Comedy is easy, PTA is hard.

[Rob MacDougall]

Hi folks.

I just posted a medium length post at the gaming blog The 20' by 20' Room about my experiences with Primetime Adventures. The short version: I really love the game, but it isn't effortless like I feel some people have made it out to be. It's fun, but hard work!

The post starts like this:

So as some of you know, I’m running a game of http://www.dog-eared-designs.com/games.html">Primetime Adventures called http://www.innocence.com/games/dungeon-majesty/index.php/Main/HomePage">Dungeon Majesty. We’re three “episodes” (game sessions) in to what will be a six episode “season,” and we’ll be playing again next week. So I’m doing some thinking about what has been, from my point of view, a terrific and funny and interesting game.

... The premise of our particular game is that some amalgam of the hip “new school” screenwriters and directors—people like Paul Thomas Anderson (note his initials!), Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, David O. Russell—produced a six episode TV series about an oddly mixed group of unhappy people who come together every week to play a classic dungeon-crawly role-playing game called http://www.20by20room.com/2004/10/dungeon_majesty.html">Dungeon Majesty. So it’s a real game about a fake TV series about a fake game, named after http://www.dungeonmajesty.com/">a real TV series about a different real game.

PTA has gotten a lot of praise, http://www.20by20room.com/2004/09/revolutionary_g.html#comments">here and http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10903.phtml">elsewhere, and it deserves it. There may not seem to be that much meat to the game at first glance (one could explain the rules in one page) but it really is a powerful little engine. The fan mail economy, the preset screen presence, the episodic structure--everything works for me. Our game has been a big pile of fun so far. And it is true that just about anything you could imagine as a TV show can be modeled (at a high level of abstraction) with the rules.

There’s only one part of the praise for PTA I disagree with: that it is easy to run and play. I’ve seen people saying things to this effect in a number of places: that you can model anything effortlessly with the PTA rules, that PTA sessions require little prep, and that satisfying stories come together like magic. Maybe I’m just slow (I don’t think I am), or maybe I have too many ingrained gaming habits (more possible but I still doubt it), but I’m here to tell you: PTA is hard work! Fun work, yes. And fun work that leads to fun play. But easy, effortless, like magic? No way.

From there I go on to say a few things about the way I've been prepping for PTA, about differences between "genre" and "non-genre" shows, and some other thoughts about the rules.

I end up saying:

The safety net that every game of PTA has going for it is that all of us playing know what a good TV show looks like. Our years in front of Buffy and The Sopranos and Hill Street Blues and Small Wonder (kidding) have trained us in a certain kind of storytelling. There’s a whole lot of tacit structure that we have to draw on in shaping an episode that we pretty much all share yet can be left unsaid. We know the structure of episodic television so instinctively that we can riff and improvise, confident that everybody knows the underlying chord changes, and it does all come together in the end. So one of the best things PTA has going for it is all the TV its players have probably watched. If you tried to use the PTA rules to run a game that wasn’t a TV show, or with a group of players that had never watched television, I don’t know if you’d get very far.

You can read the whole thing here.  I'd of course welcome comments and discussion either here or at 20'x20'.

Let me reiterate how much I'm enjoying the game, and how impressed I am by it. But it's really making me sweat!