PTA and the Extended Conflict...

[Landon Darkwood]

Hello, all,

Just bought PTA and read it, and it's be an understatement to say I'm extremely enthused by it. It's bumped two other games off my "must play immediately" list.

But I have a question about conflict resolution. Hopefully this won't be too redundant.

If I understand the rules correctly, a conflict is resolved in its entirety using one set of rolls. Protag rolls (including extra dice from other folks), Producer rolls, and there's one result. And that's it.

Previous posts on this board and the Actual Play board suggest that because there's only this one roll, one must wait for the appropriate moment in the scene to actually go for dice, which is sometime after the conflict begins to escalate. Like in a bar fight scene, you wouldn't roll for the obligatory moments when the PC's flatten a couple of randoms - just for the moment when a thug is holding a knife to the informant they came to speak with (established in the scene's agenda), because that's where the actual crux of the conflict occurs. I get that this is something you have to "feel out" depending on your group.

What I'm wondering, though, is this: what if you have a scene where the conflict starts in from the get-go but the adversary has a ton of dramatic importance? Like, the climactic battle against a main villain in the arc? You show up, he shows up, there's some banter and everyone attacks. You do your one roll and you win, and then you have this entire long, climactic scene to describe with no other context besides, "Eventually the protag's win." I don't know about you guys, but to me there's a chance of that seeming... mighty anticlimactic in play.

Now, obviously you can save that roll for sometime later in the battle, and describe a little bit of toe-to-toe action as a buildup for that one final roll... but then you don't have any context for what happens at the beginning except fiat, even though you're already engaged in the conflict.

I'm not necessarily advocating anything like a "combat system" for the game, per se. However, Fortune-in-the-Middle extended conflict systems, to me, are really good tools for providing context to narrate a longer scene. You get reversals of fortune naturally via the dice, and it comes out in description like the cool final battle in a movie - the hero trades advantage and disadvantage with the villain until he finally wins.

What I'm wondering is this: is there a way to do extended conflicts like this in PTA that doesn't screw up the core of the resolution mechanic? And if so, how would that be accomplished? Is it even a good idea?

(My initial thought was that if you want to stage a conflict out in multiple parts, the loser of each conflict roll loses a die from his Screen Presence for the duration of the conflict. If he goes to 0, it's a final loss. That would mean that major villains and dudes like that would have to have an Importance rating of some kind, from 1-3, to reduce.)

This might be a little premature of a question, given that I haven't even played the game straight up yet and I will before I even think about any tweaks. But I was curious as to what you guys thought about the subject, and it popped out at me when I was reading the rules, so.


-Landon Darkwood

[Yokiboy]

Good subject Landon, I was left with the same questions after setting up my first series. We will commence gaming this week, I'll post our thoughts on the subject after trying the rules as written. I am looking forward to hearing some comments on the subject from experienced PTA players.

TTFN,

Yokiboy

[azrianni]

Personally, I like the one-roll-per-conflict rules.  I have to admit, I'm pretty comfortable with fiat.  But part of what we're after is the feel of TV, not action-adventure movies that can spend ten minutes on a drawn-out blow-by-blow fight.  As Matt's pointed out here and in the rules, in a lot of TV fights the question isn't "will they win" but "will they win in time" or "will they win and remain friends" or "will they be able to [do whatever else] while they win."

In the cases where the outcome of the fight itself is in question, I think the key is escalating narration to the point where the one decisive blow is about to be struck.  And for that, fiat works better than dice, which might not keep the tension up by keeping things in question.  And for my tastes, another "I hit for 3 more points of damage" is anticlimactic.

[Matt Wilson]

Hey:

I'm pretty much in agreement with what azrianni says.

If you wanted to do a drawn-out battle, you could do it over multiple sub-scenes or something like that. You just have to agree that the stakes in the first part of the finale are not "do we defeat the bad guy?" Instead they'd have to be something like "do we discover the bad guy's weakness?" or even better, "do I keep my friend from getting hurt by the bad guy?" or "can I keep my emotions in check during the battle?" Those would be good "build up" scenes that could all contain plenty of punches and stuff.

Hope that helps.

[MarcoBrucale]

I don't think I qualify as an experienced PtA player, having recived it mere days ago. But I'd like to add my 2c nonetheless: I think that the 'one conflict, one roll' rules have an interesting side-effect.

Under these rules, the only way to witness an in-game effect similar to the extended contest Landon mentioned is when there is a consensus on the importance of the scene among the players. If the conflict is considered important by most of the players, and they see it as a potential source of significant material, they will be reluctant to 'kill' it with just one roll, and will keep starting scenes referring to it. All in all, I find this rather elegant.

just MHO

[Landon Darkwood]

Right, I dig. Extended conflicts really aren't extended, they're just a more precise breakdown of stakes and intent over time. The more specific you get with the details, the longer the scene will take because you're choosing to resolve subsets of the whole.

I like it, in that it really cuts out any possibilities for accidental Drift of the system. Like MarcoBrucale was saying, the players have to have committed interest in the scene, story-wise, in order to drag it out like that. There's no incentive for, say, Gamist play of any kind, because there's nothing to prevent someone from going, "I want to win" and then paying the Traits and fan mail to do it.

Yeah... that's pretty sweet. I'm sold.

Thanks for the input.


-Landon Darkwood

[Yokiboy]

Personally, I like the one-roll-per-conflict rules.  I have to admit, I'm pretty comfortable with fiat.  But part of what we're after is the feel of TV, not action-adventure movies that can spend ten minutes on a drawn-out blow-by-blow fight.  As Matt's pointed out here and in the rules, in a lot of TV fights the question isn't "will they win" but "will they win in time" or "will they win and remain friends" or "will they be able to [do whatever else] while they win."

Well said, it's right there in the rules, but it helped hearing it again. I also like the other comments in this thread, it should all help me run my first PTA game tomorrow night.

TTFN,

Yokiboy


P.S. Our series is called Seekers and is about a professor with an inferiority complex of his dad, a famous professor of the occult and the nemesis of his son, and an ex-special forces mercenary with a very troubled past suffering from self-hate which shows through self-destructive tendencies, being hunted by a lawyer representing the Geneva Convention. The professor and the former mercenary now try to debunk occult myths and legends. We're starting with a trip to the Amazon...

[timfire]

[W]hat if you have a scene where the conflict starts in from the get-go but the adversary has a ton of dramatic importance? Like, the climactic battle against a main villain in the arc? ...I don't know about you guys, but to me there's a chance of that seeming... mighty anticlimactic in play.

I can relate to your fear that a single roll or short scene seems like it'll be unsatisfying. But speaking in a general role-playing sense, if you've spent the appropriate time building up the tension, then you don't need a long drawn out scene to make the encounter climactic, it'll happen all on its own. Really, what makes a scene important/climatic is not really the scene itself, but the build-up before it.

I'm reminded of more than one episode of X-Files, where Mulder and Scully only catch up to the Bad Guy in the last couple of minutes of the show. Basically, they show up, find him in the middle of doing something, and then he dies - either killing himself or being killed by Mulder & Scully.

Now, sometimes Mulder and Scully don't know what's going on or even what happened. But the audience does know how creepy the guy is, because it's been built up the entire show, and its satisfying to see him killed.

I'll also say that sometimes a single roll can be even more exciting than a series of rolls. Knowing that you're betting hours/days/weeks of role-playing on a single roll can be frightening (in a good way), and will have everyone on the edge of their seats.

[Yokiboy]

I played PTA for the first time yesterday and loved it! I found no need at all for extended conflicts, we were actually very pleasantly surprised to find the one-roll conflict resolution to be much more exciting than any other system we've tried.

TTFN,

Yokiboy