer another perspective. Maybe RPG experience isn't the deciding factor in what type of game works for a person?

Anyway, I'm glad you guys are enjoying True20. I think Green Ronin has greatly improved that product over its first tentative version and its good to see it working as the intro game its meant to be.