[PTA] The Tower

[iago]

Rob Donoghue ran the pilot episode of "The Tower" last night, which was the first opportunity our group got to give Primetime Adventures a whirl.  We started out wanting a darker version of Buffy, set at a traditional English university that had been transplanted to Oregon, but I think because we're a fairly funny group, we ended up with something that was actually lighter than Buffy (this sort of tonal drift wasn't entirely intended, however, and I may say more on that in a bit).

Our cast, with names I'm only half-remembering, were:

Jake the Janitor (my character) - Take Matt Damon at the beginning of Good Will Hunting, make him a paranormal sciences prodigy instead of math-oriented, and make him a descendant from a long line of witch-hunters, and you've got Jake.  Jake's "issue" is that he bought into the whole class warfare deal, and despite being just as smart as the kids who go to the U, doesn't believe that he should attend it even if he _did_ have the money for it.

Professor Bradford - A chemist who was well on his way to being respected worldwide until he took a sharp left turn into studying alchemy.  The alchemy he does *works*, is the thing, and he's developed a number of techniques for accelerating the development of paranormal abilities in others through the metascience... but (issue) no one takes his work seriously.  He's something of a maverick in the choices he makes, too, as you'll see in how the episode's setup worked.

Mary the Photojournalist - Mary's one of the best photographers the student paper has, but (issue) has an incredible amount of trouble talking to people, so she hides behind her camera.  She has the ability, sometimes, to see auras around people, and this has driven her to get good at kirillian photography, so she can *show* people... if she wants.

Underachiever Jock Guy - Don't remember his name, but "Jock" was never supposed to get into this college of the university, the one with all the freaks in it, but he's a crackerjack lacrosse player with addiction issues, and -- this is the part that I thought was brilliant -- his girlfriend is his *nemesis*.

Freshman Fish-Out-of-Water - Another case of blanking on the name entirely.  "Frosh" has a history of mental illness in his family, and comes from back east (upstate New York).  He's enrolled in this out-west school in an attempt to get as far from his past as possible.

----

So, the pilot.  I'm going to try to breeze through this, as I have less to recount about how the mechanics worked just yet, but I want to make sure there's story context.

It starts out with a football game (our team, the Druids, suck, which kicked off a bit of how it's been 47 years since we last set fire to our holocaust-cloak-wearing mascot to celebrate a victory), where the tight end turns into a werewolf as he's running for the goal and bounds off into the woods. 

Prof. Bradford freaks out a bit here, because he secretly spiked the Gatorade with his latest alchemical creation ("the actinic power of the wolf eating the moon") to see if it would work as a performance-enhancer.  Untraceable, at that, at least by conventional means.  The Prof's ethics are occasionally a bit... off.

Jock has a conversation with his girlfriend, a cheerleader, who's clearly been making eyes at one of the football players, and (with him losing the conflict) she goes home with football guy, claiming that the "group" (the cheerleaders and the non-wolfed-out players) wants to stick together tonight.  Jock is left standing there nonplused, when Bradford tries to get rid of the gatorade cooler by accidentally bumping into it.  Jock naturally stops the spill, being a largely stand-up guy (and giving us our first of many examples of "self-sabotage", where the players regularly contributed their successes to the Producer's side of a conflict), and the mascot, unburnt, carts the cooler off.

Mary stands on the sidelines throughout this, taking photographs of people, and trying to shake the impression she's seeing the outlines of wolves around their heads.  Elsewhere, Jake's cleaning up a part of the stadium when he hears a commotion down by the cleaning supplies closet, and catches the "scent" of "bad magic".  There he discovers the former werewolf, naked and vomiting and human.  Taking a little pleasure in seeing one of the rich kids in distress, he still lets the guy take a spare set of overalls -- but before he can get anything out of the kid, the kid runs off.  This is where Jake notices strange silvery goop in the vomit, and we cut away.

Mary's run off to develop her photographs.  Yep: wolf-auras around most, but not all, of the team, and a number of the cheerleaders as well.  Her editor shows up, but she manages to hide those photographs from him, instead giving over the more "normal" ones of the night -- including one of Jock's girlfriend grabbing Football Player's ass.

Bradford's still a bit flipped, and grabs Frosh (in a moment of desperation), asking for help getting the gatorade cooler back.  The two find Jake, still cleaning up, who they get to agree to use his keys to get into the now-locked lockerroom where the cooler's been taken.  They get in, and find the Druid mascot on fire!  Turns out it was an accident, but in a moment of forgetting about the holocaust cloak, Frosh dumps the 'ade onto the mascot, putting out the fire -- but giving everyone there a chance to see the silvery goop (and allowing Jake to slowly start putting 2 and 2 together).

Mary's editor gets accosted by someone (I'm not sure we ever found out who, one of the few dropped threads of the night, but probably Mary's nemesis, a rival photographer who uses -- *shudder* -- digital) in the middle of the night, who runs off with Mary's photos of the event.  The one of Jock's girl playing grab-ass flutters to the ground as the perpetrator flees.

Jock comes upon the photograph, of course, and starts getting really depressed.  Frosh comes up, and they talk both about the silver goop situation and the girlfriend.  Here's where one of the interesting "conflicts" of the night came up -- the win condition was described as "Jock sets aside the girl trouble and pursues the supernatural plot".  In another moment of brilliant "self-sabotage", Frosh, who Jock's having a male bonding moment with, opposes Jock's success, and Jock instead runs off to have a conversation with his girlfriend about ... feelings.

Again on the "sidelines", Mary snaps photographs of Jock as he runs off... and notices that he has some silver goop on his hand (from when he saved the cooler from getting spilled).  Mary does her own two-and-two thing and goes to visit Prof. Bradford.  She shares her photographs with Bradford, struggling to use words instead of emphatic hand gestures, and Bradford starts to wonder why his "treatment", which didn't have any strange effects on *him* -- the first test subject -- would cause someone to go all werewolfy.

Cut to Jake, who goes through a montage of cleaning up a *lot* of late-night messes -- thanks to a team of football players who've not turned into werewolves, but have certainly been running around campus like a pack of wild dogs.  The final bits of the montage show Jake connecting all the dots and then stalking off to rail at the professor.

He storms into the professor's lab, where Prof and Mary are, and starts laying into him for making his job tough, and he's not sure what the Prof's magical silver gatorade did exactly, but by gum he's gonna --

Mary's taking photographs throughout all of this, right in Jake's face, and Jake snaps, slapping her camera aside.  A conflict arises between Jake and Mary, and Mary's side (the one the Producer backed with budget) bore out, leading to Mary having a sudden moment of empowered communication where she tells Jake off instead, makes him apologize, and generally gets him sheepish.  This calms down the situation and the three start discussing what the deal is with the gatorade.  Jake's "nose for bad magic" leads to him suggesting, at least, that the gatorade stuff *is* what's causing all the mayhem -- which the Prof says doesn't make any sense, because he's not feeling any different.  But aura-seeing Mary, a little wide-eyed, just looks at the professor and says, "Oh... no.  Bad."  And we cut away.

Next, we're in a bar, and Frosh is having a beer with his totally smokin' hot psychoanalyst, trying to drunkenly convince her that it's really not crazy of him to set folks on fire if they're trained professionals, when Mister Grabass comes in and shortly gets accosted by Not-Presently-Werewolf guy.  N-P-W demands that Grab-ass tell him "where he put them!"  It's a big commotion, and Frosh uses this as a chance to show off in front of his total babe of a shrink -- winning the "Does he look cool or is he the fool" contest, he tackles N-P-W in a glorious moment of slow-motion action, and the pair tumble out into the street.

Cut to Jock walking away from his girlfriend's room -- she wasn't there -- and getting a phone call on his cell.  It's his girl, but we don't hear her side of the conversation.  "You've got to be kidding me...  Uh-huh... well, all right."  Nobody's around that he can get a ride from, it seems, until he finds the Professor's lab, with the janitor, photographer, and prof in it.  They are still mid-reaction to ... whatever's up with the professor.  Actually, the professor looks fine, but Jake's no longer sure of it, and a lot of confused conversation occurs.  Various facts settle out, but Jock's still fixated on his girl problems rather than the Strange Case of the Silver Goo, until Jake looks him in the eye, waving around a photograph of Girlfriend and Grabass with wolfy auras, and says, "You don't understand.  Your girlfriend may be in heat."  It takes a moment for it to sink in, but when it does, Jock simply says: "How fast does your car go?"

They pile into the prof's midlifecrisismobile and tear off to the girlfriend's location -- which turns out to be the bar where Frosh's commotion is occurring.  She had called Jock asking him to come help out with Grabass, who of course is Just a Friend (gotta love that nemesis girlfriend), who's gotten into a fight.  They arrive just as Frosh and Not-Werewolf tumble out into the street.

A series of continuous scenes play out here: it comes out that Jake smells some bad magic in girlfriend's purse, Jock has something of an argument with girlfriend, Not-Werewolf starts becoming Not-Not-Werewolf, Jake gets hold of the purse, grabs a bottle of pills out of it which appear to be lycanthropy suppression pills, Jake tries to get the pills into the werewolf's mouth, but Grabass sees that Jake has the pills which he's been holding onto for his wolfy friend, freaks out, tackles Jake, the pill bottle goes flying, Presently-Werewolf tosses Frosh onto the hood of Prof's car, property damage ensues, Jake gets pounded by Grabass, Jock catches the bottle of pills and, in a coordinated use-the-flash-from-Mary's-camera moment, manages to toss the pill bottle down the werewolf's gullet, leaving the guy turning back into a naked guy, falling into Mary's lap unconscious, and leaving the professor to mourn his car but thankfully conclude that it was an interaction between his Treatment and this kid's pills, and for the rest of the team mainly just a case of it having some more minor side-effects under the full moon.

-----

Scenes from the Next featured the janitor asking Mary what she knows about voodoo, a shocker reveal that Jock has a drug problem, the Prof facing off with his less-crackpot rival, Frosh having psychoanalysis over his furry condition, and a shot of a hand holding a doll that looks like the Prof, and sticking a big needle into it.

-----

I've got a number of comments about how the rules worked, and I'll get to those in a follow-up post soon.

[ScottM]

This sounds like a great episode!  How much of the session was getting set up and how much was the scenes?  Because that sounds like a whole bunch of scenes-- was your session particularly long?

I just wanted to register my strong interest in seeing where these characters go.
Scott

[iago]

This sounds like a great episode!  How much of the session was getting set up and how much was the scenes?  Because that sounds like a whole bunch of scenes-- was your session particularly long?

We did the set-up largely over dinner (an hourish), with the game running maybe 2 hours.

[iago]

Okay.  In general, I thought the game went very well, especially given that the vast majority of the people involved hadn't ever played it before and were learning the rules as we went along. 

So let me be up-front about this: it was a positive experience for everyone, and we were all quite happy with the results, and very much enjoyed play.

That said, I want to call to light some observations and rough spots.

Issues with Tone

This was a weird one.  I think many of us had a much different (well: much darker) tone in mind for the game than we actually got.  If Buffy is, say, 60% drama, 40% comedy, we were (or at least I and one other player was) thinking of maybe a 85/15 mix, and we ended up with a 40/60 mix: solid action-dramedy territory.

We had several thoughts about why this was, but ultimately there wasn't a strong central vision for the show's "pitch" -- as a result, we ended up a bit hodgepodged.  This isn't bad per se -- things certainly drifted to the group's comfort space -- but I do think that this is part of why it mainly was a "fun night for all" and not a knocked-out-of-the-park sort of experience like, say, Moose in the City.

This can probably be solved by putting more time and effort into the show concept, or by (gasp) the Producer or, really, anyone, bringing a few fleshed pitches to the table and having a vote for the winner -- allowing folks to buy into that more fully realized idea without there being a huge dig into available time to come up with a show concept that has more than just spindly legs.

The upshot of this, though, is that the game came off a lot more like a "beer and pretzels" game rather than a game capable of great poignant depths of story -- this impression was strong enough that at least one player wasn't entirely convinced it could get away from a beer and pretzels core (though he's still willing to see if it can happen).  I note this because it jarred against my expectations going in.

I do think some "stronger hand" tactics could (and maybe even should) be adopted in order to help maintain tone.  There are a number of ways this could be incented --

• The tone could be explicitly defined as an edge that everyone has, for example, allowing players to get extra dice by acting in a manner consistent with the tone of the show.


• I'd consider using a trick I used in a Fate Buffy game I ran, where I figured out what the theme I wanted for an episode was, and I printed up a bunch of cards which indicated things characters could do that would support the overall story.  Cards were then dealt out at random to the players, and if they had their characters do something from one of the cards ("Get into an argument"; "Run screaming like a girl"; "Crack wise in the face of mortal peril."), they'd get a fate point.  The same thing could be done with PTA, only with it giving out "free" (non-budget-derived) fan mail.


• Other stuff that I'm not thinking of right now.

As a GM myself, I've got a fairly strong track record hitting the tonal mark, so I am definitely interested in seeing if something like this can be done with PTA.  I'm gonna have to do a round as a Producer, myself, and see how much "strong hand" behavior the system and philosophy can weather.

Issues with Cohesion

There was definitely a swath of the game that, I think, left some folks feeling like they were bumbling around trying to find the "point".  With five players and a producer you end up with each player getting a one-sixth "timeshare" to guide certain plot or character elements along.  The Jock's entire girlfriend plot was often in jeopardy of vanishing, and I got the strong feeling that unless more than just the Producer was invested in driving the werewolf plot forward, it would have taken a lot longer (probably longer than we practically had) to get the episode forward to a satisfying conclusion.

Seating, interestingly, had some impact on this, possibly for good.  I was seated in third position, directly across from the Producer, and I was fairly strongly oriented on moving the plotline the Producer introduced ahead.  So each of the scenes I got to frame did that, at the "halfway point" from when the Producer had last done something.  So, thus, I got to trigger the bit with discovering the tight end in the cleaning supply closet, and pushed forward a revelation that the rest of the football team had gotten wolfy in mind if not in body.  With Rob and I both able to focus on advancing things like that, I think the main storyline got some forward momentum.

Now, since this was a pilot episode, everyone had a screen presence of 2.  I'm actually full well willing to blame at least part of the cohesion "problem" on that fact alone (even if, on reflection, I *acted* like I was a presence 1 character even though I had the two dice).  We didn't have a Presence 3 character -- and no explicit presence 1 characters -- so there wasn't much in the way of an explicit dynamic to compel people to focus on any particular plot thread.  If we'd had this inherent imbalance in effect, I think everyone's agendas would have changed pretty drastically -- with the 1's pitching in primarly on storylines that weren't theirs.  With everyone having 2's, everyone's in something of a "I've got my own subplots" space, and I think that's a non-ideal space.  So my strong conclusion and suggestion here would be, ditch the homogenous pilot episode and just start with episode one.  The imbalance of screen presences is too crucial, I think, to ignore.

Issues with Fan Mail

We have something of a charisma imbalance in our playgroup: some folks are sideliners (and happy with it!) and others chew scenery like there's no tomorrow.  Fan mail inevitably goes to the jaw-mongers, and rightly so at that, but it did, in this game, create a definitive and noticeable bias (towards Frosh and Jock, who regularly had us rolling in the aisles). 

This is not, per se, bad, *except* that it does create a dynamic where the folks who have a talent for being funny and cool get extra potency to be even more cool, while the sideliners get little fan mail at all and thus are seldom in a position to take narrative control, beyond scene framing.  But I may be overstating this side of the issue; nobody really objected to the guys who got fan mail using the fan mail... since, after all, we were fans of what they were doing.  But all the same, it seemed as if the "charisma gap" got widened by this mechanic, which did not entirely float my boat.  It's a minor quibble, though, and I don't really see a way to address it that wouldn't subtract more than it gained.

Interestingly, the Jock guy -- who easily had a pile, a huge pile, of fan mail by the time the big scene with the werewolf and the pills occurred -- did something he called "competitive" with his fan dice.  When my character, Jake, went to try to shove some pills down Wolfy's gullet, Jock rolled on the opposing side of the conflict, using about half of his fan dice to tilt things away from Jake being the guy who got the pills into the werewolf.  Then when scene control passed to him, he used the rest of them to be the guy who caught the pill bottle and get it delivered into the werewolf. 

In essence, fan mail allowed him to say "No, this isn't Jake's moment of being the hero, it's mine."  And it lead him to apologize for that after the game was over.  My take on it may or may not make sense to you: I said, "Look, I was one of the big drivers behind handing out fan mail" (I was: more on this shortly) "and in my mind, giving you a big pile of fan mail is me saying, I want to see you do the cool things.  So I paid you to be the hero there.  It's only a competition if I also agree that we're competing over that moment, and I didn't feel we were."  If we were a different sort of playgroup, that might not have been the case, and some bruised feelings might have come out of it.  I don't think it's the game's job to address this, but it is important, all the same, to be aware that this sort of, uh, "scene stealing" dynamic can arise.

Finally, I gave out fanmail like a mad, mouth-foaming fanboy.  I was the only other person at the table who'd read the rules before, and I (I think rightly) concluded that I needed to be the guy to break the fan-mail ice by handing it out early and often.  If I hadn't been that guy, I'm not sure as much would have been given out as was -- so Producers, be very very clear with your players about how frequent and generous they should be with this valuable game resource.

Issues with Narration

PTA seems to live strongly in the Director stance (I think; I'm not a game theory maven), and that's not an easy space for all players to live in.  Nor should they really be forced to live there, I think.

Furthermore, we had an interesting type of player in the game: one who entirely enjoyed playing in the game, but definitely did not enjoy being given narrative control over the results of a scene after a conflict's resolution has been indicated by the dice.  Scene framing was mostly fine for her, but narrating results was much less comfortable.  There's an easy fix for this, though: the person who rolled the highest number gets to choose who narrates the result, rather than "must be the person who narrates the result".

While I am a big, even huge, fan of forcing players out of their comfort zones once in a while, I'm also a fan of making sure there's room for them to occupy that zone... and at least by the rules we were running under, there was no room for this player.  Something to think about.

Other Random Thoughts

It's very tempting to create a "taxonomy" for various 5-session screen presence configs.  For example, 1-1-2-2-3 is a "classic rising action" build, while "1-1-3-2-2" is "the cypher who's revealed to be something surprising during midseason sweeps".  And in fact it's even more tempting to come up with that taxonomy, determine the mixture of them that we'd like to see, write them down on cards, and then randomly deal out each person a screen presence sequence as the first step, using the idea of what the sequence *means* to give rise to a character concept.  On Lost, 1-1-2-2-3 might be Jack or Kate, while 1-1-3-2-2 might be Hurley or Locke.

We didn't really have much problem defining our conflicts, even when we went for some pretty abstract ones -- some of our conflicts were simply things like "does this character hare off on a side-mission, or instead pursue the bigger plot", for example, or in one case towards the end, "does this situation remain under control or instead explode in chaos" (which doesn't sound so odd until I tell you that, as a player, I was defining my win condition as chaos, not control).  But earlier in the game, since we knew that finding the conflict in a scene was something of "the point", we ended up rushing towards it.  This gave, as one player put it, a pretty "stacatto" feeling to things, where it didn't seem like scenes were getting played out as much as they could -- interaction between characters ended up undercut.  Things only really smoothed out on this point when we stopped trying to consciously ask ourselves "what's the conflict here?" and let the Producer watchdog that a bit, with us worrying less about that.  This let folks step into their characters a bit more fully and ended up in some much better later-game scenes.

In Conclusion

A solid game and a very fun time, but it would have been even better on a number of fronts if we'd already had some of the lessons I've hinted at above on hand and in mind.  This was a first edition game -- none of us have the new one that came out at GenCon (but, boy, am I ever going to get one, once I can) -- so I don't know how much the system, or the advice about how to run stuff, has changed. 

But if these sorts of lessons aren't emblazoned somewhere in the new ed, I humbly submit them as suggestions for ... um, the third one. It's very positive that you can just jump into a game really fast with no prep -- but I think some combination of prep and the benefits of prior experience are crucial from taking the PTA experience from good to stellar.  Locally, we aren't there yet. 

But we'll be trying.

[Rob Donoghue]

I think it's worth driving home the point that I think a numbe rof things ended up being a result of the time crunch.  The game ended up happening at the last minute and startign a little bit late with a few members who need to maintain sleep schedules,  so I think some of the stacatto and the press to stay "on track" came from that.  Though in the end, I agree, a stronger shared image of what the show was about would have also gone a long way (though again, doing creation then play in the same window meant that was also rushed).

I was chewing on it a bit this morning, and I was wondering how much mileage could be gotten if, as part of a setting discussion there was a discussion of roles, as seperate from specific characters, if only as a preamble of creatign protagonists.  One observation, for example, was that we were missing a star student, the character who really could have been a lynchpin for the story and who would have, in a TV sense, been the lead, even if they weren't the star (a role comparative to, say, Mal on firefly - central but not above the rest).  Similarly, in having 2 non-student protagonists, the conceptual relationship web was a little more shakey.  This falls into the sort of thing I'm inclined to be on the lookout for next time we build a pitch.

Randomly, we ended up going with a somewhat looser definitions of the character's private set.  Three of the Protags had normal enough locactions (A lab, a darkroom and a bar, I beleive), but the Janitor went with "hallways" and the Jock went for "Exercising outdoors".  Both had clear visual hooks (The former kickign nicely into the Good Will Hunting vibe).  Technically I suppose those were unbalanced (or blurred some lines) but they ended up fun an non-problematic.

Oh, and for the record:
Frosh - Steve
Jock - Trent


All told, it was fun enough to want to try again.

-Rob D.

[John Harper]

Hey Fred,

Your game sounds like it was fun. You say it was fun and you're excited to play again. All good.

Which is why a lot of your post about "system issues" confuses me. I know that since you're a designer you probably have the itch to tinker regardless, but some of your first-blush ideas for how to modify PTA are mystifying me. Overall, the impression I'm getting is, "PTA generates experience X, but we all like experiences X2, Y, and Z so let's tweak and massage PTA until is produces those experiences, too." I imagine that once you're done tinkering to satisfy those urges, you'll have FATE. I'm only half joking.

I'll try to go through your issues in detail now.

Tone
The tone of your show is created collaboratively by the group. If the group, as a whole, doesn't enforce a certain tone/style/genre convention/whatever, then your show won't have it. This general point will come up again.

Cohesion
"The point" of any PTA show is to hit the protag's Issues. This only happens if the players are actively engaging in scenes, looking for issue-laden conflicts and the Producer is firing obstacles in the path of the PCs. Players who are focused mainly on plot resolution (like you do in most games) will have trouble. Figuring out the mystery of the alchemical-werewolf gatorade is window-dressing on the Protag's issues, not the other way around.

Fan Mail
You're using it exactly right. The bit where one player used the fan mail dice against you was cool, but there's some strangeness in the way that scene played out. I wonder why you both weren't simply rolling against the producer in that scene (with the goal "Be the one who stops the werewolf"). Then the jock player would have used the Fan Mail dice for his own side to win the conflict.

I don't see how there could have been a scene-break between your two actions, is what I mean. They're part of the same conflict, and should be in the same scene.

Issues with Narration
Lemme quote you here:

PTA seems to live strongly in the Director stance (I think; I'm not a game theory maven), and that's not an easy space for all players to live in.  Nor should they really be forced to live there, I think.

Furthermore, we had an interesting type of player in the game: one who entirely enjoyed playing in the game, but definitely did not enjoy being given narrative control over the results of a scene after a conflict's resolution has been indicated by the dice.  Scene framing was mostly fine for her, but narrating results was much less comfortable.  There's an easy fix for this, though: the person who rolled the highest number gets to choose who narrates the result, rather than "must be the person who narrates the result".

When I read that, this is what I hear, "We wanted to play Dogs, but one player doesn't like westerns, religious issues, or passing judgement." or "We played Monopoly, but one of the players doesn't like counting money or capitalist competition." I mean, yeah, you can tweak the game to make that player happy or to not "force" the players to play a certain way. But in doing so, you're playing something else.

The *point* of PTA is to collaboratively author a TV show with your fellow players, by using your protags and their issues. It's not immersive-style, actor-stance roleplaying that a lot of people are used to. It also asks for the players to narrate outcomes to entertain and challenge their fellow players. To me, that's the whole point of playing PTA. If you don't enjoy those things... well, PTA is not the right game for you. Nothing wrong with that.

PTA supports a certain play experience, and it supports it well. If you want another kind of experience, there are other games that already support that, and they're fun too. Making PTA into an "uber game" that tries to support everything seems like a bad idea to me.

Your notes about conflicts at the end are interesting to me, too. But I can't respond right now -- work calls me. More later.

[John Harper]

Oh, I also wanted to respond to your idea about using the "theme cards." This is death to a PTA game. Rewarding players for hitting pre-made "good things" created by one player? Utterly wrong for PTA. With PTA, the show you get is the show that everyone makes together, from compromise and collaboration in the moment. A heavy-handed Producer judging the "rightness" of contributions by the other players is about as far from PTA-supported play as you can get.

[iago]

Oh, I also wanted to respond to your idea about using the "theme cards." This is death to a PTA game. Rewarding players for hitting pre-made "good things" created by one player? Utterly wrong for PTA. With PTA, the show you get is the show that everyone makes together, from compromise and collaboration in the moment. A heavy-handed Producer judging the "rightness" of contributions by the other players is about as far from PTA-supported play as you can get.

To be frank, I don't consider your idea of what's right for the game, and the players we play with, any more right than mine.  I especially object to sentiments that amount to "don't you dare change this game I'm not playing in in order to accommodate a player you like playing with".  I'm sorry, but that's utter bunk.  I don't want to not run a game for 6 people because one of them is uncomfortable with what the game forces them to do.  I'd rather be a uniter in that case, rather than pursue your -- intentional or not -- encouragement to be a divider.  Being excluded sucks; being told that I am wrong for not changing a game so that it doesn't encourage exclusion sucks worst.

I think you also lack some clarity about why I'm suggesting certain tweaks.  They are suggested with the intention of elevating the play experience we're having locally from "hey, that was fun" to "wow, that was fantastic!".  We definitively did not have the latter, and I get disappointed and angry every time someone tells me my kind of fun, and my way of pursuing it, is wrong.  It's not.  Deal.  It's pointless to say this:

I mean, yeah, you can tweak the game to make that player happy or to not "force" the players to play a certain way. But in doing so, you're playing something else.

Just pointless.  The only game that matters is the one that works for us.  The semantics about what game we're "really playing" when we make it work for us matter not at all.  Or, as another player has said: "I am convinced that I will ultimately be made happiest by playing PTA wrong, to one extent or another."  When I think about my priorities, "being happiest" ranks number frickin' one, and playing PTA exactly the way someone else thinks I should play it ranks number not-on-my-list.

Welcome to my number one peeve about ForgeThink: complaining that people are having Wrong Fun and thus shouldn't use the thing they want to use.  I mean, come on, that's just offensive.

But to get to specifics.

The tone of your show is created collaboratively by the group. If the group, as a whole, doesn't enforce a certain tone/style/genre convention/whatever, then your show won't have it. This general point will come up again.

The big, possibly missed, point about the whole tone thing is that without Vision, a group can go off-track as regards the group's goal, and then in retrospect realize things could have been better if we'd stayed on target.  So mainly there I'm encouraging methods that help people remember the vision.

"The point" of any PTA show is to hit the protag's Issues. This only happens if the players are actively engaging in scenes, looking for issue-laden conflicts and the Producer is firing obstacles in the path of the PCs. Players who are focused mainly on plot resolution (like you do in most games) will have trouble. Figuring out the mystery of the alchemical-werewolf gatorade is window-dressing on the Protag's issues, not the other way around.

A point well taken, there.  I don't think, as run, the "focus on pursuing conflicts that are issue-centric" message was really communicated to us players much, if at all, and I certainly didn't remember that as one of the two folks who'd read the game.  That said, the whole 'window dressing' bit here was tied into the Professor's drive to be taken seriously -- though because of the way it opened, the Prof mainly oriented on "oh crap, I'll never be taken seriously if this isn't covered up".  (But again, if we'd had the unequal screen presences in effect, this could have been either a minor subplot or The Big Point of the Presence-3 Professor's Episode.  As it was, it got muddled.  Thus cohesion issues.)

You're using it exactly right. The bit where one player used the fan mail dice against you was cool, but there's some strangeness in the way that scene played out. I wonder why you both weren't simply rolling against the producer in that scene (with the goal "Be the one who stops the werewolf"). Then the jock player would have used the Fan Mail dice for his own side to win the conflict.

I don't see how there could have been a scene-break between your two actions, is what I mean. They're part of the same conflict, and should be in the same scene.

Something that's probably revealing here: we never had more than two-sided conflicts.  There was only ever the Producer's Side and the Player-Scene-Owner's Side.  I think this was because our conflicts were pretty much This-or-Not-This, and never This-or-That-or-This-Third-Thing.  To put it another way, it simply never occurred to us to do that as a three part conflict.

And here's the other thing.  That was actually split across multiple chained-together scenes.  Someone else (the Prof) framed the scene where he told Jake to stuff pills into the werewolf's mouth.  Rob was running the "whether or not you get to roll your dice in the scene" thing pretty fast and loose, so Trent's player simply said he was throwing his dice onto the Producer's side -- not explicitly saying he was trying to be the one who got to do the werewolf pill thing.  That part only came up when it came round to be his turn to run scene.

Hands down no argument: the mechanics were not run there as instructed.  But I can tell you right now, Rob runs games by feel, not by explicit let-me-refer-to-page-XX rules, so that kind of rules drift is always liable to happen.  At least now we've got a shot at remembering it's not the Way -- if only so that we know what we're ignoring when we're ignoring it.

[Rob Donoghue]

In fairness the tight, sequential scening was an intentional riff on an idea pointed out on the boards, specifically that just because something went one way in a previous scene, there's nothing that keeps the next protagonist from going "Ok, THIS TIME we'll do it!" and that it can even be a desirable thing.  As such, the snapshot scenes all gave the players the opportunity to say "Ok, this is done, we're picking up HERE" or to say "I like where this is going, so let's take what's here and pick up right where the last scene left off."  Since it was a scene that involved everyone, and people were enjoying it, they kept rolling with it.  Also, on a purely practical note, it was nearly time to wrap up, so there was an intentional nod to tempo there.

Now, that said, it absolutely meant that the scene "walls" weren't as robust as they potentially could be, but the result was satisfying enough that I would be very hesitant to remove that sort of tool from the kit.

-Rob D.

[iago]

I am not saying "PTA is good, but it Really Needs A, B, and C."

What I am saying is that "PTA is good, but our play experience wasn't maximized, so this makes me think that maybe we could try A, B, and C."

Rereading John's reply (and getting a little assistance on the read from a friend) makes me realize that my "issues" post may be getting read as the first thing, when it's really the second.  I'm not saying PTA as-is is wrong for anyone else.  I'm not even strongly selling the idea that it's wrong for me.  I'm just identifying what our speedbumps are.

Which doesn't keep me from getting my ire up over stuff that reads like a Wrong Fun sentiment, all the same...  But in the interests of preventing that from spiralling, it's important this get said.

[John Harper]

Hey Fred,

Sorry if my post touched a nerve with you. Not my intention. I stand by everything I said, but hurting your feelings was accidental. Sorry.

I'm not saying you had "wrong fun." Not at all. You had fun. Good! You also want some things that PTA doesn't deliver, as designed. Good! Tweak to your heart's content, and maximize your enjoyment. I would never dare to tell anyone this was wrong. I didn't tell you not to tweak the game. Why would I? It's your game. I have no power over you and I don't want any. I'm just saying what I think about your first-blush response to PTA, as someone who has played the game more or less as written and enjoyed it. That's all, dude.

I don't know why you're ranting about "ForgeThink." That's some other issue that I really don't want to get dragged into. You can just talk to me, John, and what I wrote. No need to start labeling.

When I say, "after you tweak, you're not playing PTA," you're hearing some kind of harsh judgment. No such judgment is in my post. I don't say, "and that's WRONG." You heard that, but man, it ain't there. The only reason I even brought it up is to highlight the way in which the system is intended to be used (and the resulting play experience) versus the way you want to use it, and the experience you're after. Both are cool and fun. I hoped my post might help you and your group pick apart the game stuff that was "the way PTA works" and the other stuff that was "what we want to do."

Let me say it again: Play PTA as written, and it will support game X. Don't want X? Play something else. That "something else" may very well be, "PTA, with the following tweaks." See where I'm comin' from? It's not judgment, or telling you what you ought to do.

[iago]

Let me say it again: Play PTA as written, and it will support game X. Don't want X? Play something else. That "something else" may very well be, "PTA, with the following tweaks." See where I'm comin' from? It's not judgment, or telling you what you ought to do.

Yep.  Clear now, opaque then.  Apologies from my side as well. :)

[iago]

Oh, I also wanted to respond to your idea about using the "theme cards." This is death to a PTA game. Rewarding players for hitting pre-made "good things" created by one player? Utterly wrong for PTA. With PTA, the show you get is the show that everyone makes together, from compromise and collaboration in the moment. A heavy-handed Producer judging the "rightness" of contributions by the other players is about as far from PTA-supported play as you can get.

Okay, setting aside language like "Utterly wrong"... :)

I think you're reading some sort of weird-ass "Producer judging the rightness" thing out of the card suggestion.  Fundamentally, I don't see this as much different from when Ron slides the card with the stick figure with the antlers on it over to Vincent during the Moose in the City game.  In both cases, what's on the card is a Producer-directed suggestion delivered into the player's hands, where the player has the option to run with it or not.  And in both cases, I strongly feel the improvement to the game is huge.

So I'm curious.  What's the real difference between the two?  The fact that my suggestions involve a small bribe in the form of dice?  That they're arrived at somewhat in advance?  What if the stuff on the cards is just snippets from the "scenes from next episode" stuff from the last session? 

[John Harper]

Here's the thing with the theme cards. One person (the Producer) creates some things that could be added to the game, then makes the cards based on that. When the players grab these carrots, they get rewarded. This is pretty standard RPG play, and yes, you can have fun doing that. Not saying otherwise.

The design of PTA always tries to resist this style, though. Instead of one person deciding ahead of time what "cool things" to add, the "coolness" of the show must always be manufactured by compromise, collaboration, and conflict rolls, at the table, with all the players engaged. Never in the vaccuum of one person's head, and never from some position of ultimate authority. The way scenes are framed, conflicts called, and narration handled all demonstrate this philosophy of play.

When Ron slides the card over to Vincent, he's raising his eyebrows, like, "Yeah? You know this will rock." It's a pitch. An appeal to Vincent, and inclusive of everyone else too. All the players see this and go, "Oh man... yeah!" or "Hmmmm. Uh, wha?" or whatever. It's different because Ron didn't sit at home alone the night before the game writing stuff that he wanted on cards and then bribing the players to use them.

See the difference? In once case, it's one player saying to another, "Hey, how about this? This could be cool." And in the other case (the theme cards) it's the Producer saying, "If you use my suggestions, you get bonus dice."

Fundamentally, PTA makes the Producer not in charge of the show. The Producer is in charge of creating adversity for the protags, driving towards conflict, and making sure spotlight time is handled right. But the content of the series? The stuff the show is about? The setting and trappings and plotlines? In that, all players are equal. Give the Producer's "suggestions" more weight in the game system, and the balance of power changes.

(Changes! I said. Not, "the balance of power sucks and is wrong." Jesus, I can't believe I have to type that. Stupid Internet.)

"PTA Producer" and "Game Master" are not the same role. At all.

[iago]

Okay.  That response is about what I expected, so I think that's a good sign.  I wonder, though, if things change if everyone creates a couple cards and puts them into a shuffler.  Probably does.  Or, you could keep the cards as is, but depower the Producer a bit on another front -- say, make him roll d6es when he uses budget, while the players roll d10s -- thus biasing things such that the Producer rarely gets the ability to directly narrate outcomes.