[PTA] Success!

[The Mule]

Well, my second game of PTA was a blast.

I played with four people who knew each other, but not me.  One was familiar with the system, the other three were newcomers.

We rocked the system with our show, which was titled after a german word for castle that I cannot recall.

After throwing around some ideas for the show, we nailed together a few concepts into "People living/working in the castle of a Mad Scientist during Nazi Germany".

We had Gunther, a disfigured servant with a crab claw arm longing to find acceptance; Me as Hanz, the Mad Scientist's son desperate for the least bit of attention and recognition; Margaret as the new maid struggling with the transition from innocence of town life to the dark maturity of Mad Scienceville; and R-something as the castle's Go-To man who was a secret spy for the Church, struggling with the horrors required to stay under cover.

Scene framing is awesome!  Players got into that real quickly, and we got quite a few scenes with tight focus and it really kept things running.

We started with the Maid's first day, having a scene or two where she approaches the castle and meets all the inhabitants.  Testing out the conflict mechanic waters resulted in Gunther totally creeping her out, but she still managed to stay focused and pay attention to what's going on.  We introduced my character and his dark experiments aimed at proving his worth to his father, and the depths to which my needs pushed our Go-To man.

I think we had an excellent level of focus on issue; my first attempt at the game went overboard so I tried staying hands off, and we had some wonderful conflicts like "Does Hanz convince R to prioritize his requests" and "Does R manage to keep from arousing suspicion". 

A nice scene followed in which both the Maid and the Go-To guy are leaving the castle, sitting quietly next to each other having simultaneous internal monologues that boiled down to "am I really going to go through with this?".  It seemed like when exactly to pull out the cards on the conflict was flexible, but since it was pretty clear what the conflict was about right away ("*are* you going to go through with it on your own, or are you going to try to resist?), we went to cards right away and just let narration be shared between the two of them, so they still got to "play out" their monologues.

We have a scene with R meeting his contact in The Church, and learning that Hitler himself was soon to pay our castle a visit, for a report on an important "Project".  The producer did a good job there pushing from the outside, using the plot to keep the characters active and in dynamic situations.

This is when fanmail started really flowing, too.  I'd been handing it out whenever a laugh hit the table, but was pretty low key about it.  It was very good to see people start handing out fanmail just because they were getting into the game, not because they were told upfront "fanmail is important". 

When the fanmail started flowing is really when you can tell that people are in.  I think it really became clear that by awarding fanmail for things I found awesome, I was really pushing the game towards those things.  It also had the nice effect of driving players toward conflict, because with a pile of tokens in front of you, you really want to spend it.

So then we had some scenes in preparation for the visit; first we had The Big Experiment Goes Horrible Wrong scene, in which almost all our conflicts are about *who's fault it is*.  The producer had an amazing bit of luck, and so in a gigantic explosion it was almost all of our faults.  A really good scene that got all the players involved at the same time, and pulling their edges and issues.

Then, we had a "Hitler's at the door right now; can we cover up the Big Mess in time?" scene.  I'm scrambling together some of my own projects to offer instead, Gunther is trying to stall the Fuhrer, Margaret is being faced with a real monster and might not even notice, while R is trying to learn the truth of what the project's about.

Some excellent conflict in this climax scene; "Well, if I can't get even one kind word from my father (last scene's stakes), then at least I'll get one from the Fuhrer!  My stakes are "does my father degrade me in front of Hitler, or does the Fuhrer recognize my genius?"  Margaret's was "Do I notice that Hitler is a monster?", Gunther's was "Do the nazis even treat me like a human being?", and R had a lot of laughs when his character was swallowed by the automated coat hanging machine, with the conflict "Do I fight it off in time to be where I need to be to get some information on the project?"

Again, even with players throwing around 6+ cards, the producer trounces us all.  My character's father waves aside my inventions as "lesser things not worth of attention," Gunther is treated as a horrible monster, Margaret remains totally oblivious; Hitler asks "Is the abomination made with Jews?", "Why, it's made with lots of juice!"  and R bests the coat machine, but only after Hitler has begun private talks with the Mad Scientist.

We hashed out one last scene without actually going to mechanics; just agreed on the ending, that the Scientist had been given four months to complete "Project Wampire," and that none of us were shot.

For the game in general, we didn't spend a lot of time hashing out exactly *what* was said, we'd just figure out "okay they have a conversation about this stuff", and focus closer only for real dramatic moments.  Hit the highlights, so to speak.  The more distanced approach to directing the story is something I don't have a lot of experience with, but I still managed to really get into my character.

We just did it as a oneshot, but people seemed to dig it enough that there was talk of doing another episode of the show the next time they needed a oneshot.

Primetime Adventures is a fun game!

[Matt Wilson]

Awesome! Glad you had a good time.