Mod ideas: Quality of Success/Failure, Fan Mail Trait Use, Fan Mail Awards

[Sindyr]

Your fan mail reward hack is taking what works so well in PTA and shooting it in the knee.  Players being able to give tangible mechanical applause and attaboys to one another at the table is a powerful and subtle thing that should not be taken from the game.

What about the above did you think would be helpful to me or even polite?  Calling the idea a "hack"?  Telling me what I "ought" to do?  Just how were you planning to persuade me this way?

Eero - thanks for your input, I am still gravely concerned with fairness and abuses, and think I have reason to be.  It may just be that while a dominating of popular player may be getting extra FM, maybe the difference between the FM they get and the FM the quieter less outspoken and less popular players gets, while being a disparity, is not a huge one.  This could explain why in theory the abuseable nature of the existing ruleset stands out, while in practiced it may be muted by both the possibly small spread of points, and the other thing you mention - the "self-correcting nature" thing.

Food for thought.  In any case, thanks for the all the feedback.

Did anyone have any responses on the multiple FM question I asked?

[Welkerfan]

What about the above did you think would be helpful to me or even polite?  Calling the idea a "hack"?  Telling me what I "ought" to do?  Just how were you planning to persuade me this way?

Eero - thanks for your input, I am still gravely concerned with fairness and abuses, and think I have reason to be.  It may just be that while a dominating of popular player may be getting extra FM, maybe the difference between the FM they get and the FM the quieter less outspoken and less popular players gets, while being a disparity, is not a huge one.  This could explain why in theory the abuseable nature of the existing ruleset stands out, while in practiced it may be muted by both the possibly small spread of points, and the other thing you mention - the "self-correcting nature" thing.

Food for thought.  In any case, thanks for the all the feedback.

Did anyone have any responses on the multiple FM question I asked?

A short note on the use of the word "hack."  That term simply means "houserule" or "modify from the text."  (i.e. Hack the program to do something different).  It isn't value-laden at all; it simply means to change.

As to your questions of fairness, I had the same concern during the first few episodes of the game I ran.  I noticed a few issues and found solutions to them.  First, one player consistently got more fanmail than the other two.  This was for two reasons:  1) One player never thought to give out fanmail; he only ever gave it out when someone else did.  In essence, every fanmail to the other players ended up coming in pairs.  2) The player with the most fanmail came up with a lot of cool ideas. 

Second, one player almost never got fanmail.  This was both because she never really said funny lines or ideas which were, by themselves, very compelling.  All of her contributions were good in combination with everything else, but they didn't immediately grab the attention of the other players to give out fanmail.  This was compounded by the fact that the other two players didn't really give out fanmail enough to anyone.

Third, the players didn't really give out enough fanmail in general.  After every episode, at least two thirds of the spent budget remained in the center of the table, and I never got back any budget from cards.  The "economy" everyone talks about never occurred.

The solution I found to all of these issues was not to change the mechanics at all.  What I did instead was break the rule that says that the Producer doesn't give fanmail.  For the first episode or so, I actually gave out fanmail, especially when the player who seldom got any did something that I knew would become cool.  After that, I reminded people to give out fanmail or gave loaded comments, like "Wow, that's cool!"  This really fixed the issues.  They players gave out more fanmail, especially to the people that seldom got any.  I also individually talked to the clever guy and asked him to really be diligent about giving fan mail to the other players, so that they would notice getting it as much as him.

Fixing the fairness issue didn't require changes to the rules, it just required active and purposeful running of the game in order to ensure that the fanmail flowed.

About the getting of multiple FM in a scene, it shouldn't really be a problem (remember that one player almost always got two per scene in my game), but I really would recommend keeping the distribution of fanmail in the hands of the players--the beauty of that system is that it makes people reward and encourage what they like in a game and makes people become more aware of what it is that they really do like.  If you make it an automatic system, the fanmail ceases to be fanmail and just becomes a pool of free cards to spend.

Overall, I think Matt's point about playing has some merit with this specific situation.  Fanmail as a mechanic looks on paper like it has some major flaws in its use, but, in play, those problems don't really exist, and, if they do, they are relatively easy to fix with some heavy-handed GMing.

That being said, if you notice when you're playing that the distribution ends up being heavily skewed towards one player, perhaps making a rule that a player cannot reward a player with a second piece of fanmail until they have given a piece to a different player.  That way, people will be on the lookout, especially if you encourage them, for cool things the non-dominant players are doing.

[Judd]

Your fan mail reward hack is taking what works so well in PTA and shooting it in the knee.  Players being able to give tangible mechanical applause and attaboys to one another at the table is a powerful and subtle thing that should not be taken from the game.

What about the above did you think would be helpful to me or even polite?  Calling the idea a "hack"?  Telling me what I "ought" to do?  Just how were you planning to persuade me this way?

Sorry, this was unclear.

A system hack is not a negative thing.  A hack is when anyone changes a system dramatically to make it do what they want.  They are hacking at it, not like a hack-writer, like a machete through the brush.

You said you were slightly open to criticisms in general.  I guess I didn't realize how slightly.  No offense to you was meant.

[Eero Tuovinen]

That's a good point, Welkerfan. What you describe is a phenomenon that I think is quite common with new PTA players, infinitely more so than unfair strategizing with the FM tokens. My solution is basically the same, although I never give out the fanmail myself - I just hit the table and call for "fanmail!" whenever somebody does something the others smile about. Essentially, the Producer might need to remind the other players about this rule during the first session, which is no wonder at all, considering how different it is from most games. Usually people have learned to smile, laugh, clap their hands or otherwise show their appreciation of what others do in the game, but it's not nearly so easy to remember to do that and give out tokens. Folks do tend to learn it in one good session, though.

Also, Paka essentially speaks the truth - or rather, my opinion agrees with him. The fanmail system is integral to the game and easily one of its top two innovations when it comes to this game design tradition of ours. It's of course still no skin off my nose if others want to hack the shit out of it, but I won't blame anybody who looks at the endeavour strangely in face of the number of people who have found the system so thoroughly enjoyable.

If I myself were both absolutely convinced that the game wouldn't work with a given group, and also forced to play with them, but held some hope that the people in question were actually human and not some sort of cyborg monkeys sent to ruin my play - if these were the conditions, I might both choose to play PTA and hack the fan mail system, but I'd do it in a manner that would make it really easy to scale back into the defaul system once I'd taught the players to play properly. Thus I'd probably use a system wherein the budget would go into the fanmail pool just normally, but I'd tell the players vaguely that "we all distribute it together". Then if it proved that my players were actually atavistic children and unable to play fairly, I could at least hog the fan mail and keep them out of it while I'd take care of reasonable distribution myself. And if the players proved just timid, I could show them how it's done. And finally, when I'd have found out that these players are actually human and capable of appreciating the same things I do - at that point it'd be easy for me to simply fade into the background from the fan mail thing altogether, all without having to explain to the players anything about variant rules and whatnot. So it seems to me that the best variant for control-freak GMs is actually to change the system as little as possible, as this provides the best flexibility and least bother in balancing the resource system anew.

[newsalor]

Sindyr,

PTA is trying to foster a positive atmosphere, where people are freely offering suggestions and riffing with each others ideas. I find that your suggestions, while excelent in many other games, wouldn't work so well in PTA.

The quality of success thing would IMO be an unnecessary complication. The player with the high card has the authority and part of the fun is that you get to decide how to synthesize all the suggestions offered by the other players. A much more important thing is to get everyone involved in the narration and in this case I find that additional rules would limit creativity.

I see the producers main responsibilities as follows: 1) Start the action and if the game cools down, 2) find the conflict in the scenes, 3) encourage the protagonist players and give positive feedback. As far as fan mail is concerned, I often give positive feedback and then someone gives fanmail. Sometimes I've also reminded other players that they can give fanmail if they want. This I've done especially after the whole group has broken in laughter.

The key thing about fan mail is that it's system level feedback from equals, unlike the many experience systems where a GM grades their roleplaying or something. Taking away that positive feedback mechanism that let's your fellow players reward you immediately and let you know that they are having a good time because of you is a major mistake in my mind. The point of this exercise isn't to evaluate the players roleplaying skills, but to encourage the group to participate.

However, I do agree with you on the spending fan mail to use traits additional times thing. As a matter of fact the whole rule is reduntant. I don't see how depriving the producer budget points or offering players this choice enchances the play experience. I ignored this rule myself, if you wanted extra cards, you just used fan mail in my game.

I also think that you are often able to see how a system works without observing how it actually works. Theoretical models are cool and all, but if you want to be scientific, you should also believe in testing theories. It's cool that you have the balls to say that you know how PTA actually works despite the experiemental evidence that we have on the contrary though. I do hope that you get the chance to play, so you can test your assumptions. However, if you don't test the original system, then you still won't know if the game/model really behaves as you thought.