[PTA] Edgeway

[Mikael]

To start off, and to avoid losing the questions amid the other AP stuff, here are the rules questions that came up during play. Must say the rules are less than crystal clear on these, which surprised me, given that this is the second edition of a very popular game. Is there a PTA FAQ somewhere?

1. Must the framing player's protagonist be in the scene?

We said yes.

2. We also looked for a relationship between the producer budget and the episode pacing, specifically between the end of the budget and the end of the episode, but did not find this discussed anywhere.

I just used the remaining budget as a guideline towards going for the session end. I ended up doing this rather heavy-handedly, which was a mistake to learn from.

3. Orthogonal intents. The rules need careful reading to make this aspect of the conflicts clear.

4. Smaller things like should the deck of cards be shuffled before every conflict or not?

We shuffled and it was no big deal, but really I would expect this to clearly spelled out in the rules.


Ok, going into the actual game. You could say that our starting position was bad, because we went against some basic rules and advice:

1. We did not create the series in a pitch session. In order to get my group to play the game at all, I decided to use an existing, episode-oriented Everway game and the characters from that game as the series. This worked reasonably well, since the players had already bought the concept, and they were tired of creating new characters for every new game. (I am not, but I can appreciate their viewpoint.)

2. As I understand it, PTA is supposed to be a player-generated story. For this episode, however, I as a producer had a strong basic situation and a network of interest groups prepared, based on the city around a tarrasque from rpg.net. In my defence I must say that I really did not have any type of ending in mind.

3. A recent havegameswilltravel analysis suggested that you should not have very many players in a PTA game. We had 5 protagonists + the producer.

In the end the game went really well, and elicited comments like "this is the first Forge game that I can see myself playing". We had 20+ scenes, lots of action and good camera work. The players ended up addressing and twisting the basic episode "plot" to their own ends. They freed the tarrasque (simply the Beast in our game), which resulted in a rampage destroying a part of the city and a whole invading army.


Things I was happy about:

Players had no problems in requesting scenes. The PTA combo of player defining the focus, agenda and location, and then the producer actually setting the scene worked really well.

We ended up with really good "In the next episode" scenes.


Things we struggled with, sometimes, and need more practice with:

Defining orthogonal intents: It sometimes took too much discussion to define intents for two protagonists in a way that they could both succeed. How can we make this more natural so that the players can define the intents to support this, without need to go back and retrofit previous intents?

Framing scenes with strong scene cuts and for subgroups: There was a tendency to frame scenes "for everybody", which tended to dilute stong character focus. After the game, my suggestion was to frame scenes so that we focus on specific characters, even if it is understood that the other members of the "party" can be seen moving in the background.

[Matt Wilson]

Hi Mikael:

Thanks for the feedback. There's not a FAQ anywhere that I'm aware of. It's a good idea.

Here's some answers to your questions:

1. There's no reason that the framing player's protagonist must be in a scene. Chances are good that you'd want your protagonist to be in it, but you don't have to.

2. I think you'll get a few different responses about budget and episode length if you ask a few people around here. I find that it works better to keep the actual television episode format in mind than to play until budget runs out.

3. I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying it's hard to understand that all conflicts are supposed to be orthogonal, or that it's hard to understand how to make conflicts orthogonal?

4. Shuffle between conflicts, just like you'd shuffle between card games.

As for the general comments:

How can we make this more natural so that the players can define the intents to support this, without need to go back and retrofit previous intents?

Lean heavily on the protagonist's issue. Can you post an example of a scene, with a couple characters and their issues? If I'm offline when you respond, I'm sure there are other people here who will happily give you ideas of how they might do it. Otherwise I'll keep watch on this thread for your response.

I think you're right about framing scenes for 1-3 protagonists. It's that way with television shows. Sometimes it's just Scooby and Shaggy in a scene.

Glad you had a good time.

[Mikael]

Hello Matt

Thanks a lot for the quick response. Before going on with the discussion, I would like to re-iterate that in our discussions after the game, players have emphasized their liking of the mechanics and the way the game plays.

My first issue with the orthogonal intents was how it is expressed in the rules, i.e. it took careful reading to make sure that each player is playing against the producer, and thus their intents need to be orthogonal, instead of finding it clearly stated at the start of the conflict section. We also struggled with setting the orthogonal stakes (like I have heard people struggling with them in Shock:, incidentally).

Here's an example on the issue setting:

Protagonists are locked inside a cage, inside a city where a number of interest groups are vying for control of the Beast. One of protagonists, Ice Queen, whose issue is "Life has no meaning" (being effectively immortal, she is finding it hard appreciating the value of other's lives, or finding any meaning in hers), is advocating a "let them kill each other, why would we care" approach to the situation. Another player objects, stating that they must help. His protagonist, Soul Smith, has an Issue of "Caring for everybody" (is an empath, and conceptually a Good Guy). We struggled with finding a set of intents that would be orthogonal, and finally settled on the following: Ice Queen does not want the others to care, and Soul Smith wants her to care. Thus if they both won, the result would be something along the lines of Ice Queen convincing the others not to care, while at the same time starting to doubt her own detachedness. I was reasonably happy with this result, but the intent negotiation did not feel natural to the players.

My analysis is that this was partly due to the lack of practice and the fact that I as a producer had to strongly drive the negotiation process, and we ended up discussing the end result more than you really should in the intent definition phase. My hope is that with practice the players can proactively take the orthogonality into account, so that the conflicting player states appropriate intent from the start, without too much producer intervention.

Hope that clarifies the issue we had.

[FredGarber]

I've found it helps, when learning to frame orthagonal intents (especially in Shock), to keep to the declarer's own person. 

Ex: The Ice Queen wishes to remain aloof, despite the all the pleadings around her.  She will or will not melt, depending on the card resolution.  Describing the Soul Smith, I would say he wants to feel the Ice Queen's emotions.  If he fails, then he either failed to crack her shell, or didn't find any emotions inside the shell.  If he wins, he feels the emotions she has kept hidden. 
She could succeed and not melt, and he could succeed and find the emotions anyway (Drama!)
She could not melt, and he could fail to crack her shell (Angsty!)
She could melt, and he could read the emotions (Plot Twist!)
She could melt, and he could fail to notice her fragile new emotion (Tragedy!)

I started with "Each protagonist can define how his challenge affects his only own issue."   Eventually some players become comfortable enough with each other that they'll let the intent stray, because they accept the other player's direction as to how they should play the reaction.  But strictly speaking, that's overreaching intent, and describing the result, IMHO.