In our recent play, we experienced a few problems. The game was still fun, but questions were raised.

Scene Requests: how much authority do the players have here? Can they call for a scene in such a way that it creates in-game facts?
For example, we had a player request a scene in which he discovered a group of marines were actually traitors. Is this kosher?

Transparancy of Plot: does the Producer have authority to declare - "these details are true - your narration must build on this." For example, in Dust Devils there is the adventure: The Hanged Man, which the GM is expected to let the players read before play begins. So they know the full backstory, and in play decide what the story is in response to that. Is this kind of thing okay in PtA, or is the GM expected to leave most everything open for collaborative creation in play?

Scope of Narration: the person who narrates a conflict has to incorporate the various wins and losses of stakes as determined by the draw, but how much can he add on top of that?

Scene Requests 2: one thing we found was that many scenes seemed to lead directly to an obvious conflict. So the player would request a scene, stating certain things. Then the Producer would basically set the scene and just repeat that stuff. And we’d do a conflict. Nearly all of our scenes were like that, and the producer's scene-setting was superfluous. Are we doing something wrong? How do I make the producer's role a bit meatier here?
I know this question has come up before - and I suspect that the way some groups end up letting players frame scenes, rather than the Producer, is a symptom of this. I'm looking for advice on how to do it 'properly' and avoid drifting into 'players frame scenes'.

Collaboration or Buck Stops Here? One of our conflicts was player v player, in which one player wanted to kill a bunch of prisoners and another wanted to keep them alive to be handed over for to the law. If the killer won narration, he could have described the other giving in and joining in - that didn't happen, but it strikes me that it could have been highly unsatisfactory result for that player. So, should conflicts with unpalatable stakes be off-limits? Should players agree before the cards are drawn that certain conflict outcomes can't happen? Kind of like the trollbabe Fair & Clear stage.

Fan Mail anecdote: Not a question, but an anecdote. At one point, one of the players said something like, "I bribe him with a fan mail so he can spend it on me." (This was the player who was suspicious of Fan Mail when he first heard about it.) I flat out refused to allow that - and read out again the passage in the book about fan mail. But it was funny in an exasperating way - if a GM had been so blatantly self-serving in the way he awarded experience points, that player would have been first to complain.

Final Conflict: the final conflict of our session was pretty complex. The players had a prisoner who had threatened the survival of a colony. Two players wanted her taken back for justice, another wanted her executed, another wanted her handed over to the colonists whose lives her plot had threatened. So far so good - they all rolled against the Producer. But if they all succeeded, they couldn't all get their stakes - what happens here? If the players compared their successes against each other, it would be easy.

As an added complication, a fifth player (call him Gary) wanted to help the two who wanted to take her back for justice, so that she wasn't handed over to the colonists or executed, but at the first opportunity would secretly help her escape.
Should I have rolled this intention into the single conflict or done it as a separate conflict afterwards?
How do I handle this kind of nightmare?

Whoa. Them's a lot of questions. I'll try to hack at them one by one.

Scene Requests: how much authority do the players have here? Can they call for a scene in such a way that it creates in-game facts?
For example, we had a player request a scene in which he discovered a group of marines were actually traitors. Is this kosher?

Transparancy of Plot: does the Producer have authority to declare - "these details are true - your narration must build on this." For example, in Dust Devils there is the adventure: The Hanged Man, which the GM is expected to let the players read before play begins. So they know the full backstory, and in play decide what the story is in response to that. Is this kind of thing okay in PtA, or is the GM expected to leave most everything open for collaborative creation in play?

Scope of Narration: the person who narrates a conflict has to incorporate the various wins and losses of stakes as determined by the draw, but how much can he add on top of that?

Scene Requests 2: one thing we found was that many scenes seemed to lead directly to an obvious conflict. So the player would request a scene, stating certain things. Then the Producer would basically set the scene and just repeat that stuff. And we’d do a conflict. Nearly all of our scenes were like that, and the producer's scene-setting was superfluous. Are we doing something wrong? How do I make the producer's role a bit meatier here?

I know this question has come up before - and I suspect that the way some groups end up letting players frame scenes, rather than the Producer, is a symptom of this. I'm looking for advice on how to do it 'properly' and avoid drifting into 'players frame scenes'.

Collaboration or Buck Stops Here? One of our conflicts was player v player, in which one player wanted to kill a bunch of prisoners and another wanted to keep them alive to be handed over for to the law. If the killer won narration, he could have described the other giving in and joining in - that didn't happen, but it strikes me that it could have been highly unsatisfactory result for that player. So, should conflicts with unpalatable stakes be off-limits? Should players agree before the cards are drawn that certain conflict outcomes can't happen? Kind of like the trollbabe Fair & Clear stage.

Fan Mail anecdote: Not a question, but an anecdote. At one point, one of the players said something like, "I bribe him with a fan mail so he can spend it on me." (This was the player who was suspicious of Fan Mail when he first heard about it.) I flat out refused to allow that - and read out again the passage in the book about fan mail. But it was funny in an exasperating way - if a GM had been so blatantly self-serving in the way he awarded experience points, that player would have been first to complain.

Final Conflict: the final conflict of our session was pretty complex. The players had a prisoner who had threatened the survival of a colony. Two players wanted her taken back for justice, another wanted her executed, another wanted her handed over to the colonists whose lives her plot had threatened. So far so good - they all rolled against the Producer. But if they all succeeded, they couldn't all get their stakes - what happens here? If the players compared their successes against each other, it would be easy.

As an added complication, a fifth player (call him Gary) wanted to help the two who wanted to take her back for justice, so that she wasn't handed over to the colonists or executed, but at the first opportunity would secretly help her escape.
Should I have rolled this intention into the single conflict or done it as a separate conflict afterwards?
How do I handle this kind of nightmare?

The characters are described in the first post, here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=16722.0, though there's not much actual detail on their issues there. Here's a bit more detail:

The two who wanted to take the villain back for justice:
Captain Hanina Parion: This is straightforward. She's basically insecure about her leadership abilities, at least in part because of her privileged background.
Engineer Brent: He was raised as part of a clone family, and certain expectations were placed upon him, but he was always a bit of a misfit, never really fitting in anywhere. He wants to be accepted, to make a family of his own - can he make a life for himself outside the protective creche?
The one who wanted to kill, kill, kill:
Security Officer Nathan: He has struggled against authority all of his life, so he wants the freedom to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Basically, he needs to grow up - balance necessary authority/responsibility v individual rights & freedoms. (He's also a veteran ex-marine type, and so killing enemy combatants if they pose a threat is not hard for him - he's not actually portrayed as bloodthirsty, just expedient.)
The one who wanted to hand her over to the colonists:
Jack the Pilot: He's a hotshot pilot, and it has led to great things for him. But he was recently accused of cheating in a yacht race, and lost most of the respect he had gained. Now he wants to prove that he is more than just a pilot - that there is more to him than just that. Incidentally, this character was also raised in the region on a back-to-basics colony, so he had strong sympathies with the colonists.
The one who wanted to appear to help the captain, while helping the captive escape:
Alex the Manipulative Medic: He's an idealist. He was born to greatness (a very powerful family), but rejected the corruption that went with it, and is on a secret and grandiose (megalomaniac) crusade to make the universe a better place. How far will he go, what price will he pay?

Incidentally, Alex was helping the villainess here because he fancied her, and was attracted to her scheming nature - a kindred spirit, and a worthy adversary.

Have I given enough information?

On your earlier answers: yes, I would have liked to have a spatula to hand at one point. You said:

Fix your stakes. Make them about the protagonists, and not about the scene. In that conflict you describe above, there's no way for both protagonists to get what they want, and there should be.

Darren wrote:
Scene Requests 2: one thing we found was that many scenes seemed to lead directly to an obvious conflict. So the player would request a scene, stating certain things. Then the Producer would basically set the scene and just repeat that stuff. And we’d do a conflict. Nearly all of our scenes were like that, and the producer's scene-setting was superfluous. Are we doing something wrong? How do I make the producer's role a bit meatier here?
I know this question has come up before - and I suspect that the way some groups end up letting players frame scenes, rather than the Producer, is a symptom of this. I'm looking for advice on how to do it 'properly' and avoid drifting into 'players frame scenes'.

Hm, not sure how to make this work with what I just said, but part of the way out, I think, is to remember that this should be a show everyone would watch. So, when the scenes don't click, maybe ask, "What kind of scene would make me watch this show? What do we do to get that kind of scene?"

Does that make sense?

-Lisa

On your earlier answers: yes, I would have liked to have a spatula to hand at one point. You said:

Fix your stakes. Make them about the protagonists, and not about the scene. In that conflict you describe above, there's no way for both protagonists to get what they want, and there should be.

I'm not sure how to do that. In that scene where one wanted to kill the captives and the other wanted them to live, how should I have handled that? Thinking of stakes the PtA way is hard for me - I can't even begin to think how that scene could have gone differently.
(Note: Nathan's player won, and narrated the death of the prisoners in a way that didn't compromise the other character, so it turned out okay - in that instance. But if I don't figure out how to set stakes the PtA way, that kind of situation will keep cropping up.)

(Behold th ecurse of Fred and I haveing very similar online times.  Or possibly being the same person)

Ok, I'm still scratching my head.  More or less on a dare from Fred, I intend to be as rigorously by the book as I can manage next time i try, and this exchange is making it clear that I simply do not unerstand how to run things by the book when player's goals are directly in conflict.

I could probably find even better examples, but for sake of commonality, I'm goign to turn to the book, and the conflict with Roxy and Billy on page 60+.

Now, their stakes (Impress her friends vs Impress his father) are not completely at odds, but the framing of the scene makes it clear that they have been put at odds by the conflict of whether Roxy stays and parties or Billy takes her home.  Given that, how does the scene resolve if both Roxy and Billy's player's beat the producer?

As it stands, it seems like whoever narrates has a responsibility to come up with an explanation that allows Roxy to impress her friends yet also allows Billy to impress his Father, and the only way I can see that being done is by the narrator, in some way, discarding the premise of the conflict.  For example, Roxy might elude Billy, but Billy saves a little old lady as he's walking home and it witnessed by his Father, earning a "Thattaboy".  I coudl see that working out for the occaisional exception, but it seems to violate the idea of scope, and more, it's kind of contrived, and I admit that goes down th epath of shows not to watch. Also, frankly, this is a situation where the conflict is easier to get around than many of the other examples I've seen brought up, so  contriving an explanation becomes an even less satisfying resolution as the conflict becomes more clear cut.

An alternative would be to say that there's something wrong with the example, and the protagonists need to set their stakes so they can both succeed, but for the nonce, I'm goign to assume it's a valid example.

So what's the third option I'm missing?  How should it play out?

-Rob D.

Rob wrote:
I could probably find even better examples, but for sake of commonality, I'm goign to turn to the book, and the conflict with Roxy and Billy on page 60+.

Now, their stakes (Impress her friends vs Impress his father) are not completely at odds, but the framing of the scene makes it clear that they have been put at odds by the conflict of whether Roxy stays and parties or Billy takes her home.  Given that, how does the scene resolve if both Roxy and Billy's player's beat the producer?

As it stands, it seems like whoever narrates has a responsibility to come up with an explanation that allows Roxy to impress her friends yet also allows Billy to impress his Father, and the only way I can see that being done is by the narrator, in some way, discarding the premise of the conflict.  For example, Roxy might elude Billy, but Billy saves a little old lady as he's walking home and it witnessed by his Father, earning a "Thattaboy".  I coudl see that working out for the occaisional exception, but it seems to violate the idea of scope, and more, it's kind of contrived, and I admit that goes down th epath of shows not to watch. Also, frankly, this is a situation where the conflict is easier to get around than many of the other examples I've seen brought up, so  contriving an explanation becomes an even less satisfying resolution as the conflict becomes more clear cut.

An alternative would be to say that there's something wrong with the example, and the protagonists need to set their stakes so they can both succeed, but for the nonce, I'm goign to assume it's a valid example.

So what's the third option I'm missing?  How should it play out?

-Rob D.

Hi Rob,

Well I believe--rigorously by the book--only the stakes matter in the roll (Impress her friends vs Impress his father). Whether they stay or go is incidental and not carved in stone.  That's just the "how" of achieving the stakes.

So the person who wins narration gets the final say on how everything plays out, as long as the stakes won or lost are achieved as rolled.  If the narrator has trouble coming up with ideas, the group is welcome to brainstorm.  I'm not sure if the revised rules say it, but winning narration doesn't mean everyone shuts up and waits for the narrators brilliant explanation.  No, players can give suggestions and the narrator can ask for them; then the narrator has final say on what happens.

Alan wrote:
So the person who wins narration gets the final say on how everything plays out, as long as the stakes won or lost are achieved as rolled.  If the narrator has trouble coming up with ideas, the group is welcome to brainstorm.  I'm not sure if the revised rules say it, but winning narration doesn't mean everyone shuts up and waits for the narrators brilliant explanation.  No, players can give suggestions and the narrator can ask for them; then the narrator has final say on what happens.

You're quite right, Fred, on all counts - that is counter to the text (I'cve read Matt point it out many times), and those are the issues we are digging around.

In the example, I can imagine both players winning.  The narrator then gets to explain how one character impresses her friends while the other impresses her father.  Even if one is trying to impress friends by sniping at dad, something can happen to turn things around so both ends are achieved.  I don't see the contradiction.

I wonder if this search for contradiction isn't getting too hypothetical?  Has this really happened in play?

Alan, have a look back at my first post in this thread. I list two examples, bothj of which occurred in my first session, and one of which involved four possible entirely contradictory outcomes.

Alan wrote:
In the example, I can imagine both players winning.  The narrator then gets to explain how one character impresses her friends while the other impresses her father.  Even if one is trying to impress friends by sniping at dad, something can happen to turn things around so both ends are achieved.  I don't see the contradiction.

I wonder if this search for contradiction isn't getting too hypothetical?  Has this really happened in play?

Lisa wrote:

Darren wrote:
Scene Requests 2: one thing we found was that many scenes seemed to lead directly to an obvious conflict. <snip>

I had this problem, too. There are, I think, three reasons for it.

1. We didn't realize that the person setting the scene should be pretty much hands-off after saying, "Location X, Plot/Character, General Agenda".

2. Exactly what an agenda should encompass was not, and may still not be clear to us.

3. Possibly a subcategory of 2. If things are too vague, that is, if you've got the hands-off approach, this is when the players and producer may look around and go, "Um, well, we know what the conflict should logically be. We don't know anything else, and no ideas are springing to mind. Okay, go conflict. Flip those cards." This is a problem because it loses the meat and potatoes of the game, the actual interaction. The mechanics are there to assist, not replace it, correct?

I'm going to reiterate a little bit, because the point was that the example could be an example of this sort of problem, even though it wasn't a very good one.  If the answer is "It's impossible for there to be an impossible-to-resolve-interestingly conflict between stakes" then it might be worth running through specific examples.  I am proceeding from the assumption that there can be a genuine an d problematic conflict, and I consider it a sufficiently self evident point that I don't feel a strong need to get deep into specific examples.  As the example cited illustrates, it's clear that resolutions _can_ be come up with in almost any situation, but that begs the question of whether or not that is desirable because of either issues of scope or contrivance.*

So, if the concern is that my premise is flawed and it cannot happen, I'd love to hear that addressed.

Now, presumign it can happen, it's really looking like the two potential solutions are:

1) It shouldn't happen. (Somebody should)Make them change the stakes.
2) The narrator's authority should be sufficient to address this and whether the necessary solution is contrived or nor is irrelevant as that is a quality issue, not a rule issue.

Now, both of these are workable,solutions, though seem clumsy to my personal taste.  However, they are certainly VERY different, and I've seen both proposed over the course of this thread.  If either is the answer, it raises specific questiosn for me.

if it's #1, any question is who is responsible for this, and how? Is this an additional level of producer authority (or an extensionof existing authority)?  Is there a rule for determining precedence?  Thankfully, #1 is pretty straightforward.

#2 complicates things because we are not just talking about stakes in a scene, we are also talking about actions, which are as much of a part of the rules as the stakes themselves are.

Drilling down, the key rule here seems to be the second of the three things the narrator must do: "Narrator must include appropriate behavior for the protagonists involved."  I'm interpreting that as taking into account their actions, but it's a fairly fuzzy standard, particularily because the narrator is explicitly instructed to respect stakes, but give no such encouragement for actions.

Presuming that the narrator does respect everyone's actions, she is then faced with the potential for conflicting success.  Now, the narrator can respect the actions, but disengage them from success of failure.  In the example and resolution cited, Billy fails at his action but succeeds at his stakes, which requires that he succeed by some other action**, as determined by the narrator.

Now, so far so good, presuming we accept that a character can fail at their action but succeed at their stakes which is counterintuitive, but certainly not impossible, and a point worth addressing in it's own right, but we'll proceed on that assumption for the time being.

Given that we need to create a new action for the character, we have one stumbling block in that we should not replace their stated action.  If the narrator says "Well, what billy actually did was have a friend bring in a camera and snap incriminating shots" I pretty much can't imagine that going well.  Instead, we must _append_ an action onto Billy's (Such as waiting for Roxy by their house).

Now, let's presume, as in the example, that Billy's action is something that he does for the duration of the scene.  Presuming we're unwilling to counter it, we end up having to append the new action after the existing scene.

And that's where scope raises its ugly head.  If the resolution of Billy's action is out of the scene, there's a high likelihood that it will occour in something that might be better treated as a new scene.  At the very least, if it occours outside of the original scene, there is some question about where, in the context of the game, it does occour.

Now, that said, scope is not really something that I have a rules reference to make to, so perhaps that is the weak point here, but previous comments in this thread at least imply that scope is something to respect.

In any case, this is why I'm hoping there is actually a #3 that I simply have not realized, since it allows me to skip the annoying questions. :)

So, I hope that makes it a little more clear why I want the question answered, and what my concerns regarding its implication are.

-Rob D.

* Though I note, yes, Billy is  looking to Rat his sister out, so it's not as clear a conflict as it might be, but I'll stick with it because familiarity is better than arguing over the specifics of every potential example. :)

** - It is also possible to resolve someone's stakes through Deus ex Machina and other lazy writer's tricks, but I imagine those will only be as acceptable as they are in good TV, which is to say, not terribly.

In the adjacent thread, the same question is being asked.
John Harper, in this message:

John wrote:

Hey Darren: Can you fix the quote above? My name is on it (twice) but that's not me.

Rob wrote: Now, their stakes (Impress her friends vs Impress his father) are not completely at odds, but the framing of the scene makes it clear that they have been put at odds by the conflict of whether Roxy stays and parties or Billy takes her home.  Given that, how does the scene resolve if both Roxy and Billy's player's beat the producer?

Lisa's example narration for Roxy and Billy is spot on. There is *no need* to get too tangled up in tasks when dealing with a scene like this. Yes, Billy's player said something about taking Roxy home, but that's not what was at stake. If it was, we would have made it the stakes. What was at stake was who impresses whom. The outcome of the cards gives us the answers and the narration makes sense of those answers.

I'll try to give Darren a concrete example based on his game.

You have a bunch of prisoners. One protag wants to execute them. Another protag doesn't want them to be executed. Conflict!

Not so fast. First: How do the players feel about this conflict? Are the players in conflict about what should happen to the prisoners? If they aren't, then it's easy. The players agree to the fate of the prisoners (dead or not) and then set their own stakes about something else:

- "I make Killer realize he's gone over the edge this time."
- "I kill all these people and really feel nothing inside."

Stuff like that. Note that, in this case, your protag can be doing anything, including "trying to stop" the other protag. But that's not what's at stake, so it's part of narration, not card flips. PTA does not resolve tasks, ever. You can wrestle it to try and get task resolution out of it (can I do X?) but it will break.

A similar case is if the players agree to put the lives of the prisoners at stake because they all can see it going either way. In this case, Killer might have a goal like, "I summon the nerve to murder all these people in cold blood." The Saviour might have stakes like, "I stop Killer from murdering these people." See how these can both succeed or fail? And the lives of the prisoners are still at stake? And we learn things about the protags, which is the whole point of the game.

In this case, players (not protags!) who are more interested in living prisoners might give fan mail to the Saviour's side of the conflict.

If, on the other hand, the players cannot agree about whether or not the prisoners lives should be at stake, then we have a different kind of conflict. A conflict between players, in fact. The PTA system doesn't resolve conflicts between players. You have to deal with that conflict with negotiation first. Then you can do the protag's conflicts.

I hope these examples help illustrate a concrete point, which is this:
If you find yourself with protag goals that are absolutely mutually exclusive and can, under no creative narration, be reconciled if they both succeed, then you need to keep working on your stakes.

If a player thinks that modifying their initial stakes is a "disappointing compromise", they are playing the wrong game for their tastes. Crafting good stakes that work together in relevant conflicts that everyone cares about is the skill of PTA play. That's the thing you're "gaming" when you play. When you start out, it's hard. The more you do it, the better you get at it.

I see John has posted while I was composing this.  I think I give a different angle on the same ideas.

Darren wrote:
The two who wanted to take the villain back for justice:
Captain Hanina Parion: This is straightforward. She's basically insecure about her leadership abilities, at least in part because of her privileged background.
Engineer Brent: He was raised as part of a clone family, and certain expectations were placed upon him, but he was always a bit of a misfit, never really fitting in anywhere. He wants to be accepted, to make a family of his own - can he make a life for himself outside the protective creche?
The one who wanted to kill, kill, kill:
Security Officer Nathan: He has struggled against authority all of his life, so he wants the freedom to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Basically, he needs to grow up - balance necessary authority/responsibility v individual rights & freedoms. (He's also a veteran ex-marine type, and so killing enemy combatants if they pose a threat is not hard for him - he's not actually portrayed as bloodthirsty, just expedient.)
The one who wanted to hand her over to the colonists:
Jack the Pilot: He's a hotshot pilot, and it has led to great things for him. But he was recently accused of cheating in a yacht race, and lost most of the respect he had gained. Now he wants to prove that he is more than just a pilot - that there is more to him than just that. Incidentally, this character was also raised in the region on a back-to-basics colony, so he had strong sympathies with the colonists.
The one who wanted to appear to help the captain, while helping the captive escape:
Alex the Manipulative Medic: He's an idealist. He was born to greatness (a very powerful family), but rejected the corruption that went with it, and is on a secret and grandiose (megalomaniac) crusade to make the universe a better place. How far will he go, what price will he pay?

Thanks, John and Alan. I think I see now. I need to reflect on it to be certain.
I see how I was failing to separate player and character goals. I'm still not sure "PTA never resolves tasks" is true-  that demon killing example in the other thread wouldn't work. Maybe it would be more accurate to say, PTA only resolves tasks indirectly.

John Harper wrote: A similar case is if the players agree to put the lives of the prisoners at stake because they all can see it going either way. In this case, Killer might have a goal like, "I summon the nerve to murder all these people in cold blood." The Saviour might have stakes like, "I stop Killer from murdering these people." See how these can both succeed or fail? And the lives of the prisoners are still at stake? And we learn things about the protags, which is the whole point of the game.

Alan wrote: Stakes for...
Captain Hanina Parion: to demonstrate her leadership ability to the team by taking command.
Engineer Brent: To contribute effectively as part of the team.
Security Officer Nathan: to control his impulse to be a loose cannon.
Jack the Pilot: to make the most effective single contribution, to stand out in the fight.
Alex the Manipulative Medic: to gain/retain the villainesses admiration.

Awesome discussion. I'm totally late to the party.

If anyone still has questions, I'm online, but damn, it looks like John and Alan are kicking ass.

Happy to help out, Darren. I struggled with this stuff for quite a while, so I know where you're coming from.

Darren wrote: Still, I have a nagging feeling that this approach might remove the resolution of the things players actually want to resolve through the system, and leave the system to resolve the kind of things they prefer to do instinctively. It's quite a shift.

So, that only leaves one of my original questions unresolved.
Um, actually I realise looking back that I didn't ask for help with that explicitly, though it came up in both this and Lisa's thread. Basically, how to avoid the syndrome of scene requests becoming scene framing.
First, I have to get to grips with proper agenda declarations.
Now that I think about it, the discussion that makes up the main thrust of this thread does help out here too.
I mentioned a scene in which the engineer reqested: "I'm in the engine room, repairing the engines." Rather than resort to the conflict system there, I should have looked for some way to bring his issue to bear, and could certainly have said, "okay, you repair the engine - you're good, that's the kind of thing you do." I could then have introduced something into the scene to bring pressure to bear onto his issue or to complicate the repair operation in a way that it was clearly not his performance that was inquestion. But in a remote location with not too many people about, it's not easy to see how to do that. I think then I run the risk of following Lisa and her "what do we do now" problem.
Any suggestions for this sort of thing?
Can anyone post actual scene requests and a brief description of the scenes that followed? I've looked at actual play reports and haven't noticed a lot of that. Also, I'm interested to know how much interaction between players and producers there might be between scene request + producer framing, and the conflict.

Darren, I'm about two hours away from starting the pilot episode of The Belt.  I'll try my best to include the stuff you're asking about in my play notes and the AP followup.

James

Thanks, James.

John wrote:
Not so fast. First: How do the players feel about this conflict? Are the players in conflict about what should happen to the prisoners? If they aren't, then it's easy. The players agree to the fate of the prisoners (dead or not) and then set their own stakes about something else:

About the engineer scene:

Yep, you (or the player) could have just said, "The engine is fixed."

If you make it a conflict, you're saying, "What if I fix the engine? What if I don't fix the engine? What happens then?" If the player is looking at you with glittering eyes and is fingering the cards, desperate to put those questions on the line, then go ahead and set up a conflict. But I get the impression that this engine-fixing was a task-resolution hold-over from other gaming styles. In that case, skip it.

And if that was the point of the whole scene, you can skip the whole scene too. Very few TV shows include "engine fixing" scenes that are actually about the fixing of an engine. Think about Han and Leia in the Falcon's engine-room thingy. That scene was not about the engines!

I'll talk more about "what do we do now" in another post.

Rob:
The stakes I used in my example are about what the protags want out of the conflict. They also serve the interests of the players, which matter more than anything else.

The rules don't say, "The stakes should be about what the protagonist really wants out of the conflict, and the interests and wishes of the players don't matter one bit." The interests and enjoyment of the players come first. The characters are not where the buck stops! Setting up a good scene, with a good, interesting, enjoyable conflict in it -- with interesting stakes all around that mesh together -- all of that trumps "what the protag wants." If you start with "my protag wants X" and lock it down with no input and cooperation from the other players in the conflict, then yeah, you can end up with some screwy situations.

Just to be clear: My example is not an alternative approach. It's the style of play advocated by the game, starting on page 8. Now, I admit that Matt isn't as explicit about stakes-setting as I have been here. Mostly because the idea that players would set stakes that were utterly incompatible (and then stick to them!) and not cooperate and negotiate before flipping is crazy moon-speak to Matt.

So: Say what your protag wants and invite comments about that. Listen to what the other protags in the conflict want, and make comments. Talk about the Issues involved. Talk about what this conflict means. Discuss some possible action that characters might take in the conflict. Discuss possible outcomes and speak up if anything is off-limits for you. Then look at the whole mess. Does it make sense? Is everyone happy with it? Do the stakes and possible outcomes hold together? Tweak this and that. Once everyone is ready, flip the cards and find out what happens.

It seems like a lot to do. But after a few games of elaborate cooperation like this, most of the steps will fly by invisibly. But you have to start somewhere.

Ok, I was a bit unclear in asking, but this still sticks a bit for me - I don't think that "What the proag wants" needs to be something unalterable and cast in stone. Doing something lame "because it's what my character would do" is no more welcome here than in any other game.

Players are presumed to be somewhat creative and able to come up with a bunch of different things within that general scope of that limitation, and willign to talk, kick around ideas, and try to find soemthign within that scope..  It's _doable_ but it's definately a different set of choices and options than will be available for the player than if the choice set is "What the player wants".

Now, ideally, it seems then that we've got a little Venn diagram action going on, with circle one beign the range of choices the protagonist wants(call them 'valid' choices), and circle two is the range of choices the player wants('appealing' choices), and I figure most of the time there's probably sufficient overlap between the two to mean there's still a reasonable selection of choices which are both valid and appealling.

But where I'm seeing divergence is that, given a situations where there is minimal or no overlap between the cricles, such as the case where the player is most interested in seeing the protagonist do something clearly contrary to what the protag wants, it is sounding like you propose choosing from the appealling set of choices, and the text of the rules seems to say you must chose from the 'valid' set.  I _want_ it to be the former, every instinct I have leans that way, but I'm still nto seeing how it doesn't violate the rules.

Now, the solution to this is, of course, don't allow sitations where this is no overlap to evolve.  The problem with that solution is that those situations are ones where there is still plenty that appeals to the player - the 'appealling' choice set has not necessarily dwindled in size, so they still have plenty of things they'd like to explore - so we're removing a wing of directions that appeals to the folks that like to be mean to their characters.  Not _every_ option to do so is beign removed, of course, and how important this wing is really probably varies from game to game, but for players who, say, would be inclined to spend fanmail against themself rather than have the outcome the protag wants (because they find the _Conflict_ interesting, but they favor the outcome going against the protag)* it's an important one.

So I'm not saying the protagonist can only want one thing, but I am saying that sticking to what the protagonist wants really seems a much more limited set of options.  I don't think this is necessarily desireable. And I should also note, if I weren't setting up to be a stickler, this is one of the first thigns I would aboslutely loosen up the literal interpretation of, but the point of doing this as by the book as possible is to not make those decisions until after I've tried being literal once. :)

Of course, in one of those bitter twists, the game I'm being so anal in preparation for may now not be happening, because the heavens mock me.

-Rob D.

* And just to skip ahead ont his point, and yes, they'll enjoy playing it either way, otherwise they wouldn't go to dice/cards, but they definately prefer one outcome over the other, which does not seem a horrible abuse of things.

Ok, I was a bit unclear in asking, but this still sticks a bit for me - I don't think that "What the proag wants" needs to be something unalterable and cast in stone. Doing something lame "because it's what my character would do" is no more welcome here than in any other game.

So would it be more accurate to say that the stakes are about what the protag wants than being specifically what the protag wants?

Specifically, if the protag wants to, say, not do that horribly self-destructive thing, but the player thinks he completely should, can the player say that the stakes are that he makes the _wrong_ choice?  In this case the stakes are still about that act of self destruction, but the player's been freed up to take it whichever direction he wants.

Basically, I'm just trying to nail down how to run that scene where the player wants the protag to "lose" because I expect to see a lot of it.

-Rob D.

Yeah: What I'm hearing here is that the text ""The stakes are what the protagonist really wants out of the conflict" (p. 61) should instead be "The stakes involve what the protagonist wants out of the conflict, but are described in a way that's most appealing to the player."

For a smidget of real play example -- in the game of PTA that I was in, there was one point at which I started out from the point of "Okay, what my character wants here is to keep the situation under control, but what I want is to see the situation devolve into one of greater chaos.  So if I succeed here, I'm going to say that indicates that all hell breaks loose."

That sort of thing doesn't seem at all consistent with the sentence from the text, but it does seem quite consistent with the modified sentence I'm proposing.

Rob wrote:
So would it be more accurate to say that the stakes are about what the protag wants than being specifically what the protag wants?

"Okay, what my character wants here is to keep the situation under control, but what I want is to see the situation devolve into one of greater chaos.  So if I succeed here, I'm going to say that indicates that all hell breaks loose."

Sure -- and I can see stakes negotiation as taking things there -- but what I said above would probably still be what I'd open with, because it's a way for me to get out there that, as a player, it's important to me to see chaos in the narration that follows.  I get how that's not exactly the "right stakes", but if I have a basic starting point of "what do I want to see?" -- which at least has some validity in this, the Greatest Television Show That Never Was That I Want To Watch -- then I'm pretty clear on what I want to say in my opening volley.  I'm pretty clear now, however, that at that point the Producer or another player should pipe up and say... pretty much what you said.  "Hey, those aren't stakes, so much as situation. Can everyone agree that chaos will occur regardless of the stakes?  Okay.  Let's figure out the real stakes in light of that."

wrote: "Hey, those aren't stakes, so much as situation. Can everyone agree that chaos will occur regardless of the stakes?  Okay.  Let's figure out the real stakes in light of that."