Last night Clinton, Remi, and I began a five-episode PTA season called Deep in the Blue.  I'm Producing.  We agreed over the week leading up to our first session on a few things:  Protagonists are undercover narcotics cops, in contemporary Cincinnati.  Flouting reality, I decided that the Queen City is dominated by a pair of vicious Asian gangs (the Tiny Rascal Gang and the Bad Boy Crips - look 'em up before you chuckle at the names), with subordinate elements including traditional Crips and Bloods, as well as some unaffiliated Russian mafiya and a hispanic gang as well.  Oh, and hillbilly white supremacists in Kentucky.  The criminal power structure is stabilized along traditional red/blue lines, but both are in the process of flooding Cincinnati with crystal meth and the whole thing is about to explode in a satisfying and awful way.

Clinton is playing a Vietnamese-American family man, deep undercover, running a bodega on Bond Hill.  Remi is playing a young Cuban-American firebrand exiled from the Miami police force.  Hopefully they can chime in with some more character and scene stuff as it relates to actual play, but what I want to talk about is how our recent improv theater experience powerfully affected this session.

We had agreed to take the setting and situation absolutely serious, aiming for an HBO-style show with swearing and blow-jobs and people getting shot in the head and snorting crank.  The episode built slowly, but half-way through the tension increased dramatically, both in-game and metagame.  As producer I was trying hard to push the character's buttons, and that turned into a bunch of situations in which they perceived no options.  For example, Remi's guy was tasked with infiltrating the Tiny Rascals Gang through their minor subordinates, the Flacas.  In order to win their trust, he had to rat out the Bad Boy Crip meth lab that Clinton's guy had agreed (under duress) to allow to operate above his bodega.  It all ended in tears, as you can imagine.  I could feel that both players were really focused and intense - there was a scene where their characters were hiding in a dumpster from a bunch of Crip thugs sent to maybe kill them, and Clinton and Remi played out an entire scene in whispers and pantomime unbidden.  It was pretty cool to watch - they were completely in the moment, dare I say ... immersed? 

There was actually a ton of pantomime going on - handling cell phones, guns, Vietnamese sandwiches, bags of weed.  I felt that my own characters (Vietnamese crime bosses, Aryan Brotherhood thugs, Mexican tough guys, straight arrow beat cops, Clinton's character's wife, gay night club owners, etc) were well realized and interesting.  We were listening to each other and agreeing - really avoiding conflicts in many cases (there weren't too many) and just going along with suggestions and threads initiated by each other.  All of this I attribute to being soaked in improv for the last six weeks. 

We had a lovely time.  It was completely different from anything we've played together.  I hope Clinton and Remi will add their thoughts and impressions so we can start a dialogue about how and why this game is turning out to be so different.

Ok, first, a dramatic statement:

This was definitely in my five best roleplaying experiences ever.

We were worried if we'd be able to keep up the seriousness. We were all seriously hyped up from our Sunday night improv performance and all jittery. We dove right in, though. The first scene was my bodega getting held up, and it was so tense that my shoulders hunched up and I fell into a hushed voice immediately.

Jason's not using the immersion word lightly. It was total awesome immersive roleplaying. I could see right into my character, Frank Trang's, head and loved it. We used a technique I really liked in this game, the "time-out." Whenever I needed to discuss how a scene was going, or what I should do, with the rest of the group, I'd throw up my hands in a T-gesture and call a timeout to talk. Calling the time-out and then calling back in resulted in a pretty noticable difference between "in-game" and "discussing-game," which was powerful.

The other techniques which I noticed from improv included agreement: we tried very hard not to nullify each other's contributions to the game's environment. If a dude pulled up with a gun, that was that, and then I'd add to it. Mechanical conflicts were called over actions, and not over environment. In a two, maybe two-and-a-half, hour session of play, we had about six conflicts, which seemed light for us, but not light for the game. It was actually perfect dramatic pacing, in my opinion. I did also see a lot of pantomime, like Jason said. I remember distinctly when the Aryan dude asked my character for a bag of chips pantomiming reaching behind the counter, catching myself, and reaching in front to pull off a bag and hand it to him. And man, that dumpster scene was fucking intense.

Jason did something great which I've got to give him props for: every scene contains two options: the bad one and the much, much worse one. This was hot. Some of my scenes included: shooting a guy who robbed me or losing face by letting him go; letting a meth cooker rent my room upstairs or bucking the crime lord I'm trying to get in good with; letting my son work in a dangerous neighborhood around thugs or losing my connection to him; and promising to get rid of my covert partner or again bucking that crime lord - really, getting shot in this case. It was super-hot and made me make very tough decisions. The tough decisions while immersed was serious narrative play. Don't let anyone tell you immersion and narrative play don't go hand-in-hand: thinking like this guy who has put three years of his life into making a connection, while having to choose between loyalty to a partner or success at his job - man, that's some prime rib of hard decisions.

Wow!

Thanks Jason and Clinton for posting this.  Having just finished watching season 2 of The Shield, I've got a very strong sense of the intensity of the game you describe.  It sounds absolutely amazing.

I wish I could ask some PTA related questions but I don't have PTA (yet).  However, this stood out in Jason's post:

As producer I was trying hard to push the character's buttons, and that turned into a bunch of situations in which they perceived no options.

Oh yeah, there were plenty of options but none of them were good.  At one point we had a time-out to discuss the fact that the episode was clearly driving toward a particular conclusion - both officers on opposite sides of an emerging turf war - which none of us had expected.  We made sure that was OK, but at that point any other option would have been forced and unsatisfying. 

I've used the "time out" sign to indicate metagame discussion for a couple of years now.  Very useful.

Sounds awesome.  I so want to try PTA.

Jason wrote:
Oh yeah, there were plenty of options but none of them were good.  At one point we had a time-out to discuss the fact that the episode was clearly driving toward a particular conclusion - both officers on opposite sides of an emerging turf war - which none of us had expected.  We made sure that was OK, but at that point any other option would have been forced and unsatisfying. 

Eric wrote:
Now you know that those last two sentences are nothing but a big tease.  <grin>

Am I right in thinking that the Episode ended at the point at which it was becoming clear that the officers were going to be on different sides in this turf war?

Out of curiosity, could you share with us a bit more about this improv experience you had?  Not just the way it entered into play--though I'd of course be interested in that--but some particulars about some of the principles you learned from the experience, etc.

Another principle culled from improv:

Support each other

Make it your job to make the other guy look good.  Frank Trang isn't going to look good if I hand-wave off his family obligations.  Hugo Valle isn't going to look good if I ignore the fact that he's gay.  Sometimes supporting the other guy is stepping down to give him a solo scene.  Sometimes it is backing his play.  Sometimes it is utterly fucking him over.  When you trust and expect each other to help rather than hinder, things just rage. 

This game sounds hot. Obligatory PTA remark: I would totally watch this show!

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that your improv class is spicing up the gaming. I haven't taken an improv class, but I would like to. Still, the techniques you're talking about are things that are actually in the PTA rules. So, folks reading along at home: you can get this kind of white-hot play even if you're not all cool and improv-y like these guys. It may take a little more practice to get into the flow and suppress some gamer instincts, but the methods are right there in the book to help you along.

Yeah, the game sounds great. I hope my PtA-Game, which will start next week after a really hot set-up session last week (and which I probably should write an actual play report about) will at least partly rock as much as your game did.

I just wanted to comment real quick on the "Agreement is more fun than conflict."-thing: I think this is very true. And I think it also ties in with some other improv-rule: You've got to feel comfortable. You have to like what you are doing there with those people you are doing it with. You have to trust one another.

And I guess there's two points in your game reinforcing that feeling of trust that lets you accept and not block each others input. First, the personal relationship. I think, that you, Clinton, could really trust Jason not to screw you over in that "gun in your face"-scene (which also ties in with "Support each other" - if you know the others are there to support you and not to confront you, it's much easier to trust them).

But (in my mind) there also is the mechanical point: PtA's mechanics made you feel more comforteble accepting Jason's input. In many other RPGs the fact that your character had a gun pointed at his face would have put you at a great disadvantage regarding a later conflict (loosing initiative or what have you). But in PtA this set-up does not have any effect on the mechanical resolution. You knew you would draw the same amout of cards, regardless of the previous build-up of the conflict.

So, the point I want to make is the following: PtA ist great for building up the comfort an trust you need to accept the other players input. Since you know that, when the cards hit the table all odds are down to screen presence, traits, budget and fan mail, you don't have to feverishly watch out for input by the other players, that might perhaps later on put you at a disadvantage. You can simply accept their input to the conflict build-up. Which absolutely supports the process you described: agree, agree and add, agree - build up tension - then clash in a hard and short conflict - end scene. So, as John already pointed out, PtA really supports some improv-techniques. Great game!

We had our second session last night and it went very well. 

I have to say I don't really feel like a GM when running PTA - it's more like being a resource person, available to poke things with a stick when necessary, introduce new characters occasionally, and reflect the desires of the other players.  To prep for Deep in the Blue I read up on Cincinnati so that I had enough internalized to throw off quick, convincing asides, like "sure, meet me down at Fountain Square" or "It's a little locksmith shop in Clifton Heights" without breaking stride.  I had some over-arching ideas about a drug war, and who was on which side, but nothing too specific.  I made up lists of names for the eight or so groups that would be introduced (important because I can't really fake a Cambodian name on the spot) and made notes next to them as they came up.  "What was the shooter's name?  Uhh...Quang Noc Tung."  And suddenly Tung gets a few descriptive details and becomes part of the story.  By the end of the second episode half my names had been used and a web of connections had been exposed.  My favorite prep-work payoff came from something I found by accident and totally had to use:  Frank Trang, Clinton's protagonist, asked for the jacket on a particularly nasty Aryan Brotherhood meth dealer he was forced to deal with.  He got the call from CPD records:  "Yeah, he's been around.  Spent some time in the 377th Military Police, Army Reserve based here in Cincinnati, a rotten unit, remember those two guys who got drummed out for maybe beating people to death in Afghanistan?  He's one of 'em."

In play we had a slow and somewhat rough start, I think for two reasons.  First, I wasn't pushing any particular conflict.  There were just characters being introduced to see what the protagonists would do with them, and neither Remi or Clinton was biting.  No big deal.  Second, Remi's protagonist is an outsider with few local ties, so pushing relationships is harder with him.  Not any more!  At one point he expressed some frustration, and Clinton suggested that Remi try to move Hugo Valle, his protagonist, either deeper into the gang or further away from it.  Keith Johnstone, improv pundit, would call this "breaking a routine" and it worked like a God-damn charm - Remi set up a very awesome power and dominance conflict with the leader of the gang he had infiltrated and lost brutally, narrating his own degradation as only Remi can.  Suddenly his character had some serious relationships and a lot of great options. 

It was a more low-key session (screen presence 2 for Remi and 1 for Clinton) but set up some fireworks for the next time we play.  Holy shit, is it going to be hot.  We engineered it so that Frank Trang's 13-year-old son, who idolizes the Crips, is now working in a Bad Boy Crip-operated restaurant and is totally going to be recruited by their skeezy underboss, Pin "Titty" Chu.  Hugo Valle is deep in a Tiny Rascal-affiliated Mexican street gang and his nemesis just sent a goon squad from Miami to kill him.  The Cincinnati meth war is heating up big time. 

Note: When Jason says "low-key session," he means: a session in which Remi's character had a full-on firefight at the post office.

This was a great session, and it was a relationship-building session, even with the firefight. My character's finding his breaking point between trying to be a good cop, a friend to gangsters, and a father - a triangle of pain if there ever was one. His son now works for a gangster; his son also knows he tipped off other gangsters (his cop partner, but the kid doesn't know that); and he's going to have to make some hard decisions.

An observation about PTA: the ability to set up conflicts so both outcomes are really great, and not necessarily directly about what's in the scene is fun. For example, I had a conflict with my wife about whether my kid gets to have an after-school job in this post office where I know gangsters will be. I knew the story would be better if he did have a job there, but I wanted a conflict. So, even though I was arguing against the job, I set up the conflict with Jason as "I win: my wife knows I still care and has sympathy for how hard it is to be in my position, but I give in on the job to show I care. I lose: my wife's pissed, thinks I don't care, and possibly finds solace in the arms of a Mexican gangster." So we got to have the argument, I wear her down with passive-aggressive speeches, she knows I'm a good man with too hard of a job, the kid gets the job, and I get a back massage. Story on!

Clinton wrote:
Note: When Jason says "low-key session," he means: a session in which Remi's character had a full-on firefight at the post office.

I have to say I don't really feel like a GM when running PTA - it's more like being a resource person, available to poke things with a stick when necessary, introduce new characters occasionally, and reflect the desires of the other players....

Second, Remi's protagonist is an outsider with few local ties, so pushing relationships is harder with him.  Not any more!  At one point he expressed some frustration, and Clinton suggested that Remi try to move Hugo Valle, his protagonist, either deeper into the gang or further away from it.  Keith Johnstone, improv pundit, would call this "breaking a routine" and it worked like a God-damn charm - Remi set up a very awesome power and dominance conflict with the leader of the gang he had infiltrated and lost brutally, narrating his own degradation as only Remi can.  Suddenly his character had some serious relationships and a lot of great options.

Okay, maybe I was wrong. Every good improv technique is not in the PTA book. :)

Sounds like your improv class is really paying off, gaming wise. Thanks for sharing the techniques with us.

Clinton wrote:
An observation about PTA: the ability to set up conflicts so both outcomes are really great, and not necessarily directly about what's in the scene is fun. For example, I had a conflict with my wife about whether my kid gets to have an after-school job in this post office where I know gangsters will be. I knew the story would be better if he did have a job there, but I wanted a conflict. So, even though I was arguing against the job, I set up the conflict with Jason as "I win: my wife knows I still care and has sympathy for how hard it is to be in my position, but I give in on the job to show I care. I lose: my wife's pissed, thinks I don't care, and possibly finds solace in the arms of a Mexican gangster."

Gosh, the minutia of the session eludes me a bit.  We figured out that we had about eight conflicts (6 from Remi, screen  presence 2), and I bet we had at least twice that number of scenes, some as short as a played-out phone call and others quite complex.  This took place over 2.5 or 3 hours. 

I can't remember if this is PTA advice, or just something we do, but we go around the table, with each person - including Jason, the Director - having a scene. I like to think of Jason's as "audience choice," tying in story-lines.

We probably had, yeah, about 15-18 scenes.

Could any of you speak a bit about how the Fan Mail mechanic was (or was not) used?

Cheers,
Roger

Roger wrote:
Could any of you speak a bit about how the Fan Mail mechanic was (or was not) used?

Session three was last night and it was the best one yet, as far as I was concerned.  I think there is a critical mass, maybe some building momentum with PTA where everyone can really get invested in issues and events after a few sessions and the game just sings.  So we hit the ground running for Remi's 3 screen presence episode and the bodies got stacked like cordwood.  He pushed his nemesis out of a Cessna 206 over the Ohio river, for example.  It was insano. 

One thing I've noticed is that the game has gone nowhere I expected.  Before we began, I prepped a bunch of stuff detailing many factions, with ideas for sub-plots depending on how the players interacted with them, and about 50% of that stuff has surfaced.  Much of it never will, but that is not a big deal at all.  Last night the two protagonists, who had been estranged personally and were deep under cover in vicious rival gangs, came back together and worked as partners.  This was a conscious effort by Clinton and Remi and I supported it - it really demonstrated how effective keeping the protagonist stories tightly intertwined is.  By bringing them back into each others spheres of influence, it ramped up the interaction as well as the tension.  It also allowed an unbelievably tense scene in which Remi's connection, leader of the Flacas gang Miguel, got turned into a paid informant.  It was cool and unexpected - none of us saw it coming, and it couldn't have happened had the two protagonists stayed apart. 

Also of note - we really brought the improv again.  There was a bunch of object work and Remi initiated a crazy cool scene where he had a conversation with his nemesis in the airplane, creating an elaborate backstory that brought all the pieces together.  I saw his game and just "yes, and"-ed him until it was time for a conflict.  That was fun. 

Last night was Clinton's spotlight episode and Remi was 1 screen presence, the reverse of last week.  I thought it went well but perhaps not as well as it could have - the energy was a little lower and the conflicts less intense from my point of view.  I think we all still had a good time, but there was more discussion of appropriate stakes, where last week it seemed almost instinctual where the lines would be drawn.  And in a couple of cases, the scenes progressed quite far without conflicts, which came almost as an afterthought.  In addition, none of our "next week on..." scenes happened.  I tried to put the pieces in play for Clinton's, but it just didn't come around.  Experienced PTA players - is this common? 

Almost all the plot threads have been at least elucidated if not resolved, and we can all see where next week's final session will go, which is fun.  I had a lovely moment where they realized their dowdy, desk-jockey boss, Captain Katy Thomspon of the Regional Enforcement Narcotics Unit, a peson they dismissed and gave endless shit, was hand in hand with the most vicious gang in Cincinnati and had been playing them like a fiddle.  Another positive note - Clinton lost a conflict and was genuinely upset about it, which was cool.  We realized that while having equally compelling outcomes is great, having outcomes you, as a player, absolutely dread is even better. 

Remi wrote:
Does that answer your question?

Two things about this week's game:

1. I wasn't paying attention during a scene in which Clinton's character, Frank Trang, was pretending to be a California drug smuggler. I was putting up my dishes, and accidentally said, "Frank," instead of the assumed name he was using. Everyone lit up for a minute, but I protested. I should have just rolled with it.

2. The reveal of the Captain being the Big Bad was awesome. I almost cheered. It was the best bit of 'plottiness' we've had in any of our games. Bravo again, Jason.

Something that was intensely interesting to me about revealing Captain Thompson as the Big Bad - it really, really worked, and it is the most hoary cliche in cop shows ever.  I didn't plan it that way, it just seemed to fit based on the way you guys were calling for scenes.  I think when everybody is invested in the series, genre tropes don't seem at all tired or silly - they seem right. 

We had our last episode in the first (and only planned) season last night and it was superb.  Both protagonists had screen presence two, and both got to do some cool stuff.  This episode got big fast and had a very over-the-top John Woo vibe, in contrast to the rest of the season.  Particular elements of note:

- Remi's protagonist choosing his Mexican gangster lover over everything else
- A showdown with the leader of the Bad Boy Crips in which Clinton's tough as nails dude knuckles under and gives up his son Tony as a hostage
- Two briefcases, one crammed with chemically pure methamphetamine and the other with half a million dollars
- Phonetheu "Parkey" Phouangsouvanh, leader of the Tiny Rascal Gang, bleeding out in the trunk of Clinton's character's wife's Ford Taurus
- A gun-on-gun standoff in a University parking lot, surrounded by dirty SWAT officers and AK-toting Ecuadorean hatchet men
- A crazy cool ending I'll let Clinton and Remi describe, that perfectly set up a second season for all the interesting characters.

I think my favorite moment was a small one:  Frank Trang (Clinton's guy) was about to do something suicidally crazy, and he knew his social worker wife Evey would be in danger, so he sent Hugo Valle (Remi's guy), along with Miguel De Rozas, his lover, to go pick her up and leave town with her - to take her all the way to Mexico, actually.  So she's been warned that some shit is going down, and not to answer the phone, etc.  Hugo rolls up and walks into her house.  She's called 911, she doesn't know him from Adam, and she's threatening to shoot him.  It's tense.  And then Clinton (as Miguel) says "Mrs. Trang, this is Miguel de Rozas.  You know my sister Carlita.  You helped her out when she was pregnant.  My family owes you everything and I swear to you before God we are here to help."  Then shazam!  Conflict, players win, it's awesome. 

I really felt that all the elements were solidly in place for a tremendous finale, and as producer I just got out of the way.  Clinton and Remi made some really solid choices early on and betrayed each other, then overcame their betrayal to work together when the hammer fell, and it was cool.  All the conflicts felt right, and there was a lot of tension.  It was a very satisfying conclusion and made me an even huger fan of PTA. 

I'll describe my side of the ending. Ok, Frank's lost every conflict recently. He's super-fucked. He's the sort of guy who always gets some big plan, and all of them failed. He thought he'd trick some gangsters into selling him drugs, and they screwed him. He thought he'd get his boss on tape indicting herself, and she shot him - in the recorder (or so he thought.) He thought he was done as a cop and he'd be the right-hand man of Titty Chu - who laughed at him. He thought he could get the drugs and money back - a cool million - and be set, and he lost it.

So he had one more desperate plan: go all hostage-holder style right to the commissioner, holding a knife to his corrupt commander's throat. We're in the lobby of police headquarters, SWAT guys all around and the hostage negotiator trying to get Frank to let her go. And Frank's old partner talks him into checking the wire, and it was actually not busted. Frank let the captain go, SWAT guys tackled him to the floor, and we see a newspaper a week later proclaiming his innocence and his new position as interim head of narcotics.

So, by failing the whole time, he managed to do the right thing: redeem himself as a cop. But at what cost? Well, his son is being held by Titty Chu, the notorious gangster, and will of course grow to hate Frank. His wife was sent by him to Mexico with his former partner to stay safe. He's alone in a city full of people who hate him, with the hardest job around. Man, season 2 would be a blast.