[PTA/Shadowrun] The Foundation; using PTA as a first session game

[Thomas D]

Previously, on Shadowrun:  Our group originally came together to play Shadowrun, but we didn't wind up with a successful campaign.  Shadowrun's default mode is the characters are a bunch of criminal mercenaries who commit crimes for money.  We started off in that mode, plopping them into a huge city-sprawl with the tag being they're all shadowrunners, go.  Even though we spent a game session to create our characters together, after several game sessions we had characters that really had no reason to be together plus we still had two characters that were nothing more than a collection of statistics.

During our break, I thought about what went wrong.  First of all, there was the whole concept of the campaign hook that was missing.  With such an open game setting, we had characters that would have fit into any type of Shadowrun campaign, just not in the same campaign.  Now while these characters were meaty we also had characters that were ciphers. Was this because they were dropped into this open world with so many choices of what to be, the choices were overwhelming and they eventually chose nothing?  Or that they chose their characters based on ability and what they could do in the game, personality being an afterthought?

I came across Primetime Adventures.  I needed a good premise for the campaign and PTA got me that.  For the character sheet only players, I hoped having them pick an issue would lead to more character depth. Boy, did it ever.

We started off by e-mail, describing what the concept of the campaign would be -- they're all members of the Acquisitions Department of the Atlantean Foundation.  Take  Alias and The Unit, add in a healthy splash of Indiana Jones, and mix an equal amount of Hellboy/B.P.R.D.  We'll be playing Shadowrun, I said, but we'll be starting off using PTA. 

The dice mechanic:
At our next game session (D&D), I gave an overview of PTA, but using dice instead of cards.  (It would have been an impossible sell to throw up this strange new game and tell them "oh, and I'll be taking your dice away too".)  The dice mechanic worked out rather well.  My thought from this game is if you want to transition gamers from D&D-like games, use dice instead of cards.  I've seen the first edition rules where Matt used d10s, where you count odds as successes.  From what I understood, picking out odds from evens slowed the game down too much; it was easier and faster to distinguish between red and black cards.  But the problem really isn't picking out odds and evens, it's the die that Matt suggested to play with.

We went with d20s.  1-10 was a hit, 11-20 was a miss.  Picking out the single digit hits on a mass of rolled d20s was superfast.  There was no noticeable lag when rolls of 10 showed up.  If the producer and protagonist tied for hits, we'd compare the hit dice for odds/evens, with most odds getting the win.  If we're still tied, we start looking for the lowest odd die (and then the next if that was a tie) and then have a roll-off if we can't determine a winner at that point.  With about six to eight conflicts, we had to look for the lowest odd die only twice.  On one of those times, the lowest was tied, so we looked at the next-lowest die.  This didn't seem to impede play.

For fan mail, we just checked to see if the roll was odd or even to determine if it was removed from the game or returned to the director's budget.

My players loved rolling dice.

Cool stuff:
Going through character creation and getting the players to boil their character concepts down to two traits (or in the case of two players up from one to two).  With one player who wanted a courier (somewhat based on Johnny Mnemonic) kept coming up with things he'd like his character to do, they all fit under the "Courier" edge.  We threw in "Son of a Diplomat" and he latched onto that, inventing a ton of background for the character. 

Forcing players to pick issues and having the conflicts revolve around those. When we created characters, I saved the issue choosing for last. "Here is where the game forces you to role-play your character," were the words I used.  Suddenly layering in "grief", "new kid on the block", and "everyone thinks I'm a jarhead" really let the characters develop well (even though the player that picked grief didn't have that issue impact anything until the very end conflict and even then, it really felt like we were stretching it).

During the early part of the game, some of the players were still thinking of conflicts as pass/fail options -- if I succeed, I win the argument; if I fail, I don't -- instead of framing them around the character's issue.  That argument conflict came up as our second conflict in the game.  The situation involved two protagonists -- Shay and Richard, the new kid on the block -- interacting with a producer-controlled character (Jaxson) that was gloating over a third protagonist's actions (that one almost got kicked off the team).  Instead of "I win/lose the argument", we shaped it to revolve around the new kid on the block issue.  Either way, Richard would win the argument and Jaxson would slink away. We put the stakes around Shay. If Richard won, Shay would be impressed with the new kid.  If Richard lost, Shay would think that he was trying to suck up to her.

We started going around the table for scene suggestions but on the third scene when one of the players was a bit lost for a scene, another one chimed in with a great character building scene.  That player was the one I thought would have been most reluctant to play the game but man, he was in the game big time.

Another awesome scene suggestion.  We got to Fade's player and he suggested a scene between Shay and Richard.  I thought the rules said you had to suggest a scene that featured your protagonist, but we were so jazzed on how the game went, we just rolled with it. 

Splitting up a group just plain sucks in other games, but not here.  Fade and Whitehawk were breaking into a house while Shay and Richard were chasing down a drone.  We were able to get the essence of both major actions done in just a few minutes and keep the story moving.  If we were played with the straight SR4 ruleset, we're talking about a good hour with all the minutia of sneaking, scanning, hacking, tracing, and movement.  Plus, we'd put half the group to sleep when we dealt with the other half of the group.

Fan mail was slow to start moving, but after about the halfway mark when people remembered to give it to others, it started flying around the table.  I kept pointing out that there's a pile there to be passed around the table.  They finally realized that it's fun to have those poker chips zip all over the place.

Aftermath:
PTA accomplished my main goal of getting characters that were better developed than in prior games.  We also came up with several NPCs and a good idea how the characters relate to the company.  The players commented that they liked a lot of what happened in the game and wanted some of that to appear in our Shadowrun game, even though we're going to use the SR4 rules our core. (Like I mentioned earlier, they like rolling dice.  They also want more granularity of action than PTA gave us, but a bit less than what SR4 has.)

Primetime Adventures is the perfect game system for the first game session of any campaign.  If I ever run a Dungeons & Dragons game, the first game session will be played with PTA.

[Matt Wilson]

Hey Thomas. Thanks for posting. Glad you had fun.

You'll have to let us know how things go after you switch back to the SR4 rules. I have to say I'm totally fascinated with that plan.

[REkz]

Thomas & Matt,

I'm a huge SR fan.  HUGE!  I love the genre, the setting, the backstory ...
But SR4 rules ... blow.  So do SR3 and prior, but they all have this amazing world going on.
And it never worked right!  It was impossible to get Magic, hacking, and combat all on the same time.
But chuck that whole thing into PTA, and you've got REAL technomagic happening, eh?

The beauty of PTA for SR games is that if your character 'hacks someone's PAN'
(I'm using SR4 pseudo-tech-talk here, 'PAN' is personal area network) you resolve the conflict
in 2 sec's and then describe what you want to do. 
BOOM BOOM and into the next room!

Frankly, in PTA I think there's a lot LESS possibility of min/max'ing
and finagling all kinds of stuff out of the rules system than in SR 4.
(Altho I did have 1 character who played "Burned Out Soldier"
and "Street Combat Expert" as two of his 3 traits.  Seems like he's the fight guy.
I would've hassled him, but if you watch a Van Damme film,
he barely has any non-combat background either...  Or talent.  HA HA)

I was playing an SR4 game where 2 min-max'ing mages had worked
their unbalanced characters so they could cast most force 4 spells
and not even roll ANY drain.  So instead of having any real uncertainty,
there was pretty much NO tension in the game.

PTA keeps the game moving, helps KEEP conflict in the game,
and while your cyber spurs may not have any rules to back them up,
you can ice 10 villains in a 2 minute scene and not have the game slow down at all!

And is it REALLY so uncertain if your PC is going to win the conflict?
So how about just blowing thru the obstacles and getting into that
encounter with the nasty boss (possibly even nastier than the SR4 rules
if the producer throws budget in).

So, 'The Foundation' is the name of the show?  Hmmm...

I like it.   :)

And I think your dice idea is very bright.  DIG IT. 
(I prefer dice to cards any day!)

[Thomas D]

Oh, I forgot another cool bit. 

Brian is playing Fade.  Fade acts like a jerk to his supervisor and nearly gets himself thrown off the mission in the very first scene.  The other players kept suggesting that Fade apologize, but Brian doesn't have him do that.  In a later scene with him and his supervisor, another player spends a bit of Fan Mail to add to Fade's stakes roll.  Fade apologizes, but Brian says that he decided to apologize because of the Fan Mail.  He interpreted that action from another player as Fade finally taking the other's suggestions to heart.

[DAudy]

Totally awesome.  Like REkz I love the setting and feel that it has sooooo much potential but that the rules don't support playing a fast paced game full of intrigue and danger.  I had never considered using PTA in lieu of another system to get the game started but it is a really darn cool idea.  I might have to steal it 8-).

Also the dice idea is gold, people get really funny sometimes if you ask them to put the dice away.  This deals very cleverly with this problem and avoids the seek time issues that first edition PTA had.

Splitting up a group just plain sucks in other games, but not here.  Fade and Whitehawk were breaking into a house while Shay and Richard were chasing down a drone.  We were able to get the essence of both major actions done in just a few minutes and keep the story moving.  If we were played with the straight SR4 ruleset, we're talking about a good hour with all the minutia of sneaking, scanning, hacking, tracing, and movement.  Plus, we'd put half the group to sleep when we dealt with the other half of the group.

Agreed that splitting up the group and working through multiple avenues of combat, hacking, infiltration, etc can slow the game to a boring drag and completely lose the mood.  Given that it seemed to work so well for you, have you considered talking to your players about continuing the game using PTA rather than switching to SR4 rules?  It sounded like they really got into it and enjoyed being able to actually accomplish something without boring their friends to tears.  See what they think because from the sounds of your group you could get a high stakes, energized, and tense game if you keep with it.

Since I don't know your group I've got a couple questions since I'm wondering how PTA compares with SR4 in several ways.

1. Could you give me an idea of how much more or less time (in session preferably) the scenes would have taken if you had run them using SR4 rules?

2.  Did you get any scenes that were unlikely to have occured using SR4 rules or would the same sorts of things happened just with different resolution?

3.  Did anyone get to do anything cool in a scene that wouldn't have been possible strictly using SR4 rules?  Conversely was there anything someone felt they were prevented from doing by using PTA that they could have done using SR4?

Thanks for sharing your game experience with us.

Cheers,
Dan

[Thomas D]

While I wouldn't mind continuing with PTA as our game system, the players want something a bit more dice-rolly.  They wanted some task resolution rather than conflict resolution (despite them having fun with a game that featured conflict resolution).  I have a feeling it's a bit of "we've got a ruleset that came with the setting" thing.  My wife, who seems to never roll well, was still concerned with a resolution system where there's just one roll to settle, say, a combat scene.  If she blows the roll, she's thinking she'll be completely useless in that scene.  But if there were multiple tasks invovled -- say, several rounds of combat and several rolls to hit -- the law of very many dice rolls states that she'll have some positive impact on the scene.  They all really seem to want the dice to dictate their characters fate in nearly every way, rather than stating a desired outcome and working to achieve that. 

It might be easier to explain the last sentence with an example.  I'll expand one from the first post here:

There's a discussion that's building to an insult fest.  An outsider is insulting the group; the character Richard wants to argue with the other person.  They initially approached it as social combat, probably a Negotiation opposed test. (There's really no skill in SR that accomplishes this.)  So if Richard won, he won the argument.  If he lost, the other person would have won.  Instead, we used PTA stakes and Richard's issue of being the new kid in the group.  In this case, we said regardless of if he won or lost the conflict, he'd win the argument.  The big thing here would have been with how he was perceived by the other members of the team.  If he won, they would see that he was standing up for his comrades even if he didn't know them very well.  If he lost, they would think that his flattery was false, that he was just trying to suck up to the group.

In one scene, we had the rigger try to hack into the opposition's vehicle.  In SR, this would have required a few dice rolls to complete the task and we'd have some description about the VR of the interior of the van and there'd be all the things that the hacker wanted to do inside the vehicle, and then, probably about twenty minutes later in the game session, we'd get on with it.  While this is cool for the rigger player, this is mindnumbingly boring for the other players.  In PTA, there's no character issue involved in hacking into the other van.  It just happens.  So that's twenty minutes saved, and we're on with our game.

The segment that would have taken the longest in-game would have been the split scene.  While half of the group broke into the chateau, the other half were on a soccer field trying to recover a downed drone.  Game-prep, I'd have to come up with the security systems for the chateau and possible responses to the break in, the drone's stats, character bits (stats and vehicles) for the opposition on the soccer field, and probably a bit more.  The sneak into the chateau would have probably taken another twenty minutes, so we're looking at around forty-five minutes of game time resolving breaking and entering and a vehicle hacking bit.  This all took maybe ten minutes in the PTA game.  If there was some combat in either location, we're talking anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half of game time.  I'm thinking we'd tack on five more minutes to the PTA game.

Scenes that would have likely not been done using SR4 rules?  One of the players decided to have a flashback scene to an NPC which revealed that the anyiquities collector was scamming the Foundation, planning on keeping the money and keeping the artifact.  In my initial five minute prep for the game, the collector was a straight shooter.  They changed the bad guy of the game session from the nameless opposition to a person they met. 

There were several character-building scenes at the start of the game session where one of the players realized that his character acted as a surrogate big brother to another character.  This probably wouldn't have come about if we had been playing straight SR4 ruleset. 

To answer your last question(s): We really didn't do that much magical, astral, or matrix stuff, so we didn't push the edges of what would bend the rules of SR4.   With the wide open resolution system in place in PTA, I have a hard time conceiving of anything that can be done using the SR4 ruleset that you can't do in PTA.

[Joel P. Shempert]

Hi, Thomas,

My wife, who seems to never roll well, was still concerned with a resolution system where there's just one roll to settle, say, a combat scene.  If she blows the roll, she's thinking she'll be completely useless in that scene.  But if there were multiple tasks invovled -- say, several rounds of combat and several rolls to hit -- the law of very many dice rolls states that she'll have some positive impact on the scene.

As someone who suffers from this affliction, I can understand how your wife feels. And on paper it certainly looks like this would be the case. However, in my experience, when you're rolling tons of dice over and over to resolve a scene, there's a lot of chance to negate any successes you might have, whether it's a case of your own failure setting you back in the progress you were making toward your goal ("OK, last turn I successfuly grappled with him, now I'm going to disarm." "Ooh, fumble! You slip and he turns the tables on you, with the weapon at your throat!"), or other players' actions stepping on your toes ("OK, I've hit him twice with my sword now, once more oughtta do it." "Oh, Player X's Flaming Sphere just incinerated him five times over." "Well, shit, why'd I bother hitting him at all?" Or worse: "Now that I've got his attention, I'm going to try to convince him to renounce his path of vengeance." "Oh, Player X's Flaming Sphere just incinerated him five times over." "AAAARGH!"). Especially if you're failing more than not, the net result isn't going to be terribly effective, especially if characters' goals are more complex than "all of us beat all of them."

Now sure, with a one-roll system, if you faul, you're sunk, for the whole conflict. But honestly, that seems to me to be simply a case of taking your medicine in one gulp, rather than a sip at a time. I know the "sip method," from bitter experience, and not only do you still end up feeling dissatisfied with your character's effectiveness, it takes you a couple of hours to get there. It can be excruciating. If you fail with the one-shot conflict roll, sure, fine, but it takes, as you said, five minutes, you can take your lumps and go on to the NEXT conflict. And fail that too, maybe, but still, if you're rolling for shit, you're rolling for shit.

Another point: as you described in your group's play, PTA conflicts aren't ABOUT what the task resolution in Shadowrun is about. So "useless in a scene" would only be an conflict if the char's issue was "am I useless" or some such. in which case, it's AWESOME to fail a lot, leading to gut-wrenching after gut-wrenching scene of the PC's crippling self-doubt and depression. Culminating, maybe, in redemption, or maybe in ultimate despair. But "Oh shit, having fun means hitting a lot of guys with my autocannon, and I just can't hit anyone to save my life, so I'm not having much fun" goes straight out the window. No matter which way the conflicts go, it's win-win. And if you or the other players really WANT your PC to cach a break, of course there's fanmail.

Anyway, panning back to the larger issue of the whole group, it's interesting to me that they're gung-ho to go back to SR rules when they've had a very positive experience with this session that was ONLY possible while using this different ruleset. Of course, if they really wanna play this versus that, there's no changing that. I admit that I wouldn't want to run PTA for EVERYthing, just for variety's sake, though it does WORK to run about anything, just with its own unique focus. And this should be your big payoff in terms of discovering if PTA works for this kind of "jumpstart" play. I just wonder if the stuff your group experienced as fun while running PTA will carry over at all when running SR rules. Good luck. I look forward to hearing how it turns out, any which way.

Peace,
-Joel

[DAudy]

I can understand that feeling of wanting to have the dice determine what happens to the characters.  I still suffer from that affliction on occassion, though my experience suggests that it is often caused by the dissapointment from being unable to focus on character or theme.  Hopefully as your players get some more experience with this style of roleplaying they will feel more comfortable taking the reins to tell the story that they want.

I hope that even with the transition to SR4 rules that you and your players can carry over the cool character development stuff.  Let us know how it goes after a session or three, I'm really interested to see how this turns out.

Cheers,
-Dan

[Thomas D]

Well, we've had one game sesssion so far, and while I'll do a bit of an actual AP post sometime tomorrow, the word of the day is "slower".  Six hours of gaming which included just over two hours of character generation (even with characters pretty much fleshed out between game session).  So, something under four hours of play using the Shadowrun ruleset and we wound up at about the same point in the story we got to using about an hour's worth of play using PTA. 

[Jhulae]

The dice mechanic:
At our next game session (D&D), I gave an overview of PTA, but using dice instead of cards.  (It would have been an impossible sell to throw up this strange new game and tell them "oh, and I'll be taking your dice away too".)  The dice mechanic worked out rather well.  My thought from this game is if you want to transition gamers from D&D-like games, use dice instead of cards.  I've seen the first edition rules where Matt used d10s, where you count odds as successes.  From what I understood, picking out odds from evens slowed the game down too much; it was easier and faster to distinguish between red and black cards.  But the problem really isn't picking out odds and evens, it's the die that Matt suggested to play with.

We went with d20s.  1-10 was a hit, 11-20 was a miss.  Picking out the single digit hits on a mass of rolled d20s was superfast.  There was no noticeable lag when rolls of 10 showed up.  If the producer and protagonist tied for hits, we'd compare the hit dice for odds/evens, with most odds getting the win.  If we're still tied, we start looking for the lowest odd die (and then the next if that was a tie) and then have a roll-off if we can't determine a winner at that point.  With about six to eight conflicts, we had to look for the lowest odd die only twice.  On one of those times, the lowest was tied, so we looked at the next-lowest die.  This didn't seem to impede play.

For fan mail, we just checked to see if the roll was odd or even to determine if it was removed from the game or returned to the director's budget.

My players loved rolling dice.

Based on this, wouldn't Ubiquity Dice be the perfect kind of die to roll, since they're basically d2s which is the system PTA uses?  That'd be even easier than a d20, I bet.