Observations and Questions on our first PTA attempt

[The Mule]

First, off, Hello World!
PTA was highly spoken of by a friend of mine, so I've decided to take the leap from Dungeons and Dragons into nontraditional games!

I bought the book and have gathered several of my friends who have seemed dissatisfied with DnD, or interested in alternatives.  We've just had our first "Usability Test", which is basically a totally noncommittal pilot where we've just tried to wrap our heads around it.

I wrote up a transcript, basically, but upon inspection the Actual Play forum discourages just *transcripts* as opposed to examinations of social dynamics.  Since right now we're more curious about the system as opposed to the player dynamic, I figured I'd refrain from posting that up now, but I still have several questions and observations.

Fanmail:
1. The first question *every* player has when I mention fanmail is "Couldn't you just game the system?", to which my reply is "If you can come up with something plausable, it's good for everyone to get fanmail flowing."
2. MnMs do not make good fanmail tokens, even the large peanut butter ones.  I figured getting to eat the discarded ones would be an amusing way to mitigate the sadness of failure, but people were understandably discouraged by the amount of handling the tokens recieved.

Conflicts:
From pouring through the PTA forums I've really had it drilled into me that Conflict is about the Issue.  In play, however, I think I might have gone a little too far with this, as especially at first it came across as forcing the characters to be one dimensional, where every situation boiled down to "Do I resist my issue?"

There were also a lot of similar conflicts, as everyone's issue involved the group dynamic and so whenever they tried to act together their issues would clash in pretty much the same manner.

Stud's player found his traits like "Motorcycle" to be difficult to apply to situations involving "Temptation".  He was wondering if *any* conflict could really utilize traits like this with my interpretation of stake formulation tying so closly to issue.  My best response was perhaps an issue like "identity crisis" or "self esteem", or basically any issue where how cool the character looks is important.

There was some discussion about why I was discouraging using the conflict mechanics to resolve the outcome of things like battles, which I defended with the notion that this was a TV show; they weren't going to *lose*, and even if they did it would be fluff and not central to the character's stories, which is what the conflict mechanics were there to handle.

I'm not rock solid on this, however.  There *are* examples in the book, such as the Spies for Hire - Car Chase, when one character's issue is "dealing with frustration over painful divorce" and has stakes in a car chase conflict "avoid collateral damage".

It states that the connection is unclear, but she's playing support so it doesn't matter much.  My interpretation has been that if it doesn't matter much, it's not in the hands of the conflict mechanic, which seems at odds with this.

Stud's player pondered perhaps having chosen an issue like "am I strong enough?" which would allow him to use the conflict mechanic to determine the outcome of fights.

I do agree that character development seemed a little one dimensional with my intense focus on "issue", though perhaps that is a result of lackluster plot framing causing repetative situations of conflict.

Plot Development:
Actual play seemed to diverge from the stated show Premise.  With our inexperience at distributed narrative authority and the particulars of creative responsiblity during play, there was a bit of fumbling around.  Hopefully this will change with experience and more careful attention paid to Scene Agenda construction and execution.

I am eager for input from those more experienced with the system! 

[Matt Wilson]

Hey The Mule:

Thanks for posting. Here's some thoughts for you.

The first question *every* player has when I mention fanmail is "Couldn't you just game the system?"

My answer to this question, of course, is "to what end?" Fan Mail is like saying, "I thought that was cool. Thanks for being cool." If you give it away no matter what, you're only keeping the other players from knowing what you really like.

In play, however, I think I might have gone a little too far with this, as especially at first it came across as forcing the characters to be one dimensional, where every situation boiled down to "Do I resist my issue?"

"Resist the issue" as a phrase is sending up red flags for me, but we'd be better served if you posted some actual examples of play. You can totally do this in the AP forum. Just remember to include some metagame information.

Stud's player found his traits like "Motorcycle" to be difficult to apply to situations involving "Temptation".

If the protagonist has a motorcycle, the other players need to make sure that there are conflicts that involve the motorcycle. Imagine a conflict where temptation comes up during a harrowing chase. The motorcycle is still useful. Again, though, stop by AP and post what happened, and you'll get mucho feedback from me and others.

Actual play seemed to diverge from the stated show Premise.  With our inexperience at distributed narrative authority and the particulars of creative responsiblity during play, there was a bit of fumbling around.  Hopefully this will change with experience and more careful attention paid to Scene Agenda construction and execution.

I think that's the case. In fact, I can't think of a game or other activity where the first time wasn't kind of fumbly.

[The Mule]

"Resist the issue" as a phrase is sending up red flags for me, but we'd be better served if you posted some actual examples of play. You can totally do this in the AP forum. Just remember to include some metagame information.

Done.  The transcript itself was pretty long (to my eyes, at least) even before I included the player information.  Hopefully it is still managable.

Thank you for the comments!