Musings on play-experiences and the current text

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Matt and everyone,

Here's a quick summary of stuff we talked about on the phone.

1.  I was interested in what happens if the budget runs out. As the rules stand, this can only happen on a "bad bounce" of the dice, as budget would get spent into audience pool, then fanmail is derived from the audience pool, and every fanmail die has a 50% chance of making it back into the budget. So we can reasonably expect the overall "economy" to keep getting cut in half, like the distance between Achilles and the tortoise. But hey, 50% is 50%, and a bad bounce after the budget is quite low, in a very long and exciting episode, might do it.

So ... what then? Is that bad? It simply means that everyone is rolling Screen Presence alone and the producer always rolls one die. Not really a disaster for play.

2. I think the book would benefit from examples that were less fanboy SF stuff, and more about regular people. Sure, give Buffy a mention, but otherwise, I think focusing more on the Sopranos and similar shows would be a good idea. If you include fantasy and SF, use shows that people didn't call fantasy or SF, like Beauty and the Beast. Same goes for the made-up shows that you use in later examples.

3. Here's what this game has going for it from the very first moment: everyone wants to watch good TV. This is the first role-playing game (or activity, really) which says up-front, you know what good TV is, and here's how to make it happen. We've seen RPGs which use canonical material from TV shows, and also RPGs which try to "feel like" TV shows ... but this one says, "You know? It's not TV which is good, it's the minds of the creators and the minds of the audience touching which is good. Here's how."

Here's some stuff we didn't talk about yet. It actually turned out to be more important, I think.

I've been thinking about how important it is to provide hard-core adversity as a GM when playing games like Dust Devils, Trollbabe, HeroQuest, and Fastlane. The GM is really responsible for turning the heat up as much as possible, whether it's through casually-dropped comments made in passing by an NPC, through weavings and crosses as outlined in Sex & Sorcery, or simply by having the flying monkeys crash through the windows.

When a character is in the spotlight, then adversity is easy as pie as long as you keep certain portions of your mind open and concentrate on poking the character in his or her most tender spots. Matt showed me that in a heartbeat in the fetish game, which I suppose really ought to get a full description in Actual Play one of these days.

But that's not enough! That's why those soap-opera episodes of ST:TNG sucked ass so bad, because for some reason we were supposed to think that character issues were sufficient to watch an hour of TV. (Real soap operas get away with this because they have soft porn.)

So let's consider adversity insofar as it's independent of current Screen Presence, per character. The one place is comes from is the show's presence. In the book's example of the rescue-ship, clearly it's a matter of a dangerous rescue. In the other example of the Bootlegger family (my favorite in the book, by the way), it would be a police crackdown on bootlegging. All of the characters would be characteristically themselves, to be sure, but the conflicts and resolutions of the episodes would be wholly focused on defeating the adversity, not on working out issues.

What I love about the possibility of playing an episode in which all the characters had Screen Presence 1, are these:

a) It gives the premise itself a chance to shine. Wow, a rescue mission is really hard. Wow, those cop/gang gun battles in the twenties were brutal.

b) The only way to roll extra dice is via fan mail. And you know what? That makes sense, because these would be episodes that only fans would really appreciate! Everyone appreciates a story arc, but only the fans are into the plain old car-chase-explosion-crisis because it features these characters, even if their issues aren't showing.

Anyway, those are my current thoughts. Back to talkin' about the Moose.

Best,
Ron

[Alan]

Hi Ron,

When we playtested with Spacehunter, I don't think we applied the concept of "next episiode is my spotlight, so I'll play some build up" as well as we might.  That stuff seems so clear now from your Moose writeup.  But of course Matt's game was still in development and we were new to the idea.

However, I want to second what you say about a unifying element in each episode.  When we playtested, I set out to provide a central concern for all the players in each episode - having to do with being bounty hunters in space.  Then I'd poke the Issue of the character with the highest screen presence (Banging them I suppose).  Without fail, this generated two interweaving series of scenes.   One would become dominant and the other secondary.

Looking back, I think that the Producer is wise to encourage two seperate "story lines" in an episode.  One having to do with the series premise and one, with a character's Issue.  Now that you've pointed it out, it's obvious that which one dominates depends on screen presense ratings.  (Though there's some interesting variations that might arise from several character tying for highest at SP 2).

One other thing to encourage is group cooperation to relate character Issues to show premise, first in prep and later in play.  In our game this worked so well that every Spotlight episode felt like a great melding of the show premise and that characer's Issue.

I think both these elements are well supported by the game rules.  In a sense, the characters and their Issues can form a cage (or fusion chamber) that contains the series premise.

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For prospective Producers I want to clarify that GM preparation is minimal.     The more I learned about running this game, the less I prepared.  All you need is a vision of any new settings, a list of names to use in a pinch, a few ideas about how to prod some Issues, and an idea for the overall concern.  My ideas were short things like "They're contracted to find a serial killer on Titan" or "The Clavius Covenent sends black ops to get Gabriella's research on FTL drives."

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About Budget:

When we played, the rule about Budget read "The producer gets a set amount of budget at the beginning of every episode, equal to the sum of all the protagonists' screen presence scores."  And that was all he got.

In the first episodes I rationed my dice.  Then I realized that, if I were to run out early, the players would just win more often at the end of an episode.  I actually liked this effect.  It reflects jacking up the intensity for the first two thirds or so and letting things resolve in the last, supporting a one common kind of episode structure.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Just to be clear for others who are reading this, the current budget rules work like this:

Producer spends budget to increase the number of dice he rolls against characters

Once that's spent, it goes into the Audience Pool.

Players award one another fan mail out of the Audience Pool.

Players spend fan mail to add their dice to scenes and to increase the dice they roll.

Dice that players roll, if they were bought by fan mail, have a 50% chance to get a token put back into the budget.

So effectively, all the way through the cycle, a budget token has a 50% chance of making it back into the budget. Over time, given enough play in a single episode, half of the tokens disappear, then half of those, etc.

But it's hard to imagine an episode lasting long enough for the total budget to do the bottom-out where the 50% chance waxes the last remaining one or two.

Best,
Ron

[Ian O'Rourke]

2. I think the book would benefit from examples that were less fanboy SF stuff, and more about regular people. Sure, give Buffy a mention, but otherwise, I think focusing more on the Sopranos and similar shows would be a good idea. If you include fantasy and SF, use shows that people didn't call fantasy or SF, like Beauty and the Beast. Same goes for the made-up shows that you use in later examples.

I would agree with this, for two reasons.

First, these are the shows the mass of people watch, so while you could argue PTA is hardly going to be picked up by the non-gaming masses, it would still be a stronger product by using more mainstream shows.

Second, I think concentrating on shows which have a hi-action component (such as Buffy and Alias) might result in the game being more confusing. Now, I know this one is probably going to be picked up and analysed so I'll try and explain, while being perfectly aware it may just be me who has this slight disconnect.

PTA I can envision quite easily being used to run shows like Six Feet Under, E.R or Dawsons Creek...because these show have very little, or virtually no action component. As a result the conflicts are truly all dramatic ones. Now, consider a show like Alias and Buffy - they have a high action component. While I realise what is really important in these shows is the dramatic conflicts, not the ass kicking, at the same time not all physical fights and action scenes in the game have a dramatic conflict in immediate 'play' so to speak. Yet, they are still an essential part of the show (Alias's set pieces especially).

As a result, and may be this is more a problem for gamers than people coming to the game new, you're left wondering, beyond every action scene having a dramatic conflict in play as well (and while it's okay to do that, not all episodes in the shows we are emulating do), your left wondering how to do scenes with action in.

As I say, I love the game, but I find the E.R/Six Feet Under pitch sits much easier with me in a PTA sense than the Alias pitch. So, when I see Buffy examples, I wonder if people familiar with Buffy will have the same...mmmmmm...issues :)

[Matt Wilson]

Lots of good stuff in this thread...

regarding Ron's comments first:

The bit about adversity independent of character issues. It's sort of like this: in absence of character, you turn to setting. You can also look at it as if the producer's screen presence is inversely proportional to the sum of the players'. You guys are all at 1s and 2s? All right, I'm going to introduce some of my own stuff.

Regarding real show examples: I started out looking for shows gamers would connect with and that I also liked (which is why I didn't include B5. Call me crazy, but I couldn't get into it). In light of the game's success, I'll probably swap out TNG with, say, Gilmore Girls for a future printing, and I could probably cut Farscape, but in terms of examples of shows that really nail character drama and story development, Buffy, Angel and Firefly still rule the roost.

For prospective Producers I want to clarify that GM preparation is minimal. The more I learned about running this game, the less I prepared. All you need is a vision of any new settings, a list of names to use in a pinch, a few ideas about how to prod some Issues, and an idea for the overall concern.

I'm really glad that ended up being the case. In some ways PtA is a reaction to mega-prep games where you have to stat out 20 different things and draw maps and stuff. And you know, I'm too lazy to do that stuff any more.

Now, consider a show like Alias and Buffy - they have a high action component. While I realise what is really important in these shows is the dramatic conflicts, not the ass kicking, at the same time not all physical fights and action scenes in the game have a dramatic conflict in immediate 'play' so to speak. Yet, they are still an essential part of the show (Alias's set pieces especially).

This, I insist, is gamer baggage. Maybe that's a harsh way of saying it, but it's just something that needs to be unlearned. You don't need a round-by-round, blow-by-blow system to do a cool dramatic fight scene. It's really a case of the group recognizing where the pivotal moment in the fight/chase/whatever is, and saying, all right, here's where we stop ad-libbing and throw down.

Example: we're playing bootleggers, and you're driving a truck loaded with booze, and there's a cop car chasing us. So do we roll right now and resolve it? No, because we've seen enough TV to know better. So you describe some cool hairpin turns where the wheels come off the ground, and maybe some fruit cart gets smashed and you run over a watermelon, and the cops are shooting, and there's a bullet hole in the window, and there's snappy dialogue happening between you the driver, and Roxy your sister in the passenger seat, who's trying to get your gun to shoot back at the cops, but you know that shooting at cops crosses a line, and she's yelling and you're yelling and the cops are still shooting, and at some point we say, "all right, this is it, the cops are hard on your tail, and you're running out of street to lose them on." And we throw the dice, and you crap out, but you roll the high die, so you get to narrate, and so you describe the truck spinning out of control, and there's a crash, and you're in jail and Roxy's in the hospital and Dad's pissed because this is going to cost major bribes, and he might not trust you with the truck next time.

Sounds cooler to me than "okay, you got initiative this round, and you hit for 3 points of damage."

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Matt, you wrote:

adversity independent of character issues. It's sort of like this: in absence of character, you turn to setting. You can also look at it as if the producer's screen presence is inversely proportional to the sum of the players'. You guys are all at 1s and 2s? All right, I'm going to introduce some of my own stuff.

Yeah, exactly! I suggest that some text toward this end would be really helpful for the group. In fact, it might even encourage occasional player effort to get their 1's line up.

I perceive a certain trend so far, although with too few play-instances for it to mean anything, for everyone to make sure their 3's aren't in the same episode. I imagine that sometimes it would be fun to do so, especially for two romantic leads. But my point is that however the group wants to combine or separate their 3's, it's also neat to consider the other end and at least once, combine everyone's 1's. I plan to lobby for this the next time we play the game.

That's a nifty rant about combat and conflict. If you get a chance, check out the text accompanying the combat rules in Hero Wars (I believe they gutted it a bit in HeroQuest, unfortunately). You'll like it.

Best,
Ron

[Ian O'Rourke]

This, I insist, is gamer baggage. Maybe that's a harsh way of saying it, but it's just something that needs to be unlearned. You don't need a round-by-round, blow-by-blow system to do a cool dramatic fight scene. It's really a case of the group recognizing where the pivotal moment in the fight/chase/whatever is, and saying, all right, here's where we stop ad-libbing and throw down.

I agree. I just had a slight disconnect reading the rules, and I'm the first to admit it was me, in which I couldn't see how to resolve such an action scene that wasn't necessarily laden with conflict in a dramatic, character sense. But are we saying some action scenes, even if not laden with character drama, might include a conflict rule just resolve the direction of the story?

I also believe some action scenes might not include such a role - as they would just be colour? A core of the fights in Alias fall into this category, for example. Though I admit, you'd not want an abundance of such no conflict rolls action scenes in your game.

The more interesting disconnect was another player involved in our aborted playtest, who liked what he read but ultimately thought it was too 'gamey'. I put this down as him not liking the fact the game was focused on creating a good story. This is not a criticism of the game of course, I just put it in on the grounds of another interesting gamer observation :)

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Ian, you wrote,

But are we saying some action scenes, even if not laden with character drama, might include a conflict rule just resolve the direction of the story?

Seems pretty straightforward. Say we all have 1's in this episode, and so the bug-aliens attack big-time. We fight the bug-aliens like gangbusters, using our rolls and fan mail for various stages and aspects of the fight. Ultimately, we find out whether the bug-aliens take over the station or blow it up, and whether the heroes are standing in the saved station or fleeing out into space in the one remaining shuttlecraft.

This is the sort of episode in which fans who bought the "map of the space station" hobbyist material would pull out their maps and happily point out the sections of the station the characters were fighting through as they went.

Like I say, an episode that only a fan would love, but it has its place, and in fact, might be a great source for adding detail into the show ("what security measures do our repair crawl-tunnels have anyway?").

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hey! I just figured out that if such an episode were coming up, I'd be oriented toward amassing (without spending) as much fan mail as possible in the episode before it, in anticipation of needing it to boost my one-die rolls.

Best,
Ron

[Matt Wilson]

I also believe some action scenes might not include such a role - as they would just be colour? A core of the fights in Alias fall into this category, for example.

Yeah, it could very well be that what's at stake is not the outcome of the fight at all. It seems in play to boil down to a group-vibe kind of decision. You know the characters and what they're capable of, and it will make sense to the group whether or not the fight is worth making the center of attention. In Alias, we know Sydney will pretty much kick the asses of however many guards get thrown at her. So what's really at stake? Maybe it's "can she fight off all the guards and get the files and torch the computer so the Covenant can't do the same thing?" Or maybe it's "can she defeat these guards without having to kill them?" Or maybe the fight is the background for something else, so what's actually at stake while fighting is to find out that Vaughn still loves her.

Some of that stuff will take some out-of-character prompting, which I'm pretty comfortable with in my games, but players who are very "immersion" oriented and who don't like metagame conversation might not click with it.