Things that are Hard to Film

[Jason Newquist]

I play in a regular CoC game, and the Keeper is pretty damn good.  Delivers solid product, and he comes up with some wonderful stuff.  But a lot of it, I was realizing recently, is stuff that would be really hard to film.  Things like smells and textures and disturbed mental states and conflicting beliefs and assaults on the senses and memories and sudden realizations.  Fantastic content, which is *really desirable* and adds a lot to play! ...But all these things, if we were making a television series, would have to be translated into visual form.

When narrating scenes in PTA, do you go through the extra creative effort to attempt to translate it to visuals suitable for film and TV, or do you just say what you mean so that the people at the table grok what's going on, and that's enough?

I can see some groups taking "nothing that's not visual!" as a creative challenge, and other groups having a looser, easier style, and there's one or two guys who're really good at this stuff, and tend to rack up Fan Mail for their evocative visuals.

Did your group discuss this in advance?  How much non-visual (but normal and very cool for other games!) stuff occurs in your PTA game?

-Jason

[Chris Goodwin]

I've been following the Dungeon Majesty writeups, and have four of the players in my LiveJournal friends list.  They talk a lot about how they have naturally fallen into the routine of describing things like camera angles, cuts, stop motion bits, superimposed stats, and so on.  

I've not actually played the game yet myself.

[Jason Newquist]

I've been following the Dungeon Majesty writeups, and have four of the players in my LiveJournal friends list.  They talk a lot about how they have naturally fallen into the routine of describing things like camera angles, cuts, stop motion bits, superimposed stats, and so on.

Yeah, that's kinda what I'm talking about.  But do they also do this as a way of evoking things that aren't normally visual?

I suppose it takes some some practice and an eye, is what it boils down to, to come up with visuals.  Anything can be filmed.  Right?  Anything at all?  It's just a question of how much time you want to sit there and think up just the right thing.  Right?

-Jason

[Matt Wilson]

Yeah, that's kinda what I'm talking about.  But do they also do this as a way of evoking things that aren't normally visual?

-Jason

Hey Jason:

It's as easy as the producer describing it briefly and the other players having their characters explain it in dialogue or other actions. For smells, the character gags or says, "oh, man, what is that?" And so on.

[Jason Newquist]

It's as easy as the producer describing it briefly and the other players having their characters explain it in dialogue or other actions. For smells, the character gags or says, "oh, man, what is that?" And so on.

Exactly.  The TV model has a lot of implications about the kinds of things that are easier and harder to contribute to the SIS.

It's like the difference between what you can say in a novel and a screenplay.  In normal games (novels), you can talk about the stuff in the characters heads directly.  In PTA (screenplays), you are encouraged to stick to the visuals and contribute to things which the audience sees on their television screens.

So here's the question: Since we're doing screenplay gaming rather than novel gaming, does this mean that forms of Exploration which are hard to film tend to get lost, even as you gain other forms of Exploration which novel gaming doesn't easily offer?

Bonus question: Is screenwriting gaming, overall, a more or less natural form of play than novel gaming, in your experience?

-Jason

[John Harper]

I don't think the distinction needs to be quite so black and white.

When we play PTA, we all imagine this cool TV show that we wish was on the air. People tend to describe things using TV-production terms, which reinforces the idea that we are creating a show on the fly. But what if someone tosses out a bit about how the basement of the library smells like old shoes? That's cool. We all appreciate it and fit it into our ongoing SIS, without missing a beat. There's no jarring "but you can't have smells on TV" or "we're doing a screenwriting game so that doesn't count" or anything like that.

The fact that PTA isn't real TV can be a real strength. You can make TV shows that would never be on the air, because they would be impossible to film for one reason or another. Don't let the TV metaphor stifle creative input. Like Matt said, if someone is motivated, they'll figure out a way to "TV-ify" the contributions to the SIS. But if you don't it's not the end of the world.