A PTA Session is Born, Shudders, and Dies

[Bret Gillan]

So I tried to run some of my pals through a session PTA the other night. It was aborted three scenes in due to communal frustration and a dislike of the rules.

The pre-game discussion session went great. We came up with a hot premise and title (a wild west town in the midst of a zombie apocalypse called "Boot Hill"), the characters were cool (the outlaw, the sheriff, the preacher, and the barber/smuggler), and we were fired up to play. Awesome! I explained the concepts of the game, made the game the Pilot and gave everyone a screen presence of 2. Let the game commence.

I'm going to skip the actual in-game stuff since I know that tends to be the stuff I skip or skim when I'm reading posts like this one, but two of the players didn't like how Stakes are framed. One of them, Tom, was very vocal that he thought that player characters should be able to "team up" and have the same Stakes in a conflict. I explained why this was no good, referencing the answers that are brought up in the More Questions thread, but Tom didn't buy it.

There were some other issues which I think were correctable such as the players feeling that there should have been more roleplaying before a Conflict was declared, and honestly I think the other complaints were just a result of fatigue (the game was late and at the end of a pretty exciting day) and grappling with a game that's completely novel conceptually to the group.

And then, three scenes (which I think were actually pretty cool) into it, the game just crumbled. Everyone was venting complaints, I asked if everyone would rather just call it quits, and that was the end of the session.

It was a very frustrating experience for me because I recognize just how powerful PTA could be for running compelling games about hard choices and character development, and really like it. I think the players who disliked the Stakes-setting are just going to have irreconcileable problems with the game, but I still wonder if there was something I could have done differently to create a more enjoyable session.

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share this experience.

[Judd]

Bret,

I don't think there is a problme with players teaming up against an outside conflict, so long as there is a conflict in every scene.

Right?

I don't believe every conflict has to be players vs. player.

[Tim Alexander]

Hey Brett,

Your experience with PTA sounds like it had a lot in common with my first experience, though the group I was playing with did make it through the first session. Could you give us some specific info on a couple of the scenes in play? Were there any bright moments during play, or only in the initial creation period? How about fan mail, any make it out? Reflecting on my own first experience I think a lot of the trouble came from the group somewhat assiduously avoiding the very issues we had set out to address. I think there was concern about peaking too quickly, or something of the like, but in practice it just meant that the game was stale and frustrating.

Thanks,

-Tim

[Bret Gillan]

Judd,

Sorry, I was pretty unclear about that. What Tom had a major problem with was that characters had to have different Stakes in a conflict, and that we had to discuss the Stakes until they were different. To paraphrase a conversation, he thought that two players should be able to frame their Stakes as, "We want to survive," and leave it at that and then be able to stack up their cards as one hand, much like how Lisa says her group played during one of their sessions. Which, as I understand it, is just not how PTA is played.

Tim,

During play I thought the scenes and the resulting narrations were pretty cool. I probably should have backed off when it came to jumping to the Conflicts, because the players were really itching to do some dialogue and whatnot. I just took the advice to get to the Conflicts ASAP if you're new to the game to an extreme.

One of the players, Bob, got awarded some Fan Mail for some clever narration, but that was it. Again, the players said I was hitting the Conflict too quickly for them to really "do anything cool." In retrospect, I'm beginning to think that I was largely at fault for the player dissatisfaction.

[Tim Alexander]

One of the players, Bob, got awarded some Fan Mail for some clever narration, but that was it. Again, the players said I was hitting the Conflict too quickly for them to really "do anything cool." In retrospect, I'm beginning to think that I was largely at fault for the player dissatisfaction.

Don't jump to beating yourself up just yet, it's a known quantity that finding the sweet spot in terms of when to roll the dice is non-trivial and very group specific. You can find numerous threads with more detail in the Dog Eared Designs forum. What's odd though is that most of what you talk about here sounds fun, so when did it all break bad? How did it all go from fun narrations to 'wanna just call it quits?'

-Tim

[Matthew Glover]

Sorry, I was pretty unclear about that. What Tom had a major problem with was that characters had to have different Stakes in a conflict, and that we had to discuss the Stakes until they were different. To paraphrase a conversation, he thought that two players should be able to frame their Stakes as, "We want to survive," and leave it at that and then be able to stack up their cards as one hand, much like how Lisa says her group played during one of their sessions. Which, as I understand it, is just not how PTA is played.

I had this same sort of difficulty with my group when we started out.  It took quite a lot of repeating on my part for my friends to really get that PTA doesn't work like that.  "We want to survive" isn't really good Stakes for a couple of reasons, especially for a Pilot.  Of course they're going to survive.  The protagonists aren't just going to get offed in the Pilot.  Survival isn't arguable.  I'd say that this is an attitude left over from prior gaming experiences where you can roll badly and get smoked by goblins at first level.  They haven't grasped that by saying "I want to survive," they're also saying "otherwise, I just die."  What they need to be saying is "I want to survive, so that's not at stake.  What's at stake is that since my Issue is Cowardice I want to fight bravely despite the zombies assaulting the saloon."

As for stacking up cards into one hand versus the Producer, it seems like that's pretty typical for folks new to PTA, and it seems to indicate to me that the players are working from a "team" mentality rather than focusing on the individual Issue for each protagonist.  One example I like to use is a football game conflict.  You've got several protagonists involved, and all of them want the team to win the game, but that's not the important thing.  This is the crucial bit:  hammering on the Issue for each protagonist is more important than the team's performance.  If you like, you and your players can decide up front whether the home team wins or loses.  Or you can say "Let's not make any stakes that decide the outcome of the game.  Whoever wins narration can decide that."

[Judd]

What were the characters' issues, Bret?

[Bret Gillan]

Tim,

I thought the scenes and the narrations and the conflicts and the stakes were great, but everyone was getting frustrated at the struggle that was required to GET all of those things. And hey, count me in on that - it was a new way of looking at a game, and it's not easy to go from "I pick the lock" to "I want to pick the lock so that my father will love me" (silly example I know). I think the problem was that the "hammering it out" phase was being looked at as a hoop to jump through rather than an actual, integral part of the game. I'm going to link the players to this, so maybe they can also provide some more insight.

Matt,

The survival example was actually from an explanatory discussion with Tom, so that was probably also a bad example since it wasn't actually an in-play one. But yeah, the fact that PTA is a very different kind of game made things uphill. Unfortunately, we tired out before we crested that hill.

Judd,

The Issues were:
Bob (The Sheriff) - Preserve law and order in the face of the end of everything we knew.
Jere (The Preacher) - How can one hold onto Faith when confronted by seeming abandonment by God.
Josh (The Outlaw) - Confronted by creatures more horrible than he ever was, guilt crept up and he faced spiralling into self-destruction.
Tom (The Barber) - Petty and greedy, the barber was trying to hold it all together and maintain control amidst the chaos.

[TonyLB]

Yeah, see ... I don't see how "Do I survive?" can be stakes for any of those Issues.  It is, I agree, a question that players might be interested in, but it's not relevant to their Issue, is it?

My sense is that the Sheriff doesn't get to ask "Do the townsfolk fend off the Zombie Hordes?"  He gets to ask "When the Zombie Hordes attack, do the townsfolk stick with each other or do they become wild, fearful animals unthinkingly destroying themselves and the fragile remnants of our society?"

The Preacher doesn't get to ask "Can I save this child?"  He gets to ask "Is there anything in what is happening that gives me reason to hope?"

Every single scene where a character has a conflict, that conflict should somehow be about their Issue.  And, therefore, it is extremely unlikely that people have the exact same conflict, no matter what the surface appearance would lead you to believe.  Does that make sense?

[John Harper]

Bret, take heart: PTA is hard for some gamers. Sometimes incredibly difficult. Sure, maybe you could have done some things differently as Producer, but I don't think the "failure" of the session was your fault.

Gamers have many unspoken assumptions about the way they enjoy their hobby. Toss them into the deep end of a very different way to play, and sometimes they sink.

Non-gamers almost never have this problem, because they come from the world of party games and board games -- in which you sit down and learn how to play before you start, then you play according to those rules you just learned. Most RPG players do nothing of the sort. They already "know how to roleplay" -- they just need to be told what to roll and how to make a character, right? Wrong.

A very frank discussion about the the point of PTA play, and how it's played is probably in order. Even so, this really may not be the game they want to play. Nothing wrong with that. You can find other people who do want to play a game like PTA. Continue on with the old group playing whatever they enjoy.

[John Harper]

I think everything Tony said is right, as long as the agenda of the scene is Character. When the agenda is Plot -- sure, you can have a "Do the zombies eat the townsfolk?" kind of conflict. No problem. That's why you specify an agenda up front. It lets everyone know what kinds of conflicts we should be aiming for.

[Bret Gillan]

Tony,

Yeah, I don't either, but keep in mind that the "Do I survive?" wasn't an Actual Play example of Stakes. I should've said that up front.  I should probably give some real examples here.

"Piss off the sheriff." - Outlaw
"Instill the fear of God in the townsfolk." - Preacher
"Keep any of the townsfolk from being harmed." - Sheriff
"Find a way to profit from this situation." - Barber

I think we all got the Stakes, though there was occasionally some iffiness on whether they related to Issues or not. It was just GETTING those Stakes that the players found sort of tiresome.

John,

Thanks. Yeah, I think that's what happened here. I still think that some of the players would enjoy it. I did do the serious discussion of PTA and what it was about before the game, but it was still a struggle in play. Even for me. I think that if we set up a campaign of it and worked through our struggles, eventually it would click. But also, some of the players might just not like it. Ever.

I've just done the "different style of game" before and did all right. PTA just seems to be a very radical departure from the "typical game." And I mean that in the most pleased of ways.

Also, your latest post reminded me of another problem that we had which was, once a scene was declared Character or Plot, knowing what to do with that once we hit the Conflict. But again, I think experience would sort that out.

[Jeremiah Lahnum]

I was one of the players in the session, I played the Preacher who's issue was faith. Bret encapsulated my concept pretty well so I won't elaborate on that.

My difficulty with the game mainly stemmed from the jump to conflict without allowing more time for scene framing and character interaction.  It seemed that once we jumped to conflict we stepped out of character and began discussing things amongst each other as players rather than characters.  Then we'd play the hand of cards to determine who got their stakes and who got the narration privileges.  It seemed overall we spent more time out of character than in character.

For me this was a stumbling block because if I'm constantly breaking character I'm not getting a chance to really feel out my character and understand him better.  Although I felt like my character and his issue were interesting, I really didn't feel like I was getting a chance to be that character.  Instead I felt more like I was manipulating that character and then watching the result play out.  Is that the point of PTA?  If so, perhaps that's why it's not jiving with me.  That would be a radically different sort of game than I'm used to.     

I have played Capes previous to this game, and that is similar in the shared narration and scene building.  Yet, I found that even though I didn't "own" a character in Capes, we still spent a good portion of time in character in Capes, and that the out of character interactions were secondary to the in character stuff.  Conversely PTA seemed to spend most of its time on out of character interactions and less time with the in character stuff.  Is this a problem in how we approached PTA, or is that pretty much how PTA is meant to be played? 

I will also say that fatigue played a large part in building the general frustration of the group,and I think the game died largely because we were too tired to work through our frustration.  Otherwise I would've been more inclined to work through it. 

All this being said, it is an interesting game and I'd at least like to give it another shot at some point and see if works better for me the second time around.

[Frank T]

It was just GETTING those Stakes that the players found sort of tiresome.

Absolutely. I am currently playing PtA on Wednesday evenings after some 11 hours at the office. The game is demanding. It's like, every single player has to put up an effort equal to the effort of a classic GM improvizing. You need to be awake. You need to be committed. It is highly rewarding, but it's also tough. The game provides a framework and tools for shaping powerful stories, but it needs you to you come up with the story engine. That's just the way it is.

If you take Dogs in the Vineyard or Polaris as a counter-example, these games already provide an engine for the story. In Dogs, you have the town creation rules and the very premise of the game to drive you, effortlessly, toward conflict and interesting scenes. In Polaris, you have all the aspects and the relationshipsvlaying out conflicts. In either case, you don't need to frame your own set-up, the game just takes you there.

Don't get me wrong, I really like PtA and have had some great games using it. But I can relate very well to Bret's group. I feel the same when I come home 8 p.m., take off my suit, pick up something to eat and then launch Skype to start playing straight away. There is a great reluctance to force my brain into the required action.

- Frank

P.S.: My opinion about conflict stakes and tying them to issues: Don't get all fuzzy about that. It's not like there's a penalty for not playing PtA narrativist or something. Just pick stakes that make for a cool scene whichever way the conflict turns out. That's enough.

[Frank T]

I really didn't feel like I was getting a chance to be that character. Instead I felt more like I was manipulating that character and then watching the result play out.  Is that the point of PTA?

Basically, yes. You can do as much acting as you like, but "being" the character is not the point.

- Frank