[PTA] The Z - long

[ashmoo]

Last night we played our first ever game of PTA after me trying to get one running for about a month.
To speed up the actual night of play I tried to get most of the Series ironed out over emails.
This is what we came up with:

Title: The Z
Premise: An ER-style medical drama, set in a world with superheroes. The characters heal both ordinary people and superheroes and villians. Often having to improvise in order to perform surgery on patients with unique physical properties.
Theme Song: The ER theme song, remixed by John Williamson
Location: Saint Zacharia's General Hospital, New York City

Protags:
Dr. Victor Faust (Kevin Spacey) player: Marc
A brilliant surgeon, recently promoted to Shift Supervisor. He is a man without subtlety and all the staff are afraid of him. His issue is trying to find meaning in his life.

Arthur Curry (a young Christopher Walken) player: Brad
A bitter hospital orderly who occassionaly has flashes of inspiration (an Edge) that help the doctors. His issue is his guilt about being the son of a Dr Doom style supervillian. He tries to keep this fact secret.

Dr. Jeremy Steiner (some guy in LOTR movie) player: Colin
A respected lecturer in medicine at a university, recently became an ER doctor. A genuinely caring doctor. His issue is an unmanifested superpower somehow related to his Jewish heritage. The power will be revealed during the course of the season.

Producer: Me

Only 2 of the players knew anything about PTA, and no-one had ever played it so We decided to play a pilot episode first.

The Pilot Episode
I introduced the crucial scene that leads to the start of the series:

A patient is being rushed in on a stretcher. Typical medical drama trappings: handheld camera work, technobabble, flashing lights. Patient has a gunshot wound to the chest, massive cardiac failure. The doctor cuts off the shirt, which is revealed to be spandex with a logo of a fireball with a black 'I' inside it. Hey, this is the Amazing Inferno, a nurse says. Resus fails. We'll have to cut him open and try manual resus. The scalpel blade glows red as it cuts into the skin. The blood steams. Ok, grab that rib, we need to crack him open.
Cut to the hall, looking at the door to the operating theatre. A plume of fire, smoke and medical equipment comes spewing out.

Roll Opening Credits.

We do a few small scenes to establish characters and have those who haven't met, meet.

Then a patient comes in. Male 25-30, clad in black T-shirt and jeans, three day growth and shoulder length hair. Played by Gary Sinise.
Witnesses say he was shot three times in the chest. But the paramedics report he is having a cardiac arrest. There is blood, but no sign of wounds.
Cutting off the Tshirt reveals three holes.
Dr Faust gives him adrenalin, it works temporarily. But the doctor can't remove the syringe, he has to cut it out. Once removed the puncture wound disappears.
Dr Faust says, let's get him to XRay.

Character scene with Arthur and his mentor (Connection), an old black guy with silver hair. Someone suggests he is played by James Earl Jones. I can't do that voice, so I let another player, who is an excellent mimic play the character. The scene hints at Arthur's father, without any conflict.

Another male 25-30 comes in. Shaven head. Black jeans & Doc Marten's. Blood on head and his left ear dangling by its lobe. Steiner takes him. Removes the shirt to reveal swastikas and other nazi insignia. As Producer I tried to find a way to get him to find out the Dr is Jewish but couldn't find anything plausible. The doctor won't take the bait either.

In the XRay room. Dr Faust pushes the elderly patient who is being Xrayed out of the room. The Xray shows 3 bullets lodged in the aorta, restricting blood flow.

Back in the theatre, cutting the patient with a scalpel proves impossible as the cut heals in seconds. Everyone discusses what to do, until Dr Faust pulls out a shiny double-handed saw.
At this point Brad wants his character who is in the room cleaning up to suggest using the magnets in the MRI machine to draw the bullets out.
Marc wants his character to just cut them out.
The characters argue for a bit, until I decide this is worthy of the first conflict for the episode. Protag vs Protag. I take Brad's side.
Brad wins, Marc narrates. Dr. Faust cuts the patient open, orderlies and nurses use metal hooks to hold the wounds open. Digging around in the chest cavity proves impossible as connective tissue needs to be cut. Then an orderly loses his grip on a hook and half the wound closes up. Dr. Faust needs help to get his hand out of the closed up wound.

In the hall on the way to the MRI machine, the head of staff berates Dr. Faust. Apparently the old lady in the XRay room filed a complaint against him.

The skinhead starts complimenting the 'white' Dr Steiner, while railing against black, hispanic and jewish doctors, in less than polite language. Still, Dr Steiner doesn't take the bait.
After the patient is gone, the nurse comments on his speech. Dr Steiner brushes it off with a 'who knows what influences led him to that point of view...' , but concludes with 'besides I added a heavy dose of laxatives to his medication'.

In the MRI room the patient is in the machine, the doctors are jury-rigging it to push it beyond its specs. Much special effects, shimmering air and technobabble occur. The second conflict for the episode is rolled. The stakes are the life of the patient. The machine is destroyed and the bullets are torn from the patients chest. The patient survives, and a minute later is completely healed.

In John Wilkins, head of staff's office. Dr Faust is getting berated for destroying the MRI machine. Dr Faust counters that he saved the man's life. Wilkins threatens to demote him.

The denouement. A jazz version of the main theme. Orderlies are patching up damage to the operating theatre caused during the prelude. Removing orange 'danger: unstable' tape from some of the severely damaged walls.
In the MRI room, orderlies are rolling out orange 'danger: unstable' tape across the remains of the machine. The neo-nazi, bandaged and looking much better hears his bowels rumble.

Each character does a quick 'Next Week' scene.

End Credits.

My comments on the actual play will follow.

[hix]

The idea of casting supporting characters with real actors. I don't think I've come across that before. Excellent idea!

[hix]

... and a couple of more substantive questions:

1. What did you award fanmail for?
2. Is it standard to wait a while before introducing conflicts? I thought the function of every scene was to 'have a conflict'. How did you feel the game played, not having a dice roll to punctuate every scene?

[marc_buckingham]

Hey Hix, marc here who played Dr Faust

2. Is it standard to wait a while before introducing conflicts? I thought the function of every scene was to 'have a conflict'. How did you feel the game played, not having a dice roll to punctuate every scene

Don't know if its standard but felt pretty natural having a few chracter scenes and plot scenes first without rolling for conflict resolution. really set the scene.

[ashmoo]

Now, my Notes on the play

The players had trouble defining Connections. They kept wanting groups for Connections like 'friends in the police force' (which would be an Edge according to my understanding) rather than an actual character.
Using Connections in Conflicts seemed difficult too. I don't know if this was due to the genre (a doctor can hardly go visit his friend from highschool for help with a cardiac patient). All we could think of was having a Protag remember something a Connection had told them, but that would get old quick.

We didn't have enough dice so we used cards. I've never been a fan of cards as randomisers in RPGs, but here they worked a treat. 1, it's easy to read the results, as bright red is success, and high roll (for narration rights) tends to be a face card. 2, in dice pool games such as this, they don't go flying all over the table and can't get accidentally bumped to a different result.

On this night we only had limited time to play. Having the 3 act structure defined helped us control the narrative flow. We decided the acts should take 40%-40%-20% of time, roughly. This ensured that we didn't run overtime.

Not a lot happened in the character focused scenes. Not sure why. I think people had trouble thinking up ways to hit their Issue while maintaining genre. Or maybe we were still stuck in the 'what do we need to achieve' style of roleplay.

We only had 2 Conflicts in the whole episode. Everything flowed naturally but I expected more. Without Conflicts, the players had no Audience Pool to give each other Fan Mail. Also, having over half my Budget left at the end made me think we weren't playing the game as designed.

Hix, although it wasn't a conscious decision I think mentioning Actual Actors for supporting characters, is a good way to quickly get a concrete mental image of a character as well as mannerisms, voice and the like.

The players didn't give out much Fan Mail. I don't know if it was because they weren't used to the idea, and weren't looking for opportunities to, or they just didn't see anything they thought was worth it. There was many times I wan't to give fan mail, but couldn't as the Producer.

All in all, it worked out great. Once we iron out the ambiguities I think we'll end up having some mind-blowing episodes.
I'm not a fan of medical dramas or superheroes, but I'd watch this show!

[Jonas Ferry]

I'm not a fan of medical dramas or superheroes, but I'd watch this show!

Me too! I've read about PTA before here on the Forge, but this thread just sold me the game. Placing an order right now.

I've been trying to adopt the techniques for creating characters and story from tv-series for my regular games, and look forward to using PTA to play the kind of game I want. Looking at game sessions as episodes in a series has really helped me before, and to get all the surrounding structures for spotlight characters (which I've also used with success) and other stuff will be great.

Yeah, some comments perhaps?

Connections: Do you think that the players wanting groups and not single characters are baggage from other games? In other games groups are usually more "useful" in the sense that it's easier for the player to justify why they get different kinds of help from the same group. On a tv-series I can really see the point in having a single person as a connection, since it will be easier for the audience to understand who the character is meeting.

It is perhaps hard to justify the use of connections when the two characters are standing eye to eye and the conflict must be resolved now, but I suppose you can have a conflict going on for a longer period of time where you can use phone calls or meetings with friends from high school to get the courage to perform that difficult surgery the best you can.

Budget: I'm just curious; is the game master limited in the amount of conflict dice he can use or how does the budget work?

Fan Mail: My group reacted the same way with confessionals in InSpectres. InSpectres also has the tv-series feel, where you play a ghostbusting franchise in a reality tv-show and can use confessionals for the character to address the audience. In the confessionals you can give other characters traits that will give extra bonuses for the whole group if played during the game. Since the whole group benefits from it it's hard to see why my players didn't use them, but I agree that it was probably just because they weren't used to that kind of input in other players' characters and conflicts.

I suppose you'll tell them what you think before the next session, so I wouldn't worry to much. It's usually hard as a player in a new game to see all the ways you can use the mechanics, and they probably had a lot of other stuff to think about during the session.

[JMendes]

Heyzza, :)

We only had 2 Conflicts in the whole episode. Everything flowed naturally but I expected more. Without Conflicts, the players had no Audience Pool to give each other Fan Mail. Also, having over half my Budget left at the end made me think we weren't playing the game as designed.

I recognized this right off the bat.

Go check out this thread, which explores that very same problem and has a brickload of great advice, and this thread, which summarizes the consequences of that advice.

Otherwise, good stuff.

Cheers,

J.

[ashmoo]

Budget: I'm just curious; is the game master limited in the amount of conflict dice he can use or how does the budget work?

Yes. Basically the Producer gets a set amount of dice to use each episode. Any dice the Producer uses get put into the Audience Pool and players can use them to award Fan Mail to each other.

Fan Mail is used to roll extra dice.

[Jonas Ferry]

I've read about PTA before here on the Forge, but this thread just sold me the game. Placing an order right now.

Placed an order Thursday 14th and it arrived in my mailbox today, Monday 18th, in Sweden. I know this is not on-topic for this thread, but I just wanted to compliment the quick service. Thanks, Matt.